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GCC and GNU Emacs are the two facets of the GNU operating system that have probably done more than any other to take GNU and free software from idealistic concept to a utilitarian reality. Having previously looked at GNU Emacs and the Hurd, Richard Hillesley looks at the history and progress of GCC.

Mozilla has pushed out another alpha version of Firefox for mobile phones, Fennec, and it's inviting Android, and N900, users to have a shot with the little fox. Fennec is the working title for the mobile version of Firefox, incorporating the irritatingly-named "Awesome Bar" and synchronising in real time with its bigger brother. Previous alpha releases of Fennec have only been available for Nokia's N900 internet tablet, with one "pre-alpha" release being built for Android. But now Android users get a proper "alpha" and are invited to download to see what they think.

This patent troll shakedown racket has gotten a lot of press attention over the years; here is a piece I did a few months ago. Unfortunately, there is no end is in sight. Some had hoped that the Supreme Court would find a way to curb the matter in the recent Bilski case. The decision, though, ended up doing no such thing.

Yesterday Red Hat hosted a virtual press conference titled "The Evolution of Cloud Foundations." The press conference served to outline Red Hat's plans for the future of their cloud services and JBoss, but the big announcement was that the company would be open sourcing all of its cloud APIs.

Billionaire Paul Allen, the co-founder of Microsoft, has sued 11 major Web-based companies, including Apple, Google, Facebook, Yahoo, YouTube and eBay, alleging they infringed internet patents he owns.

Since at least 2008, the Btrfs Linux filesystem has been talked about as a next-generation technology one day potentially rivalling or supplanting the current dominant Linux filesystems. According to Chris Mason, founder of the Btrfs effort and now director of software development at Oracle, Btrfs is today generally stable and usable even though it's yet to be finalized.

Tablet fans will be spoilt for choice with a flood of Android tablet PCs heading their way. A year ago netbooks were the one must-have mobile device. This year it is the tablet PC that is an essential accessory. Apple's iPad wasn't the first tablet PC available but it is the best-known of these devices. But it will face stiff competition in the coming months as most hardware makers switch on to Android-based tablet devices.

This morning, I came across two Phoronix articles (here and here) generating some sort of hype with regards to a ZFS port for the Linux kernel, with article headlines as Native ZFS Is Coming To Linux Next Month. My response to this, as I will explain below is: Why?

Early this week Gnash 0.8.8 was released. Despite the small increment in version number, which would make this seem like a minor maintenance release, the difference between version 0.8.8 and the earlier 0.8.7 is like night and day.

The Indian ICT market was hit pretty hard by the global financial crisis. Although the country's tech economy avoided going into a recession, growth fell from around 30 percent in 2008 to just five percent last year. In 2010, a healthy rebound is expected.

When you get serious about creating panoramas on Linux, there's really only one answer: Hugin. Akkana Peck shows us how.

In the computer technology business, we tend to see patents as being bad for developers and business. What we don't realize that the problems we have with Microsoft's bogus patent claims against Linux and Oracle's patent-based attack against Google are nothing compared to the evils that IP patents bring to the pharmacy business. Take, for example, the assault that the Public Patent Foundation (PUBPAT) is now mounting on Abbot Labs. PUBPAT is formally asking the United States Patent and Trademark Office to reexamine eight Abbot patents relating to the critical HIV/AIDS drug Ritonavir, aka Norvir.

Seventeen new beautiful wallpapers and a lightweight and eye-candy theme will please every existing and future Ubuntu 10.10 users!

Guayadeque is a relatively new music player for Linux. It comes with a huge amount of features yet its pretty light, even with a huge music collection. Here are the highlights of Guayadeque 0.2.7: libre.fm support, the last.fm panel can now search for tracks in your library, implemented reading/writing images into m4a files, a file browser (play files by browsing them on your HDD), record from streams and many more new features and tweaks.

Project management and task scheduling made easy, from small teams to massive organisations. Join Richard Smedley as he demonstrates the power of Feng Office in this excellent step-by-step guide…

would like everyone to watch tridge's talk on patents and how engineers can interact efficiently with patent lawyers, to get your knowledge across to them. More formats are linked from End Software Patents, if you prefer audio only. Focus, please, also on what he's learned about patents, how to invalidate them in various ways, especially the part about proving non-infringement and why that is easier than proving prior art, and then the part about finding a workaround and then publicizing it. He shows how to read a patent filing document. You guys have been effective already in the past in finding prior art, but he is raising the bar with more techniques.

A few weeks ago I was living in accommodation that provided internet access via a wired router. This obviously meant no wireless access for some of my devices. This was especially bad for my Nexus One phone which because of the lack of wireless received all data via mobile network causing me to go over my fair usage policy! Also have you ever tried sharing one ethernet cable with your girlfriend/boyfriend, it doesn’t work. This was quite irritating so I decided I would try to turn my netbook into a wireless access point (AP).

How to install Ubuntu Tweak 0.5.6 beta in ubuntu 10.04/9.10. Ubuntu Tweak is an application to config Ubuntu easier for everyone.It provides many useful desktop and system options that the default desktop environment doesn’t provide.With its help, you will enjoy with the experience of Ubuntu!

Prior to the emergence of Btrfs as a viable next-generation Linux file-system, Sun's ZFS file-system was sought after for Linux due to its advanced feature-set and capabilities compared to EXT3 and other open-source file-systems at the time. While ZFS support has worked its way into OpenSolaris, FreeBSD, NetBSD, and other operating systems, ZFS had not been ported to Linux as its source-code is distributed under the CDDL license, which is incompatible with the GNU GPL barring it from integration into the mainline Linux kernel. Next month, however, a working ZFS module for the Linux kernel without a dependence on FUSE will be publicly released.

The phrase "A picture is worth a thousand words" refers to the idea that a solitary still image can provide as much information as a large amount of descriptive text. Essentially, pictures convey information more effectively and efficiently than words can.