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FFmpeg can be considered the Swissknife of audio and video applications, with many options and possibilities. You probably already have it installed on your computer as a dependency of a program you use to watch videos or listen to music. In this article we will see some use from the command line without using graphics applications.

Weblog software (also known as blog software) is a type of application which is designed to help users effortlessly create and maintain weblogs.

The Wine development release 1.3.15 is now available. The source is available now, Binary packages are in the process of being built, and will appear soon at their respective download locations.

With the right skin (Simplicity), XBMC Media Center provides a highly polished (second to none) front-end for any media playing computer along with oodles of art, posters, ratings, trailers, lyrics, plot summaries, TV guide like functionality, and so many more bits of supplemental information that I cannot feasibly cover them all here.

Fuduntu 14.9 Release Candidate is ready for testing. We need testers to help validate the updates before pushing them to the stable repository and releasing "stable" media. Lots of cool stuff in this release like kernel 2.6.37.2, new wallpaper, compiz autodetection, AWN, and more.

Red Hat has changed the way it distributes Enterprise Linux kernel code in an effort to prevent Oracle and Novell from stealing its customers, making it more difficult for these competitors to understand which patches have been applied where. Some have speculated that the change is designed to make it harder for Oracle as well as the open source CentOS project to build their own Linux distributions. But Stevens says this is not the case. He says the change is meant to hamper Oracle and Novell's ability to offer support to customers who are already running Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL).

I'll demo how to "Install Windows7 over Ubuntu 11.04 Natty, using KVM with System Disk over VirtIO". Quoting the libvirt wiki "Virtio is a Linux standard for network and disk device drivers where just the guest's device driver "knows" it is running in a virtual environment, and cooperates with the hypervisor. This enables guests to get high performance network and disk operations, and gives most of the performance benefits of paravirtualization"

The economic news today was good: the U.S. unemployment rate is down to 8.9% and hiring is up in the private sector. For those who are looking for an IT position right now there is one thing the improving economy won't help: the sad state of technical recruiting today.

The Linux audio stack is mature now. What is needed now is a realization that your customers want Linux support. Note, the WINE support for Ableton Live is getting solid today, but it does have problems. On the latest Ubuntu, it installs and runs, which is a huge step forward, but it has some perf glitches (some things are very slow), and the audio doesn’t work. With Ableton supporting Linux directly, or via Wine, ideally both, these problems could easily and quickly get fixed. A free / GPL Ableton would be very nice, but a paid-for version of Ableton on Linux enables users to run a free OS, which is even better. Not supporting Linux is damaging to the freedom of Ableton’s customers. If everyone “hates” Microsoft, why isn’t their more support for the alternate? Microsoft continues to win because of the lack of vision or laziness of others.

Debian has better values, being a volunteer-driven project where decisions are taken in the open. In contrast, Ubuntu is a project managed and controlled by Canonical, and recent history has shown that Canonical had no problem imposing some decisions to the developers community

There is a monumental change occurring in the IT market. It is perhaps the biggest change since IBM unintentionally invited Intel and Microsoft to become two of the biggest technology gatekeepers of our time. Of course, every year there is someone proposing a major change in the industry. Trust me, it is really happening this time. The change I am talking about is happening in your pocket, purse, or belt clip. Yes, I am talking about cell phones, which by the way is becoming a really bad description of what these devices do. I probably use my “smart phone” as a talking device about 25% of the time. Then there are those pad things.

Ubuntu Project, through Jason Warner, sent an e-mail a couple of days ago, asking people to submit their feedback about the Unity interface of the upcoming Ubuntu 11.04 (Natty Narwhal) operating system, due for release at the end of April, 2011.

According to the Business Software Alliance, the UK government's new royalty-free standards policy will "inadvertently reduce choice, hinder innovation and increase the costs of e-government." 'Zat so?

By any standard, Debian is the most influential Linux distribution ever. Not everyone uses Debian, but, both alone and second hand through Ubuntu, it is the source of more derivative distributions than any other. How influential is Debian? One indication is that three of the four most frequently downloaded distributions on Distrowatch are based on Debian: Ubuntu, Mint, and Debian itself. Together, these three account for 49% of the top ten downloads. Assuming that these downloads are representative of the interest in Linux, just under half of anybody's experience with the operating system comes through Debian or a distro based on Debian.

Blosxom, PyBlosxom, Nanoblogger — hell, even WordPress and Movable Type are available as Debian packages. I wondered, was I missing other blogging platforms, both flat-file and database-driven? I went to Debian’s web software archive and took a look.

Shortly before the release of the final version of Firefox 4, the Mozilla developers have introduced the "Web Apps" project. These apps are expected to play a major role play in future browsers, and in such a future, the browser will not just be for viewing web pages but will be a platform for locally installed applications. Web Application programmers need do little more than create a manifest; this is a specification which lists the structure and content of the application, and is enough to deploy the app. Applications are able to share resources and will make use of the HTML5 specification for offline caching of these resources by means of the application cache.

For Novell's first fiscal quarter of 2011, which ended on January 31, 2011, Novell reported revenues of $191 million. The first quarter 2011 revenue is a decline of nearly 6 percent from the $202 million in revenues Novell reported for the first quarter of 2010. On the net income side, Novell reported a net loss of $18 million or $0.05 per share which is in stark contrast with the first quarter of 2010 when Novell reported a profit of $20 million. Part of the Novell first quarter 2011 let loss stems from a $31 million tax charge related to Novell bringing non-U.S. cash back into the country. Novell's Linux business held its own during the quarter. Novell's Linux platform products earned $37.8 million in revenue during the quarter, an increase of 0.9 percent on a year-over-year basis.

The executive summary of my review is: from a desktop point of view, this is a release to skip, and I am not talking about the Alpha, but about F15 altogether.

It hasn't been long since we last reviewed Ubuntu Natty Alpha 2 and now, Ubuntu Natty Alpha 3 is already here. This is yet another milestone in this major build up towards the much anticipated release of Ubuntu 11.04 Natty Narwhal final on April 28, 2011. As is expected, latest Ubuntu 11.04 Natty Alpha 3 comes packed with a number of new features and major bug fixes. Quick review of Ubuntu 11.04 Natty Narwhal Alpha 3.

Ubuntu 11.04 'Natty Narwhal' Alpha 3 has been released today that brings many fixes, improvements and new features over the last Alpha 2. For Ubuntu 11.04, a feature freeze is already in place and Alpha 3 is first release after that.