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The tech industry loves a good vendor slugfest, and the upcoming legal battle between Google and Oracle has all the makings of a truly spectacular one. At issue is Dalvik, the unique, Java-based runtime at the heart of Google's Android smartphone OS. Oracle, which gained stewardship of the Java platform when it bought Sun Microsystems in 2009, claims Dalvik knowingly, willfully, and deliberately infringes on Java intellectual property. According to a complaint filed with the U.S. District Court in San Francisco last week, Oracle is seeking a halt to any further Android development, destruction of all infringing Android software, and for Google to pay damages, both actual and statutory.

LinuxCertified,Inc. a leading provider of Linux training, will offer Linux system administration bootcamp on September 1 - 2, 2010 near San Francisco (South Bay). This workshop is designed for busy information technology professionals and is designed to cover the most important Linux administration areas. All attendees get a free Linux laptop.

At my place of work, we use a Java-based trouble-ticketing system from Atlassian called Jira. It is hosted on a LAMP server virtual machine in our production VMware environment. The system has been in daily use (well, week day use) since near the end of 2008 - requiring minimal maintenance in that time (the occasional reboot after security updates have been installed). Up until yesterday, we had been using Ubuntu 8.04 LTS Server. I decided it was time to move to the latest LTS release - 10.04 - which was released earlier this year and had just received it's first .1 refresh.

Canonical have just released a video trailer of the forthcoming Ubuntu Unity interface for netbook computers. Impressive stuff…

We introduced to you guys probably the best combination of gtk theme and icon set for Ubuntu/Gnome[Equinox gtk theme + Faenza icon theme]. Now take a look at Awoken icon theme. I won't say it is better than Faenza icon theme, but it is almost as good.

Some Linux design decisions seem like hangovers from Windows-land. But, unlike Windows, Linux does not need to be protected from itself, so why hang on to old habits?

I use Audacity for podcast audio capture and production on a variety of platforms, and the speed with which my new Lenovo G555 (AMD Athlon II at 2.1 GHz) mixes down to MP3. I can't remember adding the LAME package from RPMFusion, but I must have done that because I tested that feature before I needed to edit a podcast and all was working fine. What I forgot to test was the ability of Audacity in Fedora 13 to import MP3 audio,

The Wine development release 1.3.1 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.

In order to get a sense of the popularity of various Linux distributions over the past several years, we entered their names into Google’s search insights tool and grabbed Google’s “embed code” for the resulting graphs. The graphs display some fascinating trends and bode well for the future of Linux.

French robotics specialist Gostai has announced that its advanced Urbi robotics operating system is now available as open source. The robotics platform is compatible with Linux, Windows and several real-time operating systems and uses a new orchestration script language called urbiscript that natively integrates parallelism and event-based programming. Note: The Urbi community portal is located here.

System Administrators are always in need of applications to remotely monitor their networks, administer the servers, and get stats. The Android smart phone comes to the rescue with an enormous number of such remote apps to help the administrator remotely access his system. Seven of the best android apps for system administrators follow.

I’ve been using the drop down terminal Guake for some years now. It has become an indispensable tool that I cannot imagine being without.

AMD continues to abide by their commitment to provide open-source support for their graphics cards and as proof of that this afternoon they have released their initial hardware acceleration code that supports the ATI Radeon HD 5000 "Evergreen" family of consumer grade graphics processors. While this Evergreen support isn't yet finished and for the time being is targeted towards Linux developers and enthusiasts, you can now play around with your ATI Radeon HD 5000 graphics processor on an open-source driver while having 2D EXA, X-Video, and OpenGL acceleration.

In my posts 11 Techy Things for Teachers to Try This Year and How To Do 11 Techy Things In the New School Year I mentioned podcasting and video creation. When creating podcasts and videos adding music and other sounds can enhance your students' presentations. Here are seven tools that your students can use find and or create sounds for their multimedia presentations.

[I am working on my Education degree and came across this. Its aimed at Teachers but I thought royalty free stuff would be of interest to our readers. - Scott]

Google Docs is a great online office suite, and the fact that it allows collaboration has made it quite popular. Make it even better by integrating these services straight into your Ubuntu desktop…

If you've been wanting to use voice and video chat on Linux (our top video chat request), then we have good news for you: it's now available! Visit gmail.com/videochat to download the plugin and get started. Voice and video chat for Linux supports Ubuntu and other Debian-based Linux distributions, and RPM support will be coming soon.

Recent discussions around the so-called “Open Core” model for open source have been remarkable for a couple of reasons. First, because not content with one burst of feverish blogging and counterblogging, people came back for more, responding to a separate post about business models with yet more arguments and counter-arguments on the subject of Open Core. Secondly – and perhaps more remarkably – those discussions ultimately led to an entirely fresh thought: that we are about to enter a new phase in open source business, one that places community and collaboration at its heart.

I've been working as a freelancer for almost a year now, and I cannot help noticing how free software helps making this possible. Working in an international setting, most of the work is done from my home office. This requires techniques to get the work done. Small motivational "rewards" (or really fun customer assignments so that one forgets lunch...) The other half is the communication with the customers itself. This is where free software enters the picture.

A check over at Planet Debian revealed a lot of chatter about Debian's 17th birthday. I'd like to take this opportunity to thank everyone involved in the Debian Project, past and present, for providing a distribution that has been invaluable to me since I began using Linux in 2007. Debian consistently runs on more machines — and runs better — than just about anything else out there.

This how-to describes the process of setting up an intranet based print server using Ubuntu server. By using CUPS SAMBA and SWAT the final product is a webgui based solution to a headless print server.