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It's a remarkable success story. Less than two years ago Nokia's Symbian and Windows Mobile ruled the smartphone market and Google was just a search engine, albeit a very popular one. Today Google's Android operating system is one of the most popular smartphone operating systems and has already taken a significant chunk out of Symbian's market share.

Nokia, with the Mobile Runtime for Java Applications (JRT), is enabling development of Java applications for Symbian 3 devices, Nokia officials said Thursday. The company recently contributed JRT to the Symbian Foundation. JRT is available as part of the latest Symbian 3 Product Development Kit, also detailed this week.

If you haven't gotten our subtle hints during the past year or so, IRC certainly is not dead. It really is the best way to get knowledgeable support from the folks who know best. There are a few caveats, however, that may not be obvious to people new to this old-school chat protocol.

Battle beyond Windows, Jobs, and Linux Open...and Shut The desktop is dead. Just ask Microsoft and Apple. Or, better yet, ask Facebook and Google. Sure, we still use our desktops and laptops, mostly Windows PCs and Macs. What else would we use to draft our faxes? But the industry has moved on, and the petty squabbles over Windows vs. Mac vs. Linux no longer resonate like they once did. The twentieth-century desktop has given way to a new breed of "desktop" platform. It's called the web. Have you heard of it?

Reprieved from financial troubles with fresh investments, Mandriva released the final Mandriva Linux 2010 Spring. The latest stable release is touted for offering faster boot times, enhanced "Smart Desktop" file-organization technology, easier printer and wireless configuration, and updates including GNOME 2.30.1 and KDE 4.4.3, says Mandriva.

Linux is blessed with several different package managers, so using a different distribution often means learning a different way to install, update, and remove software. Use Juliet Kemp's handy package manager cheatsheet to get going with a minimum of fuss.

I return to the topic of "learning how to program" every now and again because I haven't found a truly painless way of teaching programming to people who aren't naturally wired for it. I don't know if Processing is the answer, but it sure seems to be in the running. It has the benefit of being an open source program written to appeal to graphic designers who need or want to learn programming. Let me explain.

Pinta is a drawing/editing program modeled after Paint.NET. Pinta is pitched as a simplified alternative to GIMP for casual users. It is still undergoing rapid development and latest Pinta 0.4 was released a few days ago with a number of major improvements and bug fixes.

I'm very excited to announce I have just landed support for downloading and importing your Amazon MP3 purchases into Banshee. It is a simple extension that understands the download queue file that Amazon delivers after a purchase is made. Linux Desktop integration is provided so that your web and file browsers associate Banshee with the download queue file.

While we all have our own reasons for liking Linux and open source, here are my top five (and a half!) reasons why, as a power user, I prefer to use Linux. You’ll notice that these reasons are quite a bit different from why I think Ubuntu makes a great operating system for Mom, which just goes to show how versatile Linux can be.

Ubuntu community leader and Server and Cloud Ubuntu Developer, Dave Walker, explains the processes behind bringing Maverick Meerkat to the masses…

iRedMail is a shell script that lets you quickly deploy a Open Source Mail Server solution in less than 2 minutes. iRedOS is a customized CentOS 5.5 distribution, where e unnecessary packages were removed. It ships with the lastest version of iRedMail (iredmail0.6.0); it lets you install iredmail more quickly and smooth.

A hybrid engine that runs on gas and electricity. A football star who plays both defense and offense. A politician who understands social justice and capitalistic expansion. These anomalies are rare, but in the world of tech, they are almost unknown entities. For anyone who owns a Mac, it might seem a bit odd to think you can run both the Mac OSX and Windows, and switch effortless between them.

Amarok is a popular and powerful media player that is built on top of KDE libraries. This doesn't mean Ubuntu users are left out though - this article will show you how to make Amarok play nice in a Ubuntu environment.

The first article in this series showed how to use Hadoop in a single-node cluster. This article continues with a more advanced setup that uses multiple nodes for parallel processing. It demonstrates the various node types required for multinode clusters and explores MapReduce functionality in a parallel environment. This article also digs into the management aspects of Hadoop—both command line and Web based.

The GNU GPL depends on copyright to work. So what would happen if copyright were abolished? Would that mean that free software also disappears? Richard Stallman thinks not - and has a plan.

Let’s say you are doing research on your desktop browser and you need to leave your computer to run some errand. Wouldn’t it be great if you can sync what you are reading to your mobile phone so that you can continue your research on the move? If you are using an Android phone (running Froyo) and Google Chrome/Firefox, you just got yourself a great deal.

The GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) project occupies a unique niche in the free software community. As Richard Stallman is fond of reminding us, much of what we run on our systems comes from the GNU project; much of that code, in turn, is owned by the Free Software Foundation. But most of the GNU code is relatively static; your editor wisely allowed himself to be talked out of the notion of adding an LWN weekly page dedicated to the ongoing development of GNU cat. GCC, though, is FSF-owned, is crucial infrastructure, and is under heavy ongoing development. As a result, it will show pressures that are only seen in a few places. This article will look at a couple of recent episodes, related to licensing and online identity, from the GCC community.

Android has continued to gain smartphone OS market share this spring, gaining four percentage points from February through May to take 13 percent of the market, says ComScore. Meanwhile, a recent Pew report shows that 40 percent of Americans are now using mobile phone Internet services, up from 32 percent in 2009.

A flaw in the module pam_motd (message of the day), which displays the daily motto and other information after login (to the shell), can be exploited under Ubuntu to expand access rights. Attackers can exploit this vulnerability to gain root access. Ubuntu has already provided a patch for the flaw. Operators of multi-users systems should install it as soon as possible because directions are already in circulation via Twitter on how to exploit the flaw to get access rights to the password file /etc/shadow. The file can then not only be read, but changed.