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Stellarium and Celestia 3D are two incredibly good applications for aspiring star gazers. Stellarium renders 3D photo-realistic skies in real-time while Celestia 3D is an awesome 3D astronomy program that allows users to display objects ranging in scale from artificial satellites to entire galaxies in 3D.

In some circles games are regarded as a distraction and a time waster. However, there are many benefits to playing computer games other than the obvious simple unadulterated fun that they offer.

As we shared last week, Unigine Corp launched a Linux game development competition where any independent game teams/studios could submit a written proposal to them for a new Linux game and then later this month they will pick one submission and grant them a free license of their expensive, very advanced, multi-platform engine. There's still another week left to this competition, but we have learned some details from Unigine Corp about the submissions thus far.

There are hundreds of compelling reasons why Linux is better than all the rival operating systems. Here are just 20.

Front-line measures like firewalling, strong authentication, and staying on top of security updates are mandatory steps to keeping your system secure. But you also need to check your system's health frequently and make sure a compromise didn't slip past you unnoticed. A good place to start is with an intrusion detection system (IDS) that monitors your machine's resources and flags any changes that might indicate an intruder or a rootkit. The Advanced Intrusion Detection Environment (AIDE) is an open source IDS that you can set up in a weekend.

Less than two weeks left for SCALE Call for Papers; Sponsors start lining up for event. As everyone's sights are set on the December holidays, the Southern California Linux Expo reminds those who plan to submit papers for SCALE 9X to get them in before the deadline, which is a little over a week away. The deadline for the SCALE 9x Call for Papers is Dec. 13, with notification of acceptance being sent to speakers by Dec. 27.

Canonical's Ubuntu One personal cloud service for Ubuntu 10.10 users has expanded its reach beyond Linux with new iOS, Android, and Windows clients. Ubuntu One's beta Windows client is off to a solid start, but work remains if Ubuntu One wants to overtake Dropbox, says this eWEEK Labs review.

Previously only available in the Beta channel, Google has released version 8 of the Chrome web browser into the stable channel. This major update is the first version capable of using the upcoming web store and includes a built-in PDF viewer that's sandboxed to help prevent attackers from exploiting security vulnerabilities in the plug-in. A sandboxed Adobe Flash Player plug-in has been integrated into the Development (Dev) channel version of the browser, so that too should appear in the stable release in due time.

I heard about the new .WWF format this morning. It is an initiative of the World Wildlife Fund to prevent people printing .PDF files. As a matter of fact, it is a .PDF format, but slightly modified and with the "no printing" flag enabled. But I don't like it when people are forbidding me something. It is sending the wrong message. So I set out to crack it.

A rather small crowd of researchers, kernel developers and industry experts found their way to the 12th Real-Time Linux WorkShop (RTLWS) hosted at Strathmore University in Nairobi, Kenya. The small showing was not a big surprise, but it also did not make the workshop any less interesting.

Oracle executives talked up on Thursday the planned Solaris 11 release due in 2011, with the Unix OS upgrade offering advancements in availability, security, and virtualization. The OS will feature next-generation networking capabilities for scalability and performance, said John Fowler, Oracle executive vice president of systems, at a company event in Santa Clara, Calif. "It's a complete reworking of [the] enterprise OS," he said. Oracle took over Solaris when the company acquired Sun Microsystems early this year.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6, the latest version of Red Hat's flagship Linux-based operating system, began shipping last month, boasting a bevy of core improvements around scalability, resource management and virtualization. What's more, the system ships with a slate of updated open-source software components that stand to make life easier for developers and system administrators who wish to take advantage of recent features without leaving Red Hat's support and certification umbrella to do so.

Adam Williamson has shared that he's looking at packaging Canonical's Unity desktop for Fedora. "Why? Well, a few reasons. Mainly, Unity’s an interesting project. I want to look at it and compare it to GNOME Shell and I think quite a few others do too, so it seems nice to package it so you can run both on Fedora. I don’t really want to maintain an Ubuntu install just to test Unity (can’t do it in a KVM VM as it requires compositing support). Also, though, I think it’ll do a bit to help keep everyone honest: if other projects show interest in providing Unity as an option for people to use, it increases the motivation for Unity's developers to make sure it can be easily built without non-upstreamed changes. Hopefully it also increases the motivation for upstream projects to work with the Unity developers to get their changes merged.

I am pleased to announce the availability of Fuduntu 14.6. This is a minor change for existing Fuduntu users, who will get these updates automatically. Fuduntu 14.6 brings significant UI changes; fixes BFS compatibility with the tickless kernel; and improves many of the existing battery life and performance tweaks. Fuduntu 14.6 has a base memory footprint of 150MB post installation, and the ISOs have been reduced to under 800MB without any significant loss in functionality.

One of the standards that has become normal in the US federal sector is the requirement that all mobile devices, such as laptops, have encrypted drives. This was a direct result of a number of laptop thefts earlier in the decade that resulted in the supposed leaking of personal information. As a former federal contractor, I watched a number of successful and not so successful methodologies implemented and deployed. Some resulted in real data protection and some resulted in wonderful bricks. In some cases on a regular (read daily) basis.

The Festive Season is well upon us and the celebrations are only a few short weeks away, so in preparation this tutorial will help motivate you for the Holidays and produce an elegant wallpaper!

Linaro project sets about to promote Linux on mobile devices. Although Linux is widely used in mobile phones, particularly smartphones, efforts to make the open source operating system more mobile-friendly have, until recently, been largely dispersed.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 offers a strong foundation for hosting virtual workloads, and boosts support to ten years, says this eWEEK Labs review. Yet, price increases and the lack of Xen or .NET support could make Novell's SUSE a better choice for some enterprise users. Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6, the latest version of Red Hat's flagship Linux-based operating system, began shipping last month, boasting a bevy of core improvements around scalability, resource management, and virtualization.

In the third annual report about Linux kernel authorship by Linux Foundation, a number of interesting statistics popped up. Among the most important statistics is the one showing the level of contributions from different entities that include big corporates and individuals.

Enlightenment is one environment that I had wanted to try for a while. I remember seeing some beautiful Enlightenment screen shots about 10 years ago. However, at the time, installing it was not an easy task.
I have only started playing with it, so don’t expect a deep review. I only want to highlight the beauty of the environment and the good job the PCLinuxOS team did in customizing it for their distro.