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If cloud computing is just hype, no one has told Ubuntu server developer Dustin Kirkland, who has fascinating visions for the ways in which upcoming releases of Ubuntu might fit into the cloud. Here are the details.

The Ubuntu Server community and Canonical are again asking Ubuntu users just exactly how they are using Ubuntu Server Edition -- and in what kinds of organizations. Ubuntu Server has established itself as a popular operating system in organizations of all sizes performing numerous standard and critical tasks in multiple environments. It has also become one of the most popular operating systems on public cloud environments and has established itself as the core host Infrastructure-as-a-Service solution for private clouds.

The Bash Shell reads command line until it reaches a carriage-return. This permits the user to create very long command strings if necessary.

According to a report by the EU's Open Source Observatory and Repository (OSOR), Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin has signed a plan to "switch federal authorities to free software." The communications ministry is to start the process this year and by the end of 2014, all federal institutions are to have started the migration. The Russian government will be setting up a support centre with a repository for open source software used by authorities.

Desktop can get cluttered with too many files and icons. The blog shows a way to toggle showing/hiding files and icons in desktop so that the wallpaper can be enjoyed.

Paulo José posted some very interesting LibreOffice UI mockups at DeviantArt for which he says the main inspiration was the Blender UI:

Last week we reported on Mozilla Firefox developers having issues with Linux GPU drivers to the point that the Firefox 4.0 Linux build will not have GPU acceleration enabled by default, but it can be found for Mac OS X and Windows users. Fortunately, to fix the situation, there's now some open-source Mesa/X developers looking into these problems of Firefox GPU acceleration.

Every new version of digiKam features its own unique splash screen. But you don’t have to wait for the next digiKam release to get a new splash screen. Here are a few ready-to-go designs created by your truly.

Apart from text, images are probably the most commonly used objects in Scribus or any other layout application. The basics of working with images in Scribus are mostly straightforward, but there are some methods and resources that you might miss, especially at first.

Smartphone sales will boom in 2011. We look at some of the best phones coming our way. Looking to buy a smartphone this year? Here is a selection of the best phones coming our way this year.

Low-cost computers are to be offered as part of a government scheme to encourage millions of people in the UK to get online for the first time. [...] The cheap computers will run open-source software, such as Linux, and will include a flat-screen monitor, keyboard, mouse, warranty, dedicated telephone helpline and delivery.

Lots of people have reported problems (such as getting 404 Not Found errors) using the SquirrelMail webmail package in their web sites created through ISPConfig 3. If you have followed the "Perfect Server" guides for ISPConfig 3, you have SquirrelMail already installed, but if you are still having the same problems, then this guide is for you. This guide explains how to configure SquirrelMail on a Debian Lenny server so that you can use it from within your web sites (created through ISPConfig).

Following a beta last month, the Amarok development team has released version 2.4 of the open source music player for the KDE desktop, code named "Slipstream". According to the developers, the project's first release of 2011 is a major update that brings significant performance, usability and stability improvements.

Today, after almost two years of work, we have the special pleasure of announcing the much awaited release of Xfce 4.8, the new stable version that supersedes Xfce 4.6.

As a computer user, you will no doubt have numerous passwords to remember. Some sites put restrictions on the choice of the password. For example, a site may insist on a minimum number of characters, capital letters, numerals, and other characters which make choosing the same password for each site to be impossible. More importantly, there are good security reasons not to duplicate passwords. This inevitably means that individuals will simply have too many passwords to remember. One solution is to keep the passwords in written form. However, this is also highly insecure.

With the emerging popularity of the 'social web', it is becoming more and more common to integrate aspects from social media tools such as Twitter and Facebook into e-commerce stores, such as those powered by the Magento platform. Social media can provide a fantastic opportunity for e-commerce store owners to participate and engage with existing and potential customers while increasing the awareness of their products among a wider audience.

This article by Richard Carter, author of the book Magento 1.4 Themes Design, covers integrating your Magento store with Twitter, including:

• Adding a 'Follow Us On Twitter' button
• Making use of the Twitter 'latest tweets' widgets to your store

Editors note: Magento Community Edition is distributed under the Open Software License (OSL 3.0)

The Nouveau (and PathScale) developers working on reverse-engineering the NVIDIA Linux binary driver in turn to write a free software driver with 2D/3D acceleration for all of NVIDIA's graphics processors, have another accomplishment under their belt today. They've now merged the NVC0 (a.k.a. "Fermi") acceleration support into the xf86-video-nouveau DDX driver...

Continuing ABLEconf's drive to showcase FLOSS for business, we are seeking presentations for our Saturday, April 2nd event in Tempe, Arizona.

The Call for Presentations does close Saturday, January 22nd.

The Unigine Engine, which is developed by the Linux-friendly Unigine Corp and is known as providing the most advanced and demanding OpenGL Linux game engine at this time, has been ported to run on tablet computers and smart-phones running Google's Android operating system. Wow...

This tutorial describes how you can install Apache2 with mod_fcgid and PHP5 on Ubuntu 10.10. mod_fcgid is a compatible alternative to the older mod_fastcgi. It lets you execute PHP scripts with the permissions of their owners instead of the Apache user.