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The smart mobile user shouldn't overlook Linux. The question is, which distro should you pick? You'll get a different answer depending who you ask. You'll probably be pointed in the direction of Arch for performance, Debian for stability and Ubuntu if you want easy access to the biggest collection of apps. If that's not enough choice to make your head spin, Slackware has its fans too – particularly among people who use older laptops.

Technology conquers all, right? Except football (American, that is). The pace of technology is wondrous indeed. No corner of our lives seems safe from digital invasion, from picture frames to pasta makers. For years now, we have been threatened with Internet-enabled refrigerators, and perhaps 2011 will see it so.

Though MeeGo shows a lot of promise, the project is not making the most of the open source developer community. Here’s what’s wrong, and what MeeGo needs to do better in 2011.

Apple is doing it again: they are releasing an app store for OS X on the 6th of January. Just like the iPhone app store, and the Android app store, this is going to be a hit: the OS X ecosystem will get a giant boost from it, and we are left — once again — with a lot to learn. Before you mention that GNU/Linux doesn’t need an app store because it’s free software, and before you even say that GNU/Linux already has an app store through one of the many software managers (Synaptics, Ubuntu Software Center, apt-get), please read this article.

This week at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas (I'll be there again looking out for Linux), Intel will officially launch their next-generation Sandy Bridge micro-architecture and CPUs. The NDA though expired at midnight on these first CPUs so there is now a stream of reviews coming out. Is there any Linux graphics test results for the Core i5 2500K and Core i7 2600K? Unfortunately, there is not...

LibreOffice finally got a PPA so it's now a lot easier to install and stay up to date with the latest LibreOffice versions.

In December we published our first set of Amazon EC2 benchmarks for their Elastic Compute Cloud using Ubuntu EC2 and the different instances that were compatible. Now though we are in the process of carrying out a new set of benchmarks from Amazon's cloud that not only contains more tests, but using the official Amazon Linux AMI we tested nearly every instance type. Except what is missing are the results for the "micro" (the t1.micro API name) instance. Why? It is simply too slow and irregular.

Although digiKam can’t rival dedicated image manipulation applications like the GIMP, it does have several essential editing tools which can help you to turn plain photos into striking images.

Linux Mint is one of the oldest, and arguably one of the best-developed, spin-offs of Ubuntu. Over the last few weeks, I've been seeing more articles talk about another similar spin-off of Ubuntu called Pinguy OS, and I thought, "Another Ubuntu derivative? How many more does the world need?" But then I saw that these articles were placing Pinguy OS on the same level of Linux Mint. I figured this warranted a full-on comparison test.

How to use a Bash Shell script to record the activity of users. This script is useful in rebuilding the actions of users as they work at the command line.

We're tapping the Linux Mag hive-mind this week for Android-based apps that deserve an install. Share your favorites.

My second reaction was to fire myself from #sabayon, with thanks to someone I respect to get me thinking outside my ego. I promptly did so, you can find the thread on the mailing list. Several conversations with the team members and project lead talked me out of removing myself and to chalk it up as a lesson learned. I had to sleep on that one, but decided that if they were still willing to have me I had more to offer.

Though MeeGo shows a lot of promise, the project is not making the most of the open source developer community. Here's what's wrong, and what MeeGo needs to do better in 2011.

I recently had to move from one machine to another about 50 GB of data, divided into hundreds of thousands of small files, and i had no additional space on the machine to make a zipped tar and then move it comfortably, I tried a scp, but after 45 minutes it had moved around 2 GB of data, too slow. And so I started looking at the options a bit more advanced of tar.

Steel Storm is an old school top down arcade shooter with score oriented competitive gameplay, and is designed for people who like fast paced action and have limited amounts of time to play computer games.

We don't go out on New Year's Eve. I personally gave up the ritual a few years back. The jostling crowds and blaring music on Sixth Street just does not have the appeal it used to. Besides that, I simply don't see any real reason to celebrate. It's just a moment in time we've chosen to note a mile marker of our passing. I do see this date on the calendar as an opportunity to look at where we've been and a tool to gauge where we want to go.

I’ll cut to the meat of this review right away: Bodhi Alpha 4 has had a dramatic makeover. The new default E17 theme – called A-Nogal-Bodhi – gives the whole desktop a lighter, less oppressive feel than the black and green ’80?s terminal’ theme previously used.

I've shelled out a lot of money over the years on software -- Windows and Mac OS upgrades, Adobe Photoshop, Microsoft Office -- the list goes on and on. Some of it was necessary, but more often than not there are free alternatives out there that do the job just as well or better than the paid software -- someone just has to point you in the right direction. That's what I'll attempt to do here today. Behold, some of my favorite free programs and utilities that I guarantee will make your life easier:

The techies in Kerala have one more feather to add in their cap. India's first open source movie concept is getting ready under Chamba Swathanthra Movie Project, started in Kerala. Open source films (also known as open content films and free content films) are films which are produced and distributed using free and open source software methodologies.

Many readers will have witnessed their computer system becoming progressively slower in use over time. This particularly affects Windows so much so that over time it can feel like the machine is running at half speed. This is in part due to users continually installing more applications, and not performing system maintenance.