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ViewSonic says it's now shipping a Intel Atom-powered tablet that lets users run Android apps without leaving Windows 7. The ViewPad 10Pro has a 1.5GHz Atom Z670 processor, 16GB or 32GB of SSD (solid state disk) storage, a 10.1-inch touchscreen with 1024 x 600 pixel resolution, and up to eight hours of battery life, according to the company....

Google has agreed to pay Motorola Mobility an unprecedented $2.5 billion in reverse break-up fees if its $12.5 billion acquisition fails to go through, says a report. Meanwhile, observers are debating the value of Motorola's patents vs. the baggage of its ongoing litigation, weighing the impact on other Android OEMs like Samsung and HTC, and glimpsing an opportunity for Microsoft....

The Blender Foundation announced the release of Blender 2.59. This is the third stable release of the Blender 2.5 series, representing the culmination of many years of redesign, development and stabilizing work.

Tease out the logic of snarled, deeply nested if/else constructs with the Flatten Conditionals refactoring

The aim of this tutorial is to enable you to set up a little VPN that will let you do many things – but my primary goal when trying to get this to work was to allow me and my friend (who sits behind a firewalled network at University) to play the new games that would not work over Hamachi because they did not ship with LAN and required an always-on internet connection (DRM). His network also uses traffic shaping and blocks UDP packets, making online gaming impossible.

Mozilla has released today Thunderbird 6.0, this new release of the open source cross-platform email client and news reader comes with some new features and many bugs fix.

This week was punctuated by three phenomenal stories that show how free software is prospering. C++ has been one of the staples of free software for several decades. It is the programming language of choice for a lot of programmers, and it just got a brand new revision. Google has provided some much-needed backing of free software by buying Motorola Mobility and its associated patent pool. Microsoft has waived a backhanded truce flag at the Linux community by saying that it no longer sees Linux as a threat.

Linux Mint 11 LXDE, a recently released edition of Linux Mint, is one of a handful of distributions that does not come with a screen resolution switcher installed. Several are in the repository, but they are not installed. This short tutorial will show you how to install and use them.

Cloud might be all the rage, but file and print server technology is still critical -- just ask Samba. There are many different constituents on the Linux Planet. The cloud, mobile and even file and print sharing are all key targets for Linux. This past week, there was news on all fronts; in the coming week, there is likely to be even more.

Ubuntu 11.10 Oneric Ocelot Alpha 3 was released few weeks ago. I decided to properly install Ubuntu 11.10 Oneric in my netbook along with Ping-Eee OS this time around instead of just experimenting it with a USB install. I have been using Ubuntu 11.10 Alpha 3 as my primary OS for almost 2 weeks now and this is how I feel about it. Read on.

Welcome to the 160th issue of Softpedia Linux Weekly!

Many Linux/Unix programmers are not aware that a battle over Bash scripts is currently raging in a US (Kansas) courtroom this week.

When I first wrote on this story on April 5th, I expected that pressure would be put on Google and that Android would quickly be brought back into compliance with the GPL. That hasn’t happened. Pressure might have been placed on Google, I don’t know, but if so it’s done no good. Four months have passed and Android still isn’t compliant. Thankfully, it seems that era is now over, and the organizations that enforce the GPL are going to have to go after Google and all Android vendors for these violations.

Tons of attention over the past year have gone to tablet platforms and cloud platforms, but open source platforms may just have contributed the most important advances in technology since 2010.

Nginx (pronounced "engine x") is a free, open-source, high-performance HTTP server. Nginx is known for its stability, rich feature set, simple configuration, and low resource consumption. This tutorial shows how you can install Nginx on a CentOS 6.0 server with PHP5 support (through PHP-FPM) and MySQL support.

This month marks the two-year anniversary of the release of BFS, the Brain Fuck Scheduler, for the Linux kernel. While BFS has not been merged into the mainline Linux kernel, the scheduler is still actively maintained by Con Kolivas and patches are updated for new kernel releases. The BFS scheduler has also reached mild success and adoption over the past two years. In this article is a fresh look at the Brain Fuck Scheduler along with a fresh round of benchmarks from the Linux 3.0 kernel.

What is my opinion about OpenSuSE 11.4 KDE? Is it better than GNOME version? I definitely say yes, it is. It has some features which GNOME version lacks. They all brought in by KDE.

Benjamin Franzke, the open-source developer that for a number of months has been contributed to Mesa / Wayland, has continued with his work. His latest achievement is landing some new EGL code in Mesa, which will benefit Wayland too...

How I helped out a group of older users by introducing them to computer games that particularly appeal to them — and to the idea of FOSS, even if they don’t realize it.

Is your network safe? Almost all of us prefer the convenience of Wi-Fi over the hassle of a wired connection. But what does that mean for security? Our tests tell the whole story. We go from password cracking on the desktop to hacking in the cloud.