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For those of you who ave ever tried Linux Mint, a distro which is run off the back of Ubuntu, you will have noticed that it has it’s own special and somewhat unique gnome menu to select your applications to run, folders to browse etc

"If you don't like Windows so much then don't use it!" This is something I have been told more than once (sometimes in not those kind of words) by various people when we have been discussing operating systems. As much as I would like to take their suggestion, the fact is I can't.

Simon thinks that having consumer-friendly standards is a good and useful thing. Hardware manufacturers, for different reasons, tend to agree. Join this Linux User & Developer columnist on a journey through proprietary hell...

When you buy an ebook using your Kindle, there’s a 99% chance it’s a DRM file. That means you won’t be able to read it anywhere else but on your Kindle. And we won’t accept that. To be able to convert that file and remove its DRM protection, you need a set of Python scripts called MobiDeDRM.

After 2 long years, Google finally releases Google Voice and Video Chat for Linux err.. not entirely though. Only a DEB package is available now. And hence only Debian based distros like Ubuntu can enjoy the merits of these changes for now.

Much of the focus of desktop Linux, and regrettably even Linux in the data center, is a slow and steady migration away from the command line towards GUI tools and interfaces. While this is great news for the Linux and open source community at large, many basic Unix skills get overlooked by new users. Back when I was first indoctrinated into the mysteries of Unix, the guru I studied under scoffed at my reliance on the tools available in Mandrake to build a LAMP server. "Why don't you build it like you know what you're doing?" He would ask. "Why don't you build it with OpenBSD?"

A version of Flash is being built using Java, two years after Adobe Systems opened the player's closed formats to external inspection. Programmer Joa Ebert has demonstrated a Java build of Flash executing SWF. The player is apparently called JITB, and it was recently unveiled at an event in San Francisco.

In the previous articles, Getting Started with Blender’s Particle System and Getting Started with Blender’s Particle System- A Sequel, we discussed about the general usage and concepts behind Blender's Particle System and found some cool ways to extend it further. We also discussed several types of the particle system as well as some practical results that can be derived from it like: dust, smoke, fire/flame, bubbles, rock slide animation, and hair/fur/grass.

The days of DIY system administration are rapidly coming to a close. Why? Because the open source tools available are just too good not to use. Presenting Bcfg2, Cfengine, Chef and Puppet. This summer the USENIX 2010 conference in Boston hosted the first Configuration Management Summit on automating system administration using open source configuration management tools. The summit brought together developers, power users and new adopters.

Google is now allowing developers to upload applications to the as-yet-un-open Chrome Web Store, an online gallery of web applications and web extensions for the company's Chrome browser and its upcoming Chrome OS operating system. "Developers can now start uploading apps and experiment with packaging them, installing them in Chrome...and integrating our payments and user authentication infrastructure," the company said in a blog post.

Despite the fact that open source has specialty label-and-business-card programs, most users are going to continue to create their documents in the word processor they feel most comfortable with like OpenOffice.org Writer. It is a good choice; it provides design wizards that simplify creating print-ready documents for standard label templates, and OpenOffice’s mail merge backend is quite powerful

The Linux kernel has potentially been at risk from a flaw that has been present in Linux since 2003, according to a new finding from security researcher Invisible Things Lab. And while the flaw has now been patched in the mainline Linux kernel, it's not clear yet if all Linux distros have implemented the patch -- potentially leaving them open to exploitation by attackers.

One of the things about the Android platform that appeals to many in the Linux community is the fact that it's based extensively on open source, Oracle lawsuits notwithstanding. The primary way to write applications for an Android-based phone is still Java. Google provides a Software Development Kit (SDK) with all the documentation, libraries and tools you need. There's even an add-on for the open-source Eclipse Integrated Development Environment (IDE) to help you along.

This collection of words is a bit of a rant, I'm afraid. It's about what some call preaching to the choir or more specifically, not preaching to the choir. The Ubuntu Linux crowd prides itself on being a glowing example of the Free Software community at work. Actually, the Free Software community as a whole prides itself on being a model of the ultimate distributed work group, having, through its collective talents, created the greatest operating system of all time, including the software that runs on that OS. I'm only exaggerating a little tiny bit. But I digress . . .

Back in July we reported on the 0 A.D. game going open-source, an OpenGL real-time strategy title that had been in development for nearly a decade but hadn't yet had a stable release so the decision was made to take the game open-source in hopes of spurring new development efforts. Well, just a little over a month after that announcement, the first alpha release of 0 A.D. is now available.

The Linux community had two birthdays to celebrate recently. Debian GNU/Linux turned 17 on August 16 and openSUSE has been providing an excellent desktop Linux for five years.

Is Oracle starting to show its true feelings for open source software? It's taken a few months but the effects of Oracle buying Sun Microsystems are starting to become obvious. And among them are a series of blows for open source software.

After the release of the Ubuntu Multi-Touch stack called UTouch and the X.Org Gesture Extension, the rising question would be the support of everyday applications, as only a few applications in Ubuntu 10.10 will properly support UTouch. Standard applications which are non-multi-touch-aware only recognize events which come from the keyboard and the mouse like key-presses and mouse clicks.

This tutorial describes the installation of an ISPConfig 3 multiserver setup with dedicated web, email, database and two DNS servers all managed trough a single ISPConfig 3 control panel. The setup described below uses five servers and can be extended easily to to a higher number of servers by just adding more servers. E.g. if you want to have two mailservers, do the setup steps from chapter 2 on both of these servers. If you want to set up more web servers, then install ISPConfig on all other web servers in expert mode except of the first one.

In this article, by Martin Brampton author of PHP 5 CMS Framework Development, we get into the detailed questions involved in providing continuity for people using our websites. Almost any framework to support web content needs to handle this issue robustly, and efficiently. In this article, we will look at the need for sessions, and the PHP mechanism that makes them work. There are security issues to be handled, as sessions are a well known source of vulnerabilities. Search engine bots can take an alarmingly large portion of your site bandwidth, and special techniques can be used to minimize their impact on session handling.