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Vladimir Putin has signed an order calling for Russian federal authorities to move to GNU/Linux, and for the creation of 'a single repository of free software used in the federal bodies of executive power

If you have an old cam that you are not using, you can use it as a security cam. Control Motion is a program that monitors the video signal from one or more cameras and is able to detect if a significant part of the picture has changed; in other words, it can detect motion. The program is written in C and is made for the Linux operating system (using the video4linux interface). Motion is a command line based tool whose output can be either jpeg, ppm fies or mpeg video sequences. Motion is strictly command line driven and can run as a daemon with a rather small footprint.

AMD has allowed their Radeon GPUs to be overclocked on Linux since 2008 when using their Catalyst driver with OverDrive support. Previous to that there was Rovclock for overclocking select ATI Radeon ASICs using an open-source program along with support for tuning the video memory timings and other options, which was a program written via reverse engineering. The Catalyst Linux driver supports OverDrive manipulation of the core and memory clocks, which is enough for most enthusiasts, but if you've been looking for more extensive features there is a new option.

Linux distributions tend to fall into one of two camps. The first are those, like Ubuntu and Fedora, that are aimed mostly at enthusiasts and others happy to teeter on the bleeding edge of technology. The other group consists of more stable, commercially supported software, designed for those after less excitement, and includes products such as SUSE Linux Enterprise and Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL). New releases are a rarity in this category, so when a major new product like RHEL 6 comes along it's a big event, and one worthy of close attention.

This guide explains how you can run virtual machines with VirtualBox 4.0 on a headless Ubuntu 10.10 server. Normally you use the VirtualBox GUI to manage your virtual machines, but a server does not have a desktop environment. Fortunately, VirtualBox comes with a tool called VBoxHeadless that allows you to connect to the virtual machines over a remote desktop connection, so there's no need for the VirtualBox GUI.

It's a testament to how far Linux has come that users today don't typically have to use the command line if they don't want to. Such is the quality of the graphical user interfaces in many modern Linux distributions that there's simply no need, in general.

Popular Linux game Nexuiz was forked into a new game Xonotic earlier this year as there was some disagreement between Nexuiz developers and community. Now Xonotic developers have released first preview version playable on Linux, Windows and Mac.

Novell throws FOSS under the bus to make a deal with Microsoft. Pamela Jones wonders why bother with Groklaw, if helping companies like Novell only leads to getting the shaft yet again?

All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy, but paying for everything make Jack rather poor. Here's a look at the most popular places to score free games online for some cheap end-of-year fun.

DockBarX 0.42 is released, this version comes with some improvements and a new feature codenamed "ScrollPeak" : " With ScrollPeak instead of rising windows while scrolling, the windows will simply be opacified one by one until you found the one you are looking for and when you move the mouse cursor away from the group button it will be raised. Nothing revolutionary but it should improve the work flow for some of you."

I took a few days off from writing any articles, partly to try to make a serious dent in transcribing the Comes v. Microsoft exhibits. We're in the home stretch, and a quiet weekend, marking on a curve, is perfect. I know there's lots going on, other than work. I also needed to take some time to think about the recent discovery about Novell taking money from Microsoft and contractually agreeing to show up at Open XML standards meetings and events. Should Groklaw stop helping people like that, I asked? Is it time to shut Groklaw down? If not, is there a way to carve out helping Linux and FOSS, which is what we are about, from helping self-interested executives and board members so that in essence we end up being used by them so they get larger piles of money because we worked ourselves to the bone and then they repay the community with such a deal as this?

Dan Kegel released winetricks 20101008 today. new verbs icodecs, msnasn1, opensymbol, wmi, xmllite; removed obsolete verbs audioio, dcom98, eadm, urlmon

Back in 1998 when I started using Linux, it was ugly. In those days you installed it by inserting around 40 floppy disks into your computer and praying that one of them wouldn't be a duffer and make you have to start again. After this lengthy installation process, you were typically presented with this not-entirely-intuitive interface:

Photoshop users who have switched to GIMP will notice that some of the PS features are not readily available in Gimp. Drawing arrows is one of them. As a tech blogger who have to edit plenty of screenshots everyday, there are times where I need to draw arrows on the images to illustrate the point. While this can be easily done in Photoshop, the feature is not available in the default installation of GIMP. Here is what you can do to enable the arrow feature in GIMP.

It's a third person High Fantasy RPG action game that immerses players deep into the awe inspiring fantasy world of Dilogus, allowing them to experience it from multiple perspectives of six unique characters in both single player and co-operative multiplayer mode on Linux and Windows platforms.

The Wine development release 1.3.10 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.

K3b is a powerful, feature-complete burning application for KDE 4 which comes with support for burning CDs, DVDs, ISO images, Blu-ray discs, audio CDs, creating ISO images. K3b supports multisession mode, features on-screen display, sound notifications, it can copy from one device to another, allows to rip audio CDs using the transcode utility, rip Video CDs or DVDs or create eMoviX projects.

Are your friends convinced that they should be paying for their operating systems because Linux sounds too complicated or because they think it won't do what they want it to? Fear not, here's your guide to bringing your friends over to the light side...

"Windows users started taking games for granted a long time ago. As evidence, the average price Windows users are paying for the recent "Humble Indie Bundle #2" is $6.63." ... "GNU+Linux users seem to have a very different attitude towards games. With this scarcity of games, GNU+Linux users have become desperate."

There's the release of Wine 1.3.10 on this Christmas Eve for those with extra time to test the newest Wine over the holidays. Wine 1.3.10 has a number of changes worth checking out...