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Anybody running Debian Squeeze whose desktop-base package has updated in recent days might notice a change in the wallpaper on their Grub 2 screen as they boot up. Previously the Debian logo in the lower right side of the Grub screen tended to cover up the portion of the boot message that tells you how many seconds are left until the machine boots automatically.

Walmart lost interest in GNU/Linux on netbooks for some reason but welcomes it again on tablets. Funny how that works, eh? Small cheap computers and GNU/Linux go together well, that other OS does not fit and M$ cannot justify tinkering with the market. Chuckle.

The move to cloud-based infrastructure is one that is set to dominate networking discussions in 2011. One of the leaders in the move to cloud is networking giant Cisco (NASDAQ:CSCO), which provides servers, routing and switching infrastructure that enables cloud computing deployments.

Changing GDM/Login Screen background image and theme was one of the easiest thing to do in Ubuntu just two releases ago. It all came to an abrupt end since the release of latest GDM version. Changing theme is still so very difficult, but there is an easier way to change GDM background image in Ubuntu.

Smartphones are now an essential business tool and there are hundreds of applications to choose from. Smartphones are a key part of any businessperson's gadget lineup and Android-based phones are among the most popular. We look at some of the best Android applications on offer.

Here is the guide on installing Firebird 2.5 from FreeBSD 8.1 Ports and creating your first test database also we show you howto install Flamerobin GUI (administation tool) and the PHP driver for it .

Google is allegedly mulling a periodical publication push for Android smartphones and tablets to challenge Apple's iTunes store for its iPad magazine and newspaper apps. The planned digital newsstand for Android, which follows up on Google's recently announced Google eBookstore, will offer more favorable terms to publishers than does Apple, says an industry report.

There are 7 Linux file types: regular files, directories, character device files, block device files, domain sockets, named pipes and symbolic links. This tutorial explains each with illustrations.

2010 was another exciting year for the Linux kernel and its community. Over the course of four kernel releases and many tens of thousands of mailing list messages, over one thousand individual developers (some working alone, some working for corporations) contributed two new architectures, several new file systems, and drivers for key hardware in the form of the Nouveau Nvidia driver (produced independently of Nvidia) and an open source Broadcom driver for its recent Wi-Fi chips. Of course, many more features were added, too…

2010 was the year in which Linux took over. Not that many people will have noticed. As far as media coverage goes, 2010 doesn't appear to have been the best year for Linux. In years gone by it was common to see headlines proclaiming this or that government to be moving to Linux, or this or that company switching to free software. Not so in 2010, where tech media was dominated by tablet PCs, web applications and mobile phones.

For the first time in a decade, Microsoft’s Internet Explorer is no longer the leading Web browser in Europe, ceding the top position to Mozilla’s Firefox, an Irish research firm that tracks Web-surfing activity said Tuesday. While three other research firms also active in the field disputed the finding, StatCounter, a company in Dublin, said Firefox surpassed Internet Explorer as the top European browser in December, with a 38.1 percent share, compared with Explorer’s 37.5 percent.

Thanks for the link Herschel - Scott

Matthias Klose announced yesterday, January 3rd, some details regarding the replacement of the old OpenOffice.org 3.2.1 packages with the new LibreOffice 3.3 ones, starting with the upcoming Ubuntu 11.04 (Natty Narwhal) Alpha 2 release.

Cloud computing is the hot buzz phrase. But as both Shawn Powers and I have pointed out, cloud computing is not a new technology, or even a new implementation of new technology. But that does not mean it is well understood, either by those who are designing or those who are crying out for it as they follow the yellow-brick road (or the latest issue of PC Week). As several Anonymous (and not so anonymous) commentators have said, there is a lot more to cloud computing then just hardware, some good data links and some smart coding.

gImageReader is a graphical GTK frontend to tesseract-ocr, a free software optical character recognition (OCR) engine.

Last week we learned that Yum supports a robust ecosystem of plugins, and how to find and manage them. Today we look at some good Yum plugins for security, and managing package priorities.

This two-day introduction to Linux broadens attendees horizons with a detailed overview of the operating system. Attendees learn how to effectively use a Linux system as a valuable tool. They get familiar with the architecture and various components of the operating system, learn both graphical and command line tools, and learn to do basic networking. This class is scheduled for January 11th - 12th, 2011.

In a seemingly short period of time, JavaScript has gone from a form-validation tool to a game changer. Having my head buried into SDK development for a number of years, I have taken relatively small notice of JavaScript until this past 18 months. It’s no longer just a scripting language for pulling off Web2.0 tricks but a mainstream language for building full-blown applications.

With the recent announcement that the Russian government will mandate A shift from Microsoft to Linux by 2015. I started thinking about what the Russians will do if they have some Windows Applications that don't have Linux equivalents at this time.

It may be somewhat ironic that the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office published in the last week of 2010, a year with a boat load of questionable patent filings and approvals, a patent application from IBM, which automates the management of intellectual property and comes with a “defend” module to formulate a strategy in the case of patent infringement.

As illustrated today by the release of Intel's "Sandy Bridge" CPUs there is a new desire by Linux users: open-source drivers "out of the box" at launch. Over the years the expectations of Linux users have gone from simply wanting Linux drivers for their hardware to wanting open-source Linux drivers (read: no binary blobs) to now wanting open-source drivers in the distribution of their choice at the time the hardware first ships. This is a great problem to now be experiencing, as since starting Phoronix seven years ago, the Linux hardware experience has improved a great deal where it's no longer a question if there will be Linux support but when. Some hardware vendors, such as Intel, are now working towards this goal of same-day open-source Linux support -- and in some cases achieving it -- but for open-source Linux drivers for graphics it's a particularly tall hurdle to jump.