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The Brazilian subsidiary of Electrolux has joined with ProFusion Embedded Systems to develop a refrigerator that includes a Linux-based touchscreen computer. The Infinity I-Kitchen's computer is based on a 400MHz Freescale i.MX25 processor, offering a 800 x 480 display and an Enlightenment Foundation Libraries (EFL) user interface.

This article describes the setup of a redundant Linux OpenVPN gateway on Debian / Ubuntu and how to setup client authentication with certificates.

This post follows up “Howto” http://wiki.xen.org/xenwiki/RHEL6Xen4Tutorial . Install kernel-2.6.32.26-174.xendom0.fc12.src.rpm on RHEL 6 Server.

Last night an update was published as to the state of Unity in Ubuntu 11.04 Alpha 1, which is the Unity desktop interface that Canonical will be using in their next Ubuntu release rather than the GNOME Shell. Most all other GNOME distributions, however, will be using the GNOME Shell with GNOME 3.0 when released in March. As it so happens, another development snapshot of the GNOME Shell arrived last night too...

Some iPhone fans should really dismount from their iHorse. This is an argument I had to forgo having in favour of discussing the pros and cons of the BlackBerry Torch, iPhone 4 and Samsung Galaxy S with someone else trying to decide which phone to buy. “Everybody just copied the iPhone,” is the sweeping, unsupported statement that makes me see red.

The Bordeaux Technology Group is proud to announce a 50% off recession busting sale on Bordeaux for Linux, Mac, FreeBSD, PCBSD and OpenIndiana. With the current US unemployment rate hovering near 10% and rumors of the possibility of a double dip recession. We want to do our part to help save individuals and small business as much money as we can on their Wine related software needs.

Unlike virt-manager, virt-install is a command line tool that allows you to create KVM guests on a headless server. You may ask yourself: "But I can use vmbuilder to do this, why do I need virt-install?" The difference between virt-install and vmbuilder is that vmbuilder is for creating Ubuntu-based guests, whereas virt-install lets you install all kinds of operating systems (e.g. Linux, Windows, Solaris, FreeBSD, OpenBSD) and distributions in a guest, just like virt-manager. This article shows how you can use it on an Ubuntu 10.10 KVM server.

I love coffee, I love tea. I love the Java Jive and it loves me.* If Java is giving you jive, put your fears aside. You'll soon love it sweet and hot. Or maybe not. How many times have you run into problems with Java? Chances are very good that most of you have. If you perform a Google search using the words “Linux” and “Java,” you’ll have an all-day scavenger hunt on your hands. Searching for answers to installing Java, making it work and surviving the aftermath could use up whatever energy you’ve gleaned from actual cups of java. If you install the correct package, you need never fret again. You’ll learn to love Java again. You might even sing about it.

If you are a user of OpenOffice.org or LibreOffice you might be familiar with styles and formatting. These are pre-defined text formats that you can select from in order to change various aspects of your text. With both OpenOffice.org and LibreOffice you have the ability to create custom styles and formats that can be used, and re-used, easily. And best of all, this is all done without a single bit of scripting or coding. Thanks to the Styles and Formatting tool, you can become a LibreOffice power-user in no time.

Novell channel partners are expressing mixed reactions to news that the software vendor, once a critical player in the channel, will be acquired by Attachmate for $2.2 billion. "We've been assured by Novell that there are no planned changes to partnerships," said Phil Cook, lead architect for identity management technology at Identropy, a Novell platinum partner that provides managed services built around the vendor's identity management software. Cook said Novell sent an e-mail to reassure all of its partners on Nov. 22, the day the sale was announced.

Recently two pieces of first class anti-free software diatribe hit the headlines. The first is Microsoft’s “please don’t use OpenOffice.org” video and the second is Steve Jobs’ anti-Android rant. Both are pretty shallow attempts at deflection and have been rightly called out as actually endorsing the subject of the attack as a valid opponent. In both cases it does seem to say that Microsoft and Jobs are concerned enough about OpenOffice.org and Android respectively that they need to tell the rest of us how bad they are. Read the article at Freesoftware Magazine.

Developed as part of KDE4 was Nepomuk to handle meta data of all kinds on the desktop in a generic fashion regardless of file type as a step towards a semantic desktop. While Nepomuk continues to advance, the KDE developers are now collaborating with GNOME developers to bring Zeitgeist to the KDE desktop too. Zeitgeist is one of the GNOME 3.0 projects and is basically a desktop engine for logging and tagging all sorts of desktop activity from document openings, the web-sites you visit, emails and notes you create, etc. This information is stored on your system in a central database so that via other GNOME applications you can access this data or perform queries to help you in different ways.

Ever since the proposed acquisition of Novell by Attachmate Corporation there has been much curiosity, but almost no information, relating to the other major piece of the deal: the acquisition of 882 patents by a consortium led by Microsoft for $450 million.

You may need to export variables in some circumstances in order to use them. The export command places the variable in the environment. The environment, which is the list of name-value pairs like PATH, is inherited from the parent process. The export command allows the child process to modify the environment.

Today the U.S. Supreme Court agreed to hear Microsoft’s appeal in a case that could make it easier to invalidate a patent. If successful, Microsoft’s challenge should help in the fight against bad patents by leveling the playing field for showing that a patent is invalid. A Microsoft win in the case would benefit not only Microsoft, but also the free and open source software community. That’s why EFF, joined by Public Knowledge, the Computer & Communications Industry Association and the Apache Software Foundation, filed an amicus brief in the Supreme Court supporting Microsoft.

Maybe it's the post-holiday letdown, but looking back on 2010 I'm not sure the open source community has that much to be grateful for this year. Not only have we missed another year for the Linux desktop, but there's been plenty to gripe about in 2010.

Linux came a long way concerning music players in the last couple of years and if in the past there were only few choices for users - XMMS has to be mentioned here - well, now there are so many players to choose from, and if most share the same features, each one provides an alternative by bringing a new feature or a different interface. This I can tell, can satisfy any user's taste. Without further ado, here are no less than 16 graphical music players for Linux.

When Novell first announced that it was being acquired by Attachmate for $2.2 billion, the question of who would retain ownership over Unix copyrights was an open issue. As part of the Novell sale, the company also revealed that it is selling 882 patents to a Microsoft-led technology consortium for $450 million. Potential ownership of Unix by the Microsoft-led group could have led to a new round of patent battles between Microsoft and the open source community. In a terse statement, Novell has now publicly stated that it will not be selling Unix as part of the patent sale.

Most commercial software today depends on open source software. The commercial software might be using an underlying open source platform, or it might be incorporating open source components, or it might be provided as a commercial open source product itself. Whichever the case, the software firm behind the commercial software needs to ensure that its interests are met by the open source software projects it depends on. This article shows how commercial software firms manage or steer open source software projects to meet their business needs.

It’s common to hear commentators and business leaders justifying practices that wouldn’t be recognised as “open source” by many of us on the grounds that they have to make money somehow. Actions that deny the software freedoms of end users – and even developers – appear like a fungus, spuriously justified by the need for profit. Phrases like “we can’t give everything away” garnish the thought, and it’s easy to be drawn into sympathising with them. But they are wrong. Open source itself is not about making money – that’s the job of its participants. Open source is the pragmatic product and projection of software freedom.