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If you've been in the IT industry for a couple of decades you might well remember when thin-client technology was big news. In particular you might remember when Oracle chief Larry Ellison sang the praises of thin-client technology. You might also remember when, in the late 1990s, Ellison again proclaimed the virtues of thin-client computing.

Novell has prevailed in its appeal against Microsoft in the antitrust case about WordPerfect! Here's the Order [PDF], hot off the presses. The lower court's order dismissing Novell's claim on summary judgment essentially on a technicality is "reversed and remanded." That means it goes to trial. Novell has the opportunity to tell a jury just what it believes Microsoft did wrong. I have a special treat: I also have the audio of the oral argument before the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals, and when you hear how skillfully Novell's attorney, Charles Cooper, presents Novell's case, I think you will understand very well why Novell prevailed.

On its DefectiveByDesign.org campaign page, the Free Software Foundation (FSF) has announced that 4 May (today) will be this year's "Day Against DRM". With this day of action, the organisation wants to focus the public's attention on the risks of what it considers to be an anti-social technology. The FSF has created a wiki page which allows users to swap campaign banners and event ideas.

digiKam usually does a decent job of decoding RAW files using the default settings. But if you prefer to have complete control of how the application processes RAW files, choose Settings » Configure digiKam, switch to the RAW Decoding section, and enable the Always open the Raw Import Tool to customize settings option.

Antoni Norman proudly announced a few days ago, May 1st, that the Beta release of the upcoming Pinguy OS 11.04 operating system is available for download and testing.

The open-source graphics driver landscape is ever changing with new work going into Mesa / Gallium3D near daily. While many improvements have been made in recent time, the open-source drivers have a ways to go in competing with the proprietary competition. Even the open-source AMD driver, which is developed using documentation from AMD as well as code and engineering resources within the company, it has a tough time competing with the well-optimized Catalyst driver. Fortunately, the AMD driver is now largely centered on the two Gallium3D drivers: R300g and R600g, and have pushed away their classic Mesa DRI drivers into maintenance mode. The R300g supports the R300 through R500 ASICs (up through the Radeon X1000 series) while the R600g driver supports all ATI/AMD hardware past that point up through the latest Radeon HD 6000 series and Fusion. In this article, we are seeing where the performance is currently at for the classic Mesa, Gallium3D, and Catalyst drivers under Linux.

Inkscape is frequently mentioned, and lauded, as one of the best examples of open-source software available today. It is a mature, feature-full and flexible product, thanks to a very dedicated developer community. The latest version, 0.48, adds new tools, such as the Airbrush (which many have longed for), and advanced path editing, among many other additions and improvements.

LXer Feature: 04-May-2011

Yesterday I downloaded, burned, and installed Ubuntu 11.04. Perhaps in the fullness of time I will come to terms with that decision, but let me give you my first impressions.

Enterprise Linux champion Red Hat announced record fourth-quarter earnings this month following the launch of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 (RHEL 6). As many companies closed up their financial year, the world’s most profitable open source company announced that its revenues for the financial year (FY) 2011 were up 22 percent at $909.3 million.

The fate of an open-source version of Microsoft's .NET running on iOS and Android is unclear after Novell's new owner Attachmate laid off members of the project, according to reports. Attachmate has let go of US staff working on the Novell-sponsored Mono Project as part of a move centering on Novell's Linux-related efforts back in Germany.

Just few days ago I wrote about my happiness after achieving my long-term desire with Linux Mint XFCE. This distro is based on Debian Testing. I managed to activate and use Broadcom 4311 there in Live mode! Did it make me stop? As long as I had USB stick with Linux Mint XFCE on it, I decided to give Debian another go.

It is Linux distribution releases that make the Linux Planet go around. This past week was a big week for releases, with two very different distros releasing their latest and greatest offerings. It was also a big week for browser releases with new Firefox and Chrome browsers for Linux.

A new version for free note taking Application, MyNotex has been released that brings support for importing notes from Tomboy and Gnote. MyNotex is a free note taking application written in Lazarus with a unique hierarchy system where under a broad Subject heading, notes can be maintained and further categorized by title, date, and tags.

When you hear the phrase virtual machine today, you probably think of virtualization and hypervisors. But VMs are simply an older concept of abstraction, a common method of abstracting one entity from another. This article explores two of the many newer open source VM technologies: Dalvik (the VM core of the Android operating system) and Parrot (an open source VM technology for efficiently executing dynamic languages).

After all those rich desktop Environment saw in Ubuntu, Chackra or Gnome 3 in general i needed a desktop minimalistic and comfortable, so today I’ve done some test on #! Crunchbang 10, it’s a Debian GNU/Linux based distribution with a lightweight desktop Environments: Openbox and optionally XFCE.

Attachmate completed their acquisition of Novell last week and turned the assets into the Novell and SUSE business units. This morning the first signs of changes were announced when over one-hundred employees would be losing their jobs as part of the streamlining process. Later on in the day I was then to first break the news -- a rumor at the time -- via my Twitter feed that all of Mono's developers would be losing their positions...

Technology is very much a part of the classroom in 2011 and I used a number of open source tools to aide in my teaching. The following is a collection of some of the best open source tools around that you can use to enrich your mathematics class.

In around 15 minutes, the time it takes to install Ubuntu Server Edition, you can have a LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP) server up and ready to go. This feature, exclusive to Ubuntu Server Edition, is available at the time of installation.

Finally, the Bible study software, SwordSearcher that is designed by Bible Believers for Bible Believers can run on your Mac or Linux system.

Six months after version 4.8 arrived, the OpenBSD project development team has announced the release of OpenBSD 4.9, its free BSD UNIX-like operating system. According to developer Bob Beck, version 4.9 is the 29th release on CD (30th via FTP) and includes a number of new drivers, performance improvements and new features.