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A group of classical music lovers have successfully appealed for funds to release copyright-free versions of symphonies by four famous composers. The money will pay for an orchestra to record the music on an “all rights basis”. The project, Musopen, aims to deal with a problem caused by the way copyright laws work. Although the actual symphonies written by composers in, for example, the 19th century are long out of copyright, there is separate protection for every individual performance by an orchestra. That means that in most cases, the only recordings currently in the public domain are very old performances generally recorded with poor quality equipment and plagued with hiss and crackle.

This tutorial shows how to set up a standalone storage server on Ubuntu 10.04. Instead of NFS, I will use GlusterFS here. The client system will be able to access the storage as if it was a local filesystem. GlusterFS is a clustered file-system capable of scaling to several peta-bytes. It aggregates various storage bricks over Infiniband RDMA or TCP/IP interconnect into one large parallel network file system. Storage bricks can be made of any commodity hardware such as x86_64 servers with SATA-II RAID and Infiniband HBA.

Warzone 2100 is a free, open-source real-time strategy game available for Linux, Windows and Mac. This game was originally closed-source, developed by Pumpkin Studios and published by Eidos Interactive in 1999, but in 2004 it was officially licensed under the GNU GPL.

If you thought Damn Small Linux or Puppy Linux is small, hold your breath. Tiny Core Linux is a minimalistic GNU/Linux distribution based on Linux kernel 2.6, it comes with graphical environment and provides facility to download and install applications from the Internet and it fits into 10MB of ISO file.

A file archiver is computer software which brings together a group of files into a single archive file. An archive file is therefore a collection of files and directories that are stored in one file. There are many advantages of storing multiple files this way. For example, an archive is a great way to store backup data, transfer files to another directory, or to a different computer. Archive files are often compressed to save disk space and reduce transfer times.

Many have criticized syslog-ng, a replacement for the syslog logging daemon with many additional features, for not being open enough. Syslog-ng has a closed-source commercial version and keeps the entire code base under a single copyright by requiring copyright transfer for contributions, which has been a sore spot in the eyes of many people. This may be part of the cause for syslog-ng failing to become the default system-logging daemon of modern Linux distributions. Now the project seeks to relieve these concerns and attract a wider contributor base with a new licensing model.

GREYC's Magic Image Converter (G'MIC) is a image retouching tool which has been made available as a GIMP plugin. It comes with a large number of pre-defined image filters and effects (more than 190!) and works on Windows, Linux and Mac OSX.

As you guys should know already, Shotwell is now the default photo manager for Ubuntu 10.10 instead of F-Spot. Yorba has released Shotwell 0.7.2 with a number of bug fixes and improvements. The latest update is available via ppa for Ubuntu Lucid and Maverick.

Have you ever thought about measuring the Internet in terms if malware per minute? Me neither, but someone has and it makes for uncomfortable reading if you are a Microsoft Windows user.

[Not exactly FOSS related but of interest to our readers I think. - Scott]

Acer founder Stan Shih, in a talks with reporters on September 8, commented that Apple's strong popularity is mainly due to its products such as iPad and iPhone, and these products are like mutant viruses, which are difficult to find a cure for in the short-term, but he believes that PC vendors will eventually find a way to isolate Apple and become immune. Shih noted that Google's Android operating system is already attracting a lot PC brands to develop related products and this is one of the factors that proves that PC brands will eventually be able to isolate Apple.

First some definitions. In this post let’s define an “open standard” as one that is: 1) freely available, 2) developed in an open process and 3) freely implementable, e.g., is royalty free. I freely acknowledge that there are interests out there that attempt to soften these criteria, but that only demonstrates the competitive power presented by truly open standards. We see similar “dumbing down” pressures on other popular marks of distinction, such as the constant pressure by “big agriculture” to allow more permissive use of pesticides in organic/biologique food. It is almost a law of nature that any item of relative scarcity and value will be counterfeited. Dumbing down definitions is just one way to counterfeit an open standard.

Well, well, well, guess who's back! It's been over seven months since i last published an article here at TuxArena, but now we're back on track and kicking! The series of reviews continues today with an article about one of the most popular audio player out there (and why not admit it, even controversial). I'm talking Amarok here.

A how-to on using FFmpeg to copy audio and video streams from one container to another without re-encoding them. Downloading a video from YouTube is pretty easy these days thanks to various browser extensions; and if the downloaded video is in a .mp4 container, I don’t have do anything since just about any video player, including my 1st generation PopcornHour reads them just fine. But some videos on YouTube are stuffed into .flv containers. So for those videos in .flv format, I want to convert them into .mp4 files at least, or something better. Additionally, for music videos I sometimes want just the audio; so I can play it in my car or with my desktop audio player. So an additional task is to extract just the audio into an audio container. On top of that, I would rather not re-encode the video or audio, I just want to extract it and stick it into a different container.

Nearly 6 years ago when we first started thinking about doing project hosting on code.google.com we noticed something particular about the other open source project hosting sites. They either accepted all Open Source Initiative (OSI) approved licenses, like Sourceforge, or they only accepted one, like the Free Software Foundation's Savannah project, which only accepted GPL'd projects.

Nautilus Terminal is a Nautilus extension which embeds the terminal into the Nautilus window. And just like it is with Dolphin, when you navigate to a different folder, the terminal also "cd"s into that folder.

In the Netherlands virtually every single company uses Windows. Windows is not a very secure Operating System, so everything is bolted down. I cannot install new programs, I cannot kill system processes, I cannot add any buttons or change the menu. The whole thing usually boots from the network. During the day, these are some of the annoyances I have to deal with.

Parrot S.A. is shipping a hackable $300 "quadrocopter" flying drone that runs Linux on a 468MHz ARM9 processor and may be remotely controlled by an iPhone. The AR Drone uses Wi-Fi to receive navigation instructions and transmit video from one of its dual cameras, and it ships with an SDK for developing multiplayer augmented reality games.

Google's Android mobile operating system was designed for smartphones, but it is increasingly being adopted by consumer electronics companies to power a range of new devices, including tablets and e-book readers. As we discovered when we looked at some of the upcoming Android tablet products a few months ago, the platform isn't natively suited for the tablet form factor and will need some refinement in order to deliver a top-notch user experience on devices that aren't smartphones.

On Thurday, September 2 two leading Linux distributions released milestone developmental versions on the road to their next releases. OpenSUSE released Milestone 1 of 11.4 and Ubuntu released a beta of their upcoming 10.10, codenamed Maverick Meerkat, for developers and community testers.

Damn Vulnerable Linux – The most vulnerable and exploitable operating system ever! Damn Vulnerable Linux is the most complete training environment for IT security with over 500.000 downloads. It includes all tools you need ready to go. Additionally tons of training material and exercises are included. Damn Vulnerable Linux works fine under Windows, Linux and Mac OSX using any virtual machine such as VMware, Qemu or KVM. You can let it run installed natively on a standard PC or even boot it from USB.