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This week we interviewed Mikhail Fursov, software engineer at Unipro, a software services company with an open source bioinformatics product: UGENE. We will learn about their business model, what role open source plays in it, and how they are integrating cloud computing into their services. Let’s get into it!

FreeBSD provides a Linux binary compatibility layer that allows 32-bit Linux binaries to be natively executed on this BSD operating system. Linux binary compatibility on FreeBSD allows Linux-only applications to be executed in a near seamless manner on this alternative platform, even for games. New tests have revealed that the modern FreeBSD operating system (via PC-BSD 8.2) can actually outperform Linux when it comes to running OpenGL Linux game binaries.

Verizon Wireless will start selling Motorola Mobility's Droid Bionic for its 4G LTE network on Sept. 8, featuring heavyweight features and a matching $300 price. The Droid Bionic offers a dual-core 1GHz processor running Android 2.3.4, 16GB each of internal and microSD storage, a 4.3-inch, 960 x 540 pixel display, eight-megapixel and VGA cameras, and accessories including a Lapdock and an HD Station....

IBM and 3M announced they'll work together to develop adhesives that will help package semiconductors into dense towers of silicon. By including up to 100 layers, the resulting chips could be up to 1,000 faster than today's speediest microprocessors, the companies claim....

When you think of “Ubuntu Linux,” you probably think of the community Linux distribution and the Linux desktop. That’s great, but Canonical, Ubuntu’s parent company, also wants you to think of Ubuntu as a server and cloud operating system platform. To that end, Canonical has been working with IBM to get Ubuntu certified on IBM’s high-end System P Power hardware line and System z mainframes.

This article summarizes when the U.S. federal government or its contractors may publicly release, as open source software (OSS), software developed with government funds. This section is intended for non-lawyers, to help them understand the basic rules they must follow.

The software RAID code now supports bad block management and dm-crypt can notify SSDs about freed storage areas. The iSCSI target framework LIO has been updated to Version 4.1 and the default Ext3 settings make the filesystem more robust, but a bit slower.

Different Linux distros build in favorite cleaning products. For instance, Ubuntu has Computer Janitor. CentOS, Fedora and Red Hat Linux use Yum Clean to remove cached package data. But BleachBit goes beyond such distro-specific cleaning services to accomplish a more complete spit-and-polish session to Linux's file structure in any distro.

A simple but effective procedure for evaluating security on your computer is to check what sites it’s connecting to, or what sites are connecting to it. Most critical malware nowadays turn computers into zombies for botnets — typically zombified hosts will connect to a central server using IRC. Or it could be that you’re inadvertently running a program that’s listening for Internet requests. In any case, it’s good to check these connections.

Google is well known when it comes to programming circles as to redefine words so that it could suit its ideas. It can be an open source because it was released under Apache 2.0 software license but at the same time, it fails to meet other two points.

LibreOffice Logo Michael Meeks, a LibreOffice developer at Novell, compared the codebase of LibreOffice with the OpenOffice.org sources hosted at the Apache Software Foundation (ASF). As he writes in a blog post, the differences are already so great that it will now be hard to exchange new code between the two projects. In light of the several million lines of source code by which the two products now differ, he says users should not assume that code committed to Apache OpenOffice.org will "inevitably and automatically appear in LibreOffice". "Instead I suspect we will end up cherry-picking and porting only those things that justify the effort, as/when/if there is any such thing," added Meeks.

One of the basic utilities supplied with any operating system is a calculator. These are often simple utilities that are perfectly adequate for basic use. However, the calculator supplied with Android devices is exceptionally limited offering just the basic addition, subtraction, multiplication and division functions combined with parentheses.

Next Tuesday during XDC2011 Chicago at the Illinois Institute of Technology I am hosting a panel about contributing to Linux and open-source projects, in particular, X.Org, Mesa, and the Linux kernel, but the information should be largely relevant to any free software project. This discussion panel is largely targeted towards university students and others that aren't yet contributing to upstream projects, with most of the panel participants having begun their Linux contributions prior to graduating from university and then most of them being poached by major open-source companies.

The Ubuntu developers are moving quickly to release Ubuntu 11.10 (Oneiric Ocelot). The beta version of the Canonical's free and open source Linux distribution is released now.

The PCLinuxOS Magazine staff is pleased to announce the release of the September 2011 issue of the PCLinuxOS Magazine.

Following a Digitimes report that Intel is planning to temporarily halt the MeeGo project, Netbooknews.de confirmed the news and claims Samsung is interested in acquiring the open source project. Meanwhile, Samsung's CEO stated that with his company's Bada operating system on the move, it would "never" buy WebOS -- another mobile Linux platform in limbo....

As entities on the Web, we have devolved. Client-server has become calf-cow. The client—that's you—is the calf, and the Web site is the cow. What you get from the cow is milk and cookies. The milk is what you go to the site for. The cookies are what the site gives to you, mostly for its own business purposes, chief among which is tracking you like an animal.

Lighttpd is a secure, fast, standards-compliant web server designed for speed-critical environments. This tutorial shows how you can install Lighttpd on a Fedora 15 server with PHP5 support (through FastCGI) and MySQL support.

Zotac announced its smallest ZBox mini-PC yet, featuring a 1.6GHz AMD & Brazos& E-350 processor and integrated home theater PC (HTPC) functionality, including dual IR receivers. The 5.0 x 5.0 x 1.7-inch Zbox Nano AD10 offers a gigabit Ethernet port and four USB ports including two 3.0 ports, and a & Plus& version comes with 2GB of DDR3 memory and 320GB of storage....

Nemesys, a game studio run out of Budapest, is porting their game titles to Linux. The studio's current titles include Fortix 2, A.C.S, and Ignite. Nemesys Ignite, in particular, is a very promising racing game that will surely roar things up for Linux...