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Usenet is a worldwide distributed Internet discussion system. It was founded in 1980 to enable users to read and post public messages to various newsgroups. As such, it predates forums, blogs, instant messaging and P2P networks.

Rooting your Android device is much like jailbreaking an iPhone. Once rooted, you can make your phone run faster, tether it to your computer, tweak hidden settings to your liking, and more. Here's how to do it on your Motorola Droid. Rooting essentially means giving yourself root permissions on your phone. It's the equivalent of running programs as administrators in Windows, or running a command with "sudo" in Linux. There are a number of great reasons to root your Android phone, highest among them being speed (through custom ROMs and through overclocking), tethering, and installing apps and widgets from other builds.

After applications recently started disappearing from the Android Market, Google continued to have reliability issues with the online store as developers over the weekend experienced issues with erroneous download counts. On Saturday, a number of developers started complaining about incorrect download counts on Android Market. The total number of downloads for their respective applications had in some cases dropped by several thousand, developers reported.

The release of FFmpeg 0.5 last March was significant as it was the first official release in quite a while for this popular and widely used free software media program. Fifteen months later, FFmpeg 0.6 has been released with plenty of changes including support for Google's VP8 codec / WebM and improvements for HTML5/H.264 video playback.

I use Ubuntu on all my personal computers and I even recommend it to friends. I am starting to think maybe I shouldn't though, because it is obvious: Ubuntu is harder to use than Windows

In a recent walkthru we outlined the steps for taking an existing server and converting it into a NAS box. That article assumed that you already installed Linux on the server and you will maintain that installation (i.e. updates, security, etc.). This article takes examines an alternative: a dedicated NAS distribution called OpenFiler that allows you to very simply create a stand-alone NAS box that can be administered over the web.

Here are some screenshots of the Slackware based Zenwalk 6.4 GNOME distribution. This quick little distro features many improvements and takes full advantage of GNOME 2.28.2, the Linux kernel 2.6.33.4, features several artwork changes, and more.

It looks like Dell will join Acer and HP in offering netbooks based on Google's Chrome OS sometime this fall. Dell isn't among the official Chrome OS partners named by Google, but as noticed by Download Squad, the code repository for Chromium OS — the open source incarnation of Chrome OS — includes some rather conspicuous bits that point to Dell as an early manufacturer.

If you've ever tried to change system-wide bash settings, you know there are three major ways of invoking bash, all of which behave differently when reading in settings files. 1. Interactive login shell (e.g., when logging in from the console or via ssh) 2. Interactive non-login shell (e.g., when you run bash at a terminal prompt) 3. Non-interactive shell (e.g., to run a shell script).

Ubuntu Netbook Edition (formally netbook remix) is a collection of applications that make Ubuntu more usable on smaller screens. But you don't have to be running a netbook to benefit. This article looks at how to use the best netbook remix features in a standard Ubuntu 10.04 install.

When I said recently that we still need the Open Source Initiative (OSI), it started a flood of comment. There's no doubt that we need OSI - but we need a better OSI. The one we have now is just too small to be effective and too mired in past successes; a renaissance is needed. You can help.

Another shoe has dropped for the SCO Group -- this makes about a dozen -- but when will this outfit go away? First the SCO Group sues IBM for billions in a case related to alleged intellectual property infringement, and then it starts threatening Linux and Linux users. Then, after Novell says that the SCO Group does not have the rights to Unix that it needs to sue and threaten, it sues Novell. Since then it has been mostly downhill for the SCO Group.

"Making significant architectural changes" the official answer. Adobe has discontinued 64-bit Flash 10.1 development for Linux stating that significant architectural changes were being made to the plugin that would add improved security.

When you install the Ubuntu Netbook Edition in October, don’t look for Firefox on the desktop -- it won’t be there. Chromium, Chrome’s open source cousin, is going to be taking its place. After years of desktop dominance on Linux, is Firefox losing its foothold or is this an anomaly?

Twilio Cloud Communications announced the release of OpenVBX, an enterprise telephony solution that provides Google Voice like functionality and scalable performance. Unfortunately Twilio doesn't offer hosting, leaving that up to an admin to decide.

Are you like me and have multiple Ubuntu machines under one roof? Are you tired of downloading the same update multiple times? Sick of what seems to be duplicate work? Let me introduce you to my little friend... squid-deb-proxy.

This article describes how you can monitor your Postfix mailserver with the tools Mailgraph and pflogsumm. Mailgraph creates daily, weekly, monthly, and yearly graphs of sent, received, bounced, and rejected emails and also of spam and viruses, if SpamAssassin and ClamAV are integrated into Postfix (e.g. using amavisd-new). These graphs can be accessed with a browser, whereas pflogsumm ("Postfix Log Entry Summarizer") can be used to send reports of Postfix activity per email.

By utilizing the power of the World Community Grid Cancer research can be dramatically accelerated. The community grid is a sharing of computer resources. You donate not your computer but your systems resources.

I know it sounds crazy but the Linux Desktop isn't dead, it's just pining. It's pining for the correct platform--a tablet computer. And, I'm not referring to some cheap imitation tablet that will merely satisfy a few observers and nerdlets who use Linux. I'm thinking of a tablet computer for hardcore Linux moguls. You know, the kind of Linux person who is so into Linux that he tries to carry an egg on his feet through the winter. The kind of Linux fan who carries a wallet-sized photo of Linus Torvalds in her wallet. Linux pines for a true tablet platform that will do Linux justice and vice versa. Does one exist? Not yet.

Microsoft and Oracle are losing out to Linux and MySQL while cloud computing's not exactly taking off, according to the latest survey of Eclipse users. The number of those building software using a PC running Linux has grown by thirteen percentage points in three years to almost a third, while those using a machine running Windows has dropped by 16 points to 58 per cent since 2007.