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Today, a smartphone is really only as good as the applications that run on it. And despite what Nokia CEO Stephen Elop says, that battle has really become a two-horse race between Apple and Google.

But a new consortium of mobile carriers, developers and manufacturers called the Wholesale Application Community (WAC) is looking to shake up the landscape by introducing applications that will work across all devices and carriers.

I’ve run Puppy Linux before. Many times. I started with Puppy 2.13 and still remember that release very, very fondly. I did the Lenny-to-Squeeze upgrade on my 12-year-old Compaq laptop by the book (the release notes, that is), and everything went perfectly well. I can’t get the new Grub to work, but it’s still chainloading to grub-legacy, so I can stick with that if need be. But my Xfce environment on this aging laptop isn’t ideal. If any machine was made for a low-spec live distribution like Puppy or TinyCore, this Compaq laptop is that computer.

The Senate on Tuesday overwhelmingly approved landmark legislation to overhaul the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, a reform effort more than half a decade in the making that aims to improve the quality of patents and curb frivolous litigation.

It appears that SkiesOfAzel, the Orta theme developer was contacted by a LMDE (Linux Mint Debian Edition) developer to create a similar theme for LMDE and the initial result can already be tested. This will most probably be the new Linux Mint Debian Edition default theme.

Fedora 15, codenamed 'Lovelock' now has its first alpha milestone available. This is a BIG release for Fedora in that it's the first Fedora of the post Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 era, and oh yeah first with GNOME 3, SystemD and BoxGrinder.

It has been really long since we featured any new collection of wallpapers for Ubuntu or Linux. Article featuring Ubuntu/Linux wallpaper packs was the last in this particular category and even that was several months ago. So here is it once again, a nice and simple collection of 15 Ubuntu branded wallpapers from across the web. Enjoy!

A full review of Zorin OS 4, including a gallery of images. Many people coming from Windows try Ubuntu Linux as their first Linux distribution. But Ubuntu itself, while very good, may not always be the best choice. There are many Ubuntu derivatives and it’s possible that one of those can sometimes be a better bet for those seeking to ease their way into a comfortable Linux niche. Zorin OS is an Ubuntu derivative designed to help make the transition from Windows to Linux as easy as possible.

If you work for a company with an online presence long enough, you'll deal with it eventually. Someone, out of malice, boredom, pathology, or some combination of all three, will target your company's online presence and resources for attack. If you are lucky, it will be a run of the mill Denial of Service (DoS) attack from a single or limited range of IP addresses that can be easily blocked at your outermost point, and the responsible parties will lack the necessary expertise to overcome this relatively simple countermeasure. Your usual script kiddie attack against a site with competent network and server administration is fairly short. If you are unlucky, you'll experience something worse: A small percentage of attacks is from a higher caliber of black hat, and while more difficult to deal with, the individual generally bores easily and moves on.

The Fedora 15 'Lovelock' alpha release is available. This release of Fedora includes a variety of features both over and under the hood that show off the power and flexibility of the advancing state of free software. Examples include: GNOME 3, the next major version of the GNOME desktop; systemd, a smarter and more efficient way of starting up and managing the background daemons; updated programming languages and tools. View the Fedora 15 Alpha Screenshot Tour

It's a complex tale, but MPEG LA handles video codec royalties for none other than Apple and Microsoft (among others), and MPEG LA appears to being trying to quash Google's free video codec, which has attracted the attention of the US Justice Department. Could the plot thicken any more?

There are a lot of mobile apps that use open source software, but how many of them are in compliance with open source licensing rules? As it turns out, not very many. A new study from open source services vendor OpenLogic reports that 71 percent of Apple iOS and Google Android apps are not in compliance. OpenLogic scanned 635 apps, including both free and paid on the Apple App store and Google Android Marketplace. Of those 635 scanned apps, 52 apps include Apache licensed code while 16 included GPL/LGPL licensed code.

Canonical, through Gerry Carr, announced a few minutes ago (March 9th) that the 'Ubuntu Netbook Edition' of their popular operating system will be folded into Ubuntu for upcoming release, Ubuntu 11.04 (Natty Narwhal).

Google has released a new SDK for its open source and royalty-free VP8 video codec, promising faster encoding and improved video quality. Mountain View has not changed the VP8 format, merely the software around the format. The new SDK is known as "Bali", and it's the second major update to the platform. According to a Google blog post, on x86 processors, Bali encodes 4.5 times faster than the initial V8 SDK release in "best" mode and 1.35 times faster than previous release, known as Aylesbury. Google likes to name its V8 SDKs after ducks.

If you have a big collection of music, you can’t have in all your computers, so you’d better have it only in one of them and share it with the others. There are a lot of ways to do that, you can use Samba, NFS, or other means to share you drive with others, and thus your music collection, but a better way IMHO, is to share it using a streaming server.

The Linux Foundation announced keynotes and programming for its Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit, scheduled for April 6-8 in San Francisco. The event will also kick off the year's Linux 20th anniversary celebrations, leading up to the official celebration in August.

Tiny Core is a light and modular Linux distribution. Its main purpose is to allow the easy construction of simple but powerful appliance-like desktops. Michael Reed tests the latest release…

"A bug in the Caiaq USB driver, which could be used to execute arbitrary at the kernel level has been reported by Rafael Dominguez Vega of MRW InfoSecurity. The device drivers are vulnerable to buffer overflow condition when an USB device with an unusually long name (over 80 characters) is connected to the machine."

LXer Feature: 09-Mar-2011

This is an addition to the series that was never at first envisaged. Indeed, within a recent thread (shown immediately below) and in my response to “hkwint”, I stated very clearly that I had absolutely no intention of writing further on KDE4, but this situation almost developed with a life of its own and I now think it needs to be brought out into the open for the LXer readers.

Microsoft Corp. will pay Nokia Oyj more than $1 billion to promote and develop Windows-based handsets as part of their smartphone software agreement, according to two people with knowledge of the terms.

Distributive of Porteus Linux is very light. It weights under 300 MB. You can either burn it to CD, or extract files from .iso image and copy them to your USB drive. Like in SLAX, there are 2 files in the distributive which can make your USB bootable: one for Windows users and one for Linux. I found a small issue there, because Linux-oriented file (.sh) is not marked as executable, and I could not make it executable. Neither chmod nor Midnight Commander options helped. Anyway, I have Windows XP for some reasons, so .bat file was used. Finally I got bootable USB drive with Porteus system in it. Reboot. Choose to boot from USB. Let's go!