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Here’s a little trivia for everyone out there: Did you know that Pidgin also makes a text-based version of their popular instant messaging client?

The application is called Finch, and it feels exactly the same as its GUI based brother Pidgin but… you know… in a shell.

As the first phase of a detailed review of the Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1, DeviceGuru has published a Galaxy Tab 10.1 Screenshot Tour. It consists of over 200 screenshots showing numerous aspects of the device’s UI, home screens, and applications.

There's still no revised release plans from Unigine Corp on when they plan to officially release their OilRush cross-platform game (the last official update was this "summer" but acknowledged to me delays were likely), but they did put out a new beta version. OilRush v0.72 brings a number of new enhancements to better this inaugural title developed by the Russian company...

Those of you who read these hallowed pages know I have an affinity for distros that — how can I put this tactfully? — are unique and can be arguably considered as “boutique” or specialized distributions. While others may consider them as such, I don’t necessarily see them that way — I liken them to modified distros in the same way a Shelby Cobra is a step above a mere Ford Mustang, with the proviso of course that ultimately, like the Shelby, they’re not for everyone.

She went on to share with the class that from time to time, she would inadvertently hit that key, making the screen go full. Of course, she had no idea what key she had pushed.

Honestly, I thought she was going to cry.

No one in the assisted living center knew how to bring the menus and task bar back and she was frozen in place, unable to do anything.

In desperation, she would reinstall Windows from scratch. Not knowing anything about data backups, she would lose everything she had accumulated.

Just because she did not know that the F11 key was the culprit and the cure.

It's undoubtedly good to give back to a community you take so much from. And in doing so, you can also help improve the software that you use every day, both for your benefit and for everyone else. Here are 19 ways you can help open source projects.

For six months I longed for the Motorola Atrix Android smartphone first announced in January. That was, until I got one and reality fell short of my utopian vision. Now I must beseech Motorola, telcos and Linux hackers alike to bring my dream to fruition.

The latest version of the Linux kernel, Linux 3.0, was pushed out last night, marking the end of the 2.6 kernel series.

As most people in the know understand, this does not represent a big sea change, since the new version numbering was really just a way to discontinue the 2.6 numbering, which would have been 2.6.40 for the kernel today, had not Linus Torvalds announced in late May that the time had come for a new numbering scheme.

The fact that Linux is celebrating its 20th anniversary this summer likely played a part in Torvalds' decision, which he even mentioned in his initial statement in May:

I am just now completing a certificate in graphic design at the online school Sessions.edu, and although I have come to like the Adobe Creative suite tool (and mainly inDesign), I would rather be relying only on open source tool. Why is that? Well there are many factor that steer my decision toward that.

If you want to read more about open source and creativity I invite you to read FLOSS+Art which is a solid explanation of the relationship between open source and creativity/art. From the description:

One of the most important tasks an administrator has is to set up and maintain storage resources and let users share files across the network. Network Attached Storage (NAS), a hardware/software system designed specifically for network storage, has made the traditional file server storage model all but obsolete. FreeNAS, a NAS server based on FreeBSD, makes implementing NAS simple.

With FreeNAS, you can share files among the Windows, Mac OS, Linux, and Unix machines on your network. What’s more, FreeNAS provides incremental backups and supports LDAP user authentication, among its many features.

Welcome to the 157th issue of Softpedia Linux Weekly!

The release of OS X Lion was fairly well-received by the Mac community, despite some substantial changes to the UI. Perhaps there is something to be learned from the way Mac people are rolling with the changes. The Linux community might want to reconsider its recent resistance to change. Perhaps Unity and GNOME3 were declared failures before they were given a fair chance.

One of the perennially pesky issues of the Linux desktop is multiple configuration files for very similar programs. Please let me know what you think of my proposal to solve configuration anarchy.

Tuning IO is a tedious task which requires many iterations until you eventually reach your goals or see any results. While tuning IO, I think that tuning for read performance is a different task from tuning for write performance. Combing them both can sometimes be one of the hardest tasks a SysAdmin can face. I decided to focus on write performance in the first article.

This tutorial shows how you can enable Compiz Fusion on a Fedora 15 GNOME desktop (the system must have a 3D-capable graphics card - I'm using an NVIDIA GeForce 8100 here). With Compiz Fusion you can use beautiful 3D effects like wobbly windows or a desktop cube on your desktop. I will use the free nouveau driver in this tutorial instead of the proprietary NVIDIA driver. nouveau is an accelerated Open Source driver for NVIDIA cards that comes with experimental 3D support on Fedora 15 - on my test system 3D support was working without any problems.

LXer Feature: 24-Jul-2011

In the Roundup this week we have RMS telling to resist the temptations of the cloud, good bye Kubuntu, numeric relativity with the Einstein Toolkit and Microsoft is in the top 5 contributors to the Linux kernel? Methinks not.. Enjoy!

Slackware Linux is one of the most powerful distributions available. But its power comes at a price. It's far less user-friendly than many other distributions. In fact, only Gentoo tops Slackware for difficulty. But if you avoid Slackware for those reasons, you'll miss out in a number of ways. Here are 10 of them.

One of the challenges I ran into while installing Arch was configuring the Wi-Fi network. In Arch is not that much of a problem, because their documentation is very well laid out, but what if you are using something else?

We will talk about how to connect to Non-Secured Networks, as well as WEP and WPA protected networks.

It has emerged that in 2007, Jonathan Schwartz (the then CEO of Sun Microsystems) gave heartfelt congratulations to Google for incorporating Java into Android. Google now has another defence against Oracle's Java patent lawsuit using the doctrine of estoppel.

Mozilla Foundation is re-forming the Mozilla Enterprise User Working Group (MEWG). This is a complete reversal in attitude on Mozilla's part, and the right move to make. Firefox and Google Chrome can't continue to take market share away from Microsoft's Internet Explorer without convincing enterprise administrators that these browsers are safe, secure, and thoroughly tested. It just won't happen. Furthermore, nothing could produce more distrust from enterpise IT administrators than statements that make it seem like they don't figure into the grand scheme of things.