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Android moves pretty fast. It's import to know when, how and what to expect when you upgrade your device. Let's step through a recent upgrade from Froyo to Gingerbread on a Nexus One.

For the last 15 years we have been living in a Microsoft monoculture, which has had very real knock-on consequences for everyone online – not just for users of its products. Today, though, that monoculture is fading away, to be replaced by something much more complex.

Canonical, Ltd.'s new business model of choice — proprietary relicensing (once trailblazed by MySQL AB) — was also barely legitimate. In one literal sense, that's still true: it's legitimate in the sense that it doesn't violate GPL. In the sense of software freedom morality, I think proprietary relicensing harms the Free Software community too much, and that it was therefore a mistake to ever tolerate it.

Linux from scratch6.8 is released, This release includes numerous changes to LFS-6.7 and security fixes. It also includes editorial work on the explanatory material throughout the book, improving both the clarity and accuracy of the text.

The FreeBSD project announced the release of versions 8.2 and 7.4 on February 24. Both bring lots of new features and bug fixes. FreeBSD can be run on a large variety of architectures and is still considered one of the most stable and hardened systems available.

Linux is, without doubt a good operating system, although I feel more needs to be done to de-alienate it for the average user. I’ve been using Linux as my primary OS for the last 12 years. A few months ago I decided to give OS X a try and since then I’ve been spending more and more time using it.

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When one's computer becomes unstable, it's natural to think first of a particular app or the desktop. After that, one may tend to suspect the operating system. Finally one may find it turns out to be hardware at fault. This is what happened to me recently, and at the operating system phase, Debian became a last resort. At first I blamed Sabayon and tried Linux Mint. When Linux Mint seemed to also be crashy, I resorted to the newly released Debian 6.0. I thought if anything was going to be stable, it'd be Debian. Although I finally found and replaced faulty hardware, I've learned a bit about Debian on the desktop. I've used Debian on my X-less server for years, but never thought of it much as a desktop system. So, here is a summary of my Debian desktop adventure.

The 2.6.37 kernel I got from Liquorix has made Debian Squeeze a nearly perfect distribution. Liquorix tracks the kernel very closely, and as such there’s a new update every few days. Due to update fatigue, for now I’m “pounding out” the Liquorix entry in my sources.list. I have a good 2.6.37 kernel, and I want to stick with it for at least a little while.

Red Hat CTO, Brian Stevens, has defended the company's change to how it distributes the kernel source code in a blog posting. The company had changed its policy on how it distributed the source to its Linux kernel, a key component of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL). Where it had previously shipped out a standard kernel with all the patches which needed to be applied to make that kernel into Red Hat's version, for RHEL6 it switched to shipping an archive with those patches pre-applied and details of the patches not explicitly listed.

In mid February there were news reports that Canadian government computers at the Finance Department, Treasury Board, Defence Research and Development Canada had been hacked and information mined by persons unknown, most probably operating out of China.

I’ve been experimenting with other flat-file blogging systems, including Blosxom and Ode. Both Blosxom and Ode are based on Perl scripts, while FlatPress is written in PHP.

Steven Rosenberg has written a little article mentioning various self-hosted blogging platforms including Flatpress, Blosxom, PyBlosxom, Ode and others. I wanted to address a couple of his questions about Ode.

Perhaps free market forces can work wonders but when it comes to FOSS, commercial interests usually break the software. Are RHEL's recently revealed "secret patches" an example?

I've been relying on Google Chrome in Windows XP/7 and Chromium in Debian Squeeze for much of my web use because it's way faster, less memory-hungry and generally more pleasant than Firefox/Iceweasel. But in the past few days I've run into a few problems.

FFmpeg can be considered the Swissknife of audio and video applications, with many options and possibilities. You probably already have it installed on your computer as a dependency of a program you use to watch videos or listen to music. In this article we will see some use from the command line without using graphics applications.

Weblog software (also known as blog software) is a type of application which is designed to help users effortlessly create and maintain weblogs.

The Wine development release 1.3.15 is now available. The source is available now, Binary packages are in the process of being built, and will appear soon at their respective download locations.

With the right skin (Simplicity), XBMC Media Center provides a highly polished (second to none) front-end for any media playing computer along with oodles of art, posters, ratings, trailers, lyrics, plot summaries, TV guide like functionality, and so many more bits of supplemental information that I cannot feasibly cover them all here.

Fuduntu 14.9 Release Candidate is ready for testing. We need testers to help validate the updates before pushing them to the stable repository and releasing "stable" media. Lots of cool stuff in this release like kernel 2.6.37.2, new wallpaper, compiz autodetection, AWN, and more.

Red Hat has changed the way it distributes Enterprise Linux kernel code in an effort to prevent Oracle and Novell from stealing its customers, making it more difficult for these competitors to understand which patches have been applied where. Some have speculated that the change is designed to make it harder for Oracle as well as the open source CentOS project to build their own Linux distributions. But Stevens says this is not the case. He says the change is meant to hamper Oracle and Novell's ability to offer support to customers who are already running Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL).