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The German government has given details of its reasons for migrating the German Foreign office from Linux and free software back to Windows and Microsoft software. The SPD (Social Democrats, the main German opposition party) submitted an initial question on "the use of open source software in the Foreign Office and other Government departments", but, according to the Green parliamentary group, the German government's response left various questions unanswered. These questions have now been addressed by Cornelia Rogall-Grothe, the German government's IT commissioner in a documentPDFGerman language.

Google is building an interactive Native Client debugger that will integrate with various popular IDEs. According to Google engineer David Springer, the company will begin with Visual Studio before moving on to Eclipse and others. "We're starting with Visual Studio because a lot of client programs are already built there," Springer said this afternoon at Google's annual developer conference in San Francisco. Part of Google's Native Client pitch is that it will allow developers to easily move their existing client applications into the browser.

I have seen many articles on how to play Angry Birds game in Linux using Wine and other similar tools, but as you are about to see now, there is an even easier method to play Angry Birds in Ubuntu and other flavors of Linux. It is called Chrome Web Store. Yes, Angry Birds is now available in Chrome Web Store for free installation.

In addition to writing tags, ratings, labels, descriptions, etc. directly into the photos, version 2.0 of digiKam can save metadata in a separate .xmp file.

When a cloud vendor like Box.net teams up with a traditional on-premise vendor like EMC, customers win because they get access to Cloud services without ripping out existing software.

This tutorial shows how to set up an Ubuntu Natty Narwhal (Ubuntu 11.04) server that offers all services needed by ISPs and hosters: Apache web server (SSL-capable), Postfix mail server with SMTP-AUTH and TLS, BIND DNS server, Proftpd FTP server, MySQL server, Courier POP3/IMAP, Quota, Firewall, etc. In the end you should have a system that works reliably, and if you like you can install the free webhosting control panel ISPConfig 2 (i.e., ISPConfig runs on it out of the box).

You may remember a legacy company from a few years back – used to be very big in old market segments like the desktop, but never managed to make much impact in growth areas like the web or mobile.

Before reviewing the status of the lawsuit and the claims interpretation, a quick word on how the parties got to the point of a lawsuit. This was not a shot that caught Google off guard. Oracle and Google had been in discussions for months prior to this lawsuit over a license that would have permitted Google to move forward. Word is that the companies had all but reached agreement, but when the Google negotiators sent the proposal up the ladder for final approval, it got nixed at the very highest levels within Google.

Is Ballmer nuts or, more precisely, is he even more nuts that I already thought him to be, paying billions for a company worth thousands? Doesn’t Google own the patent on paying way to much for much too little? It seems I’m not the only one asking such questions.

Many people read and left comments on the recent post I wrote about my poor experience using the Fedora IRC channel. Lots of people left comments agreeing with what I had said, many also left comments to the opposite effect.

The DHS tries to bend Mozilla to its will. Mozilla doesn't. Bravo Mozilla! I know I'm a little late with this news, but that's because I was kind of busy earlier in the week. Anyway, the news (Nate Anderson, Ars Technica) is that the US government (specifically, the Department of Homeland Security) tried to force Mozilla to remove an add-on for Firefox called MAFIAAFire.

Honeycomb was released to the world and by all reports it's not nearly ready for prime time. Google may be able to take a go-slow approach with its software and release versons like this, but tablet makers don't have that luxury -- not with Apple running away with the tablet market.

Google is making lots of Android- and Chrome-related news. But if you stop to really think about this conference you’ll see how Google is winning the hearts and minds of software developers and business partners. Here's how.

Google co-founder Sergey Brin has said that only about 20 per cent of Google's employees are still using Microsoft Windows, and that all of those users are on Windows 7. He stressed, however, that he is not sure of the exact percentage.

Pinta, a "lightweight" open source raster image editor, turned 1.0 on April 27, offering Linux users another choice for simple image editing. Pinta is intended to be a clone of Paint.NET, the Windows-only raster editor written in .NET. As such, it uses Mono under the hood, but it gains the ability to run equally well on Linux, Mac OS X, or Windows. Is it a replacement for GIMP or Krita? That depends on what you need to do.

Google is rumoured to be set to announce a scheme where students can get a Chrome OS toting laptop for a $20 (£12) a month contract, mimicking the way in which many people get the latest mobile phones. According to Forbes, Google will announce the deal later in the day at its Google I/O conference, and the package will include Google Apps.

Ubuntu Natty has been out for almost two weeks. If you do not like the Unity interface, nor the classic Gnome, you could install KDE and give it a spin. We have covered KDE 4 several times and it is elegant and by far the best KDE distribution. Here’s how you can install KDE in Ubuntu Natty.

As you probably know after the gnome 3.0 release developers are back on releasing the second iteration of the ‘awesome’ desktop, gnome 3.2. There have been discussions going on in gnome development lists. One of the discussions is about including deja dup backup as default in gnome. This will help to create a unified experience from the start.

Engineers at Facebook have launched the Open Compute Project, a new initiative to share state-of-the-art plans for datacentre design. Rory MacDonald investigates…

Samsung and Acer will start selling the first Google Chrome OS notebooks starting June 15, priced from $349 to $499 but also available as part of monthly business/school subscriptions. The 12.1-inch Samsung Chromebook Series 5 and the 11.6-inch Acer Chromebook offer dual-core 1.66GHz Intel Atom N570 processors, 2GB of DDR3 RAM, a 16GB solid state disk, memory card reader, a webcam, USB, Wi-Fi, and optional 3G.