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The London Stock Exchange has said its new open source-based trading system will save it at least £10 million annually, as well as driving new business.

Now that Ubuntu founder Mark Shuttleworth is devoting his full energies to desktop design, the changes are coming thick and fast. But are these new designs based on flawed assumptions? Is Ubuntu forking GNOME?

How do you quickly create a spreadsheet where, for example, every other line has a background of a different color? Here are a couple of methods. The first one is faster (and works even in controlled environments where you can't install extensions) if you want white rows alternated with colored ones. The second trick is more flexible, but doesn't refresh coloring when you add or delete rows.

Well it’s often been said that “it never rains but it pours” and that seems very true the about Linux distro releases in the last two weeks.

Google has removed the beta label from the latest version of its Chrome browser, marking the first time a "stable release" is available for the Linux and Mac OS platforms, not just Windows.

Here are some screenshots of the Fedora 13 release using the Gnome(default) desktop environment. The screenshots focus on the new Fedora 13 installer and various areas of the desktop.

The program and schedule for LinuxCon 2010 has been finalized and with the announcement comes news of additional keynote speakers and session details. Representatives from Intel and Nokia will discuss the future of MeeGo in the keynote, "Freedom to Innovate: Can MeeGo's Openness Change the Mobile Industry?"

Novell's openSUSE developers have been a busy bunch this week. Today openSUSE 11.3 milestone 7 is out which is the last stop ahead of a Release Candidate in June and a final release in July. The openSUSE Build Service 2.0 Beta 1 came out yesterday with a final release now set for June 10. The two releases are somewhat linked in a way. The openSUSE Build Service is a really neat offering was first announced back in 2007 and hit its 1.0 release in 2008. What the build service enables is any open source develop to build Linux packages for openSUSE as well as rival distros Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora and Mandriva. The Build Service is also used in the actual building of the openSUSE distribution itself.

User authentication is an important part of many applications. Let's look at how we would utilize third-party authentication methods. oAuth is an open protocol for secure user authentication across APIs. It allows users to gain limited access to websites by using their Twitter credentials. It's a very sound method of user authentication, and doesn't take too much work to get going. Twitter oAuth is used by hundreds of third-party Twitter clients and mashups—just to give you an idea of how useful it can be. In this article we will: * Learn how Twitter oAuth works * Create a library for authentication * Utilize the library in order to create an application to demonstrate how it works

The Free Software Foundation has said it has approached Apple because a GPL2 licensed application, a port of GNU Go, is available from Apple's App Store. The FSF say that distribution through the App Store is not in compliance with the GPL's conditions because they clash with Apple's terms and conditions. The developers of the application, are also not in compliance with the GPL as they do not currently distribute the source for the application. Brett Smith, writing on the FSF blog, is at pains to say that the FSF have not sued Apple or made any legal demand and says the only reason they are announcing this is because Apple has removed applications from the store before without explanation and that they want to prevent wild speculation.

Microsoft have announced two open source projects which are designed to allow developers to work with Outlook's PST file format. One of the projects, PST Data Structure View Tool (PSTViewTool) is a MFC / C++ applications for viewing the data inside the Microsoft email client's data storage. The other project, PST File Format SDK (pstsdk) is a cross platform C++ library for reading that same information.

Maybe I'm being unfair. After all, I have been having networking problems with my Ubuntu 10.04 (Lucid Lynx) virtual machine running in VMware Workstation 7. Seems to be tied to a DNS problem. The VM doesn't pick up the DNS server IPs from the DHCP server on my network (though it gets an IP just fine). I thought the solution was to point to Google's free DNS servers. Worked for awhile, but then stopped. I tried using the DNS servers on my wee home server and DSL modem device and that worked for awhile too, and then stopped.

I mentioned earlier this month that I was enjoying the Starcraft 2 beta on Ubuntu 10.04 thanks to Wine software. In my previous posting I had simply stated that SC2 was "playable" under Wine. I have a fairly powerful gaming laptop that sports an nVidia 260m GTX and a 1680x1050 resolution panel. SC2 defaulted itself under Wine to "ultra" settings on my system.

"Let's get the obvious out of the way, we advocate for computer software users' freedom. Let's look at it mathematically, 'GNU / Linux' means GNU divided by Linux. How does that make any sense? Let's look at it linguistically, to say "GNU slash Linux" isn't the norm, typically when a word uses a slash the slash is not pronounced..."

Novell, promoter of SUSE Linux, is listening to potential takeover bids. Mandriva, promoter of a Linux distribution that has 3 million users, is in discussions with potential investors. As a result, some pundits think Mandriva Linux and Novell SUSE Linux face the similar business challenges. I beg to differ. Here’s why.

HTC dominates the Android phone market but other mobile makers are picking up the Android pace. The majority of Android-based mobile phones released to date have been made by HTC but there are also a number of other Android phones worth considering. We look at some of the alternatives to HTC if you're determined to own an Android phone.

Spring Python offers a clean cut way to take simple applications and split them out between multiple machines using remoting techniques that can be seamlessly injected without causing code rewrite headaches. Spring Python makes it easy to utilize existing technologies, while also being prepared to support ones not yet designed. In this article we will learn how: * Pyro provides a nice Python-to-Python remoting capability to easily create client-server applications * Spring Python seamlessly integrates with Python so that your application doesn't have to learn the API * You can convert a simple application into a distributed one, all on the same machine * It takes little effort to rewire an application by splitting it up into parts, plugging in a round-robin queue manager, and running multiple copies of the server with no impact to our business logic

Users who have bought Nokia's flagship smartphone, the Maemo-based N900, won't be able to upgrade the device to MeeGo, Nokia said in a blog post. The MeeGo OS, merges Intel's Moblin and Nokia's Maemo Linux-based operating systems.

This tutorial shows how to set up a CentOS 5.5 server (x86_64) that offers all services needed by ISPs and web hosters: Apache web server (SSL-capable), Postfix mail server with SMTP-AUTH and TLS, BIND DNS server, Proftpd FTP server, MySQL server, Dovecot POP3/IMAP, Quota, Firewall, etc. This tutorial is written for the 64-bit version of CentOS 5.5, but should apply to the 32-bit version with very little modifications as well. In the end you should have a system that works reliably, and if you like you can install the free webhosting control panel ISPConfig (i.e., ISPConfig runs on it out of the box).

Two exhibitors at the event last weekend showed off open source 3D printers that can build objects based on your instructions, another one introduced 3D design software.