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On the day before the Software Patent Debate Igor and I got some bad news. The lawyer who had said he would be able to present for the Pro Patent position would be unable to attend the debate. We needed to find someone credible, someone knowledgeable, someone who could put on a show. And we needed someone at almost the last minute. Despite impossible odds Igor thought of the perfect person; Brett Roberts, former Platform Manager, strategist and my long time and good natured protagonist. Thanks to the magic of modern communications in short order we had secured Brett as our debating opponent.

Nginx (pronounced "engine X") is a lightweight, high-performance Web server/reverse proxy and e-mail (IMAP/POP3) proxy, licensed under a BSD-like license. It runs on UNIX, GNU/Linux, BSD variants, Mac OS X, Solaris, and Microsoft Windows. Apache's performance is generally very good as well. However, in a resource-constrained environment , Apache does not necessarily provide optimal performance or resource utilization. One of the "best practice" approaches to reducing the strain on Apache is to let a leaner lighter web server take over the serving of the site's static files (images, javascript, css, etc.), leaving the heavy lifting of serving the dynamic content to Apache. This tutorial shows how you can set up Nginx as front end to Apache for ISPConfig 2 On CentOS 5.x.

A few years ago I wrote "(if you think Free Software is about people) Please go in the streets, and ask the first N people you meet, with N as big as you like, if they want it". This is just what will happen next Saturday afternoon in Italy, inside one of the shopping centers of Coop, the largest supermarket chain in Italy

Linux finally gets a great audio tagger. As someone that loves music, listens constantly and is always adding to my collection by purchasing and then ripping CDs, a decent tag editor is an essential tool. I’ve been using Linux for the past seven years or so and the only drawback that I was constantly faced with was the lack of a great audio tag editor - basically a Linux based equivalent to mp3tag.

As a 19-year-old college student in 2003, Matt Mullenweg developed what has become the largest self-hosted blogging tool on the web. Two years later, he founded Automattic, which runs the content management system for WordPress and a handful of other web tools. WordPress — still free and open source — is currently used by more than 12% of the top million websites (this one included). In a recent e-mail exchange, Mullenweg discussed the open source movement, the shifting personal web publishing world, and the future of WordPress.

Parted Magic is one of the best standalone partition management Linux solutions out there. Sukrit explains why…

A Jump and Run game like Super Mario World with an advanced Editor and highly detailed Graphics based on SDL with a OpenGL accelerated Graphics Renderer developed in C++. Secret Maryo Chronicles has been described as a Super Mario Bros. clone by PCtipp. It was listed as the number one open source video game by APC in January 2008.

Two months after the first beta arrived, the OpenOffice.org developers have issued the first release candidate (RC1) of OpenOffice.org 3.3.0, the next release of the Oracle owned open source office suite. According to the OpenOffice.org Wiki, the RC1 development version will be followed by a second release candidate and a quality assurance (QA) build prior to the final product release. Dates for the RC2, QA and Final version have yet to be confirmed.

CodeWeavers Releases CrossOver 9.2 to Support Civilization 5 on Linux and Mac... SAINT PAUL, Minn. (October 19, 2010) Less than a month after Firaxis released its highly anticipated and acclaimed Civilization 5, CodeWeavers, Inc. today announced the release of CrossOver Games 9.2, enabling gamers to play the game on Linux and Mac operating systems.

A quick look at Lubuntu 10.10, including a full gallery of screenshots. An updated version of Lubuntu was released last week, along with Ubuntu, Kubuntu, and Xubuntu. This release brings Lubuntu, along with the rest of the buntus, up to version 10.10. Lubuntu is a distro designed to provide a lightweight alternative to Ubuntu itself. Lubuntu uses the LXDE desktop environment.

The London Stock Exchange has said its new Linux-based system is delivering world record networking speed, with 126 microsecond trading times.

Uncomplicated Firewall (ufw) is a front-end to iptables on Ubuntu. One of its features are "application profiles" that make firewall port configuration easy. Unfortunately there are relatively few profiles available. I just wrote 192 of them for various application and game servers. Enjoy.

gcalcli is a nice utility. Make it better with this hack. I wrote earlier of the very useful command line utility called gcalcli (short for GoogleCALendarCommandLineInterface). Click here to read that post. One of the options is called "agenda" which spits out, by default, the next five days of calendar entries. If you would prefer a different range of time than five days, then you can specify two dates and the utility will give you that set of entries.

This week is the fourth annual Open Access Week, and starting yesterday Oct 18, the official kick-off date, the CC community has been participating in various open access events around the globe. “Open-access (OA) literature is digital, online, free of charge, and free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.” Taking place the same week everywhere, Open Access Week brings together people from all ends of the academic and research communities at various worldwide conferences, workshops, and other events to “continue to learn about the potential benefits of Open Access, to share what they’ve learned with colleagues, and to help inspire wider participation in helping to make Open Access a new norm in scholarship and research.” Below is a (not exhaustive) list of what CC jurisdiction leads, open culture and open education advocates, and the Creative Commons staff are doing to inspire open access.

While last month several OpenOffice.org members had left the free software office suite project to form LibreOffice and The Document Foundation, there's no signs that OpenOffice.org is going away anytime soon; Oracle has just announced the first release candidate for the upcoming OpenOffice.org 3.3.0.

A quick look at Xubuntu 10.10, including a full gallery of screenshots. Last week I reviewed Kubuntu 10.10 and Ubuntu 10.10 over on Desktop Linux Reviews. This week I wanted to look at Xubuntu 10.10. I decided to do a quick look rather than a full-blown DLR review because less has changed in Xubuntu than in the other two distro releases.

Recently there has been a transition from physical products being the most critical aspect of many company’s businesses to data being the key driver. This transformation started some time ago and has steadily progressed over time. While one can argue over the subtleties of whether a company actually makes a physical product or not, it is fairly clear that to almost all companies data has become if not the key to their success, then very close to it.

The Free/Open Source software world is cram-full of excellent networking utilities, some free of cost, some costing money, and all excellent. Cynthia Harvey rounds up a herd of 55 of them just for us.

I just recently did a post detailing why you should give the E17 desktop a try. If you made the plunge and are now using E17 on your unix based system you might be slightly at a loss on exactly how it all works. The following are some helpful tips and tricks for when you are first getting started with E17.

The EFF have announced their 2010 Pioneer Awards: transparency activist Stephen Aftergood; public domain scholar James Boyle; legal blogger Pamela Jones and the website Groklaw; and e-voting researcher Hari Krishna Prasad Vemuru, who was recently released on bail after being imprisoned for his security work in India. "These winners have all worked tirelessly to give critical insight and context to the tough questions that arise in our evolving digital world," said EFF Executive Director Shari Steele. "We need strong advocates, educators, and researchers like these to protect our digital rights, and we're proud to honor these four Pioneer Award winners for their important contributions." Press release here; PJ's comments here.