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It appears Nokia could be on the verge of dropping Symbian and MeeGo in favor of a new OS, and that could spell trouble for IT departments who are supporting these mobile operating systems.

Less is more. More performance, that is. Learn how to use less of your hard drive (even though you paid for all of it) to get an I/O boost.

Have you ever wondered why Linux systems seem to get hacked so much less than Windows? Here is an excellent example: Imagine for a moment someone at a Windows conference going on for an hour, with source code and subsystem examples, all the ways he could imagine hacking into Windows via the USB system.

At the ShmooCon hacker conference, security expert Jon Larimer from IBM's X-Force team demonstrated that Linux is far from immune from attacks via USB storage devices: during his presentation, the expert obtained access to a locked Linux system using a specially crafted USB flash drive, taking advantage of a mechanism that allows many desktop distributions to automatically recognise and mount newly connected USB storage devices and display the contents of the device, in this case, in the Nautilus file explorer. The desktop will do this even if the screensaver is already active.

In a just released "report card" on the use of open source technology at the federal level, the Defense Department received the highest rating -- 82 percent -- from Open Source for America. "The Department is looking to adopt transparent policies and procedures in line with President Obama's Open Government Directive," said Daniel Risacher, associate director of enterprise services and integration at DoD.

Two well-known members of the free and open source software community have kicked off an initiative to promote women's participation in FOSS technology and culture. Linux kernel developer Valerie Aurora and open source advocate and developer Mary Gardiner are behind the non-profit The Ada Initiative, named for Countess Ada Lovelace, who is acknowledged as both the world's first programmer and open source programmer.

There is only a month to go before the first KDE and Qt conference in India opens. The event will be headlined by three keynotes speakers talking on the effects of technology on culture, the law and what makes our community tick. Talks and workshops have been announced and registration is open for anyone planning to attend. Read on for details. read more

In this tutorial we will show you how to get Pidgin to speak instant messages, notifications ...in Ubuntu using Festival. Festival is a general multi-lingual speech synthesis system that offers a full text to speech system with various APIs

This tutorial shows how to prepare a Debian Squeeze (Debian 6.0) server for the installation of ISPConfig 3, and how to install ISPConfig 3. ISPConfig 3 is a webhosting control panel that allows you to configure the following services through a web browser: Apache web server, Postfix mail server, MySQL, BIND nameserver, PureFTPd, SpamAssassin, ClamAV, and many more.

Geoff Huston is the Chief Scientist at the Asia Pacific Network Information Centre. His frank linux.conf.au 2011 keynote took a rather different tack than Vint Cerf's talk did the day before. According to Geoff, Vint is "a professional optimist." Geoff was not even slightly optimistic; he sees a difficult period coming for the net; unless things happen impossibly quickly, the open net that we often take for granted may be gone forevermore.

A government agency in Norway has reported Sony to the Consumer Ombudsman after floods of complaints over removal of "Other OS" functionality from PlayStation 3 consoles.

Norway's Consumer Council claims Sony breached the Norwegian Marketing Control Act, by withdrawing a key feature after sale. It says Sony's terms of service are unreasonable and leave the consumer without any legal protection.

Systems software maker Novell has announced today a special deal for customers building clusters with its SUSE Linux Enterprise Server. If you cluster servers with the company's High Availability Extensions, you get those extensions for free.

Peppermint Ice is a Linux distribution whose main claim to fame is its use of a 'site-specific browser', dubbed Ice, which is based on Google's Chromium browser. This lightweight Linux distro is designed for netbooks and has a strong focus on Web applications.

There are several commands available on the command line to locate files and folders on the file system. This article reviews three of them, viz whereis ,locate. find.

Wineskin 2.0 wrappers are made from Wineskin Winery, which is also being released in a 1.0 form today! Download Wineskin Winery, and it will handle downloading updates, engines, and even let you use Wine source to make custom engines, as well as creating Wineskin 2.0 wrappers!

Suspend/resume. Or in words that non-geeks can understand, sleeping/waking up. It’s one of those things that not just Linux but also BSD and even Windows have been trying to get right for years.

Last week, I covered OfflineIMAP to sync IMAP for use with Mutt or other applications. Continuing with that theme, I want to talk about another tool I use with Mutt to handle the opposite problem -- actually pushing mail to an SMTP server. Let's take a look at msmtp.

PCLinuxOS has suffered from its share of issues over the years. With difficulties ranging from personnel shake-ups to hosting problems, it seems developing and managing a Linux distribution can be challenging work. Perhaps sometimes it's more trouble than it's worth.

I recently spent some time getting one of my long term projects built. For quite some time I've had an old desktop computer serve as my printer server. As this machine is kind of loud, I've turned it off when not using it. This led to some client machines not appreciating the printer becoming available at the wrong time.

Canonical and Autonomic Resources today announced the availability of an integrated product based on Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud (UEC) and Dell Blade server hardware under the ARC-P cloud product family. ARC-P-UEC is now available for purchase as single sku on Autonomic's GSA Schedule 70 contract. UEC has proved very popular with private companies testing and developing cloud built on their internal servers and data centers. This move makes that same technology available to the federal government and offers the efficiencies of cloud computing to the large-scale, but often budget-restricted, government IT sectors.