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Sometimes you just have to get excited about what you can buy, hold in your hand, and use in your home machines. Let's look at some cool storage technology that the average desktop user can tackle.

For many individuals, computer gaming is nowadays an essential part of everyday life. This should not be seen as a negative. Whilst violent computer games have sometimes been identified as contributory factors in criminal activity, and undeniably they can be very addictive, it is important to recognise the real benefits that games offer besides simply providing a means of great entertainment.

Linux continues to invade the scalable computing space and, in particular, the scalable storage space. A recent addition to Linux's impressive selection of file systems is Ceph, a distributed file system that incorporates replication and fault tolerance while maintaining POSIX compatibility. Explore the architecture of Ceph and learn how it provides fault tolerance and simplifies the management of massive amounts of data.

The Bordeaux Technology Group released Bordeaux 2.0.4 for FreeBSD and PC-BSD today. Bordeaux 2.0.4 is a maintenance release that fixes a number of small bugs. With this release we have changed the Bordeux UI from a GTKDialog to a GTKWindow, the "OK" button has also been re-named to "Install". We have upgraded our Wine bundle from 1.1.36 to 1.1.41, updated to the latest winetricks release, added support for the new Steam UI, and changed the progress bar back to Zenity.

I like the brand spanking new Ubuntu 10.04 a lot. But while I like its GNOME 2.30 interface, I also like other interfaces such as KDE. It would be nice if Ubuntu could also play MP3s, common video formats and Flash from the get-go. You could install all these and other extras from the Ubuntu repositories, but there's also a wide-variety of Ubuntu spin-offs that come ready to give you the functionality you want right out of the box.

Ever wanted to instantly have Drupal, Moodle, OTRS, MySQL, WordPress, Zimbra, Bugzilla, phpBB or a slew of other open source software packages up an running in a hassle-free manner to try out or available for rapid deployment? TurnKey Linux gives you just that.

A reader, Steve Hampson, suggested another solution to the backspace/delete terminal problem: Try typing stty dec on the offending terminal. Unfortunately, this doesn't work in my case. I had a look into stty to see if I could work out what was going on.

Anyone who knows me will have heard me rant about the poor state of music software, particularly for Linux. There seem to be two types of music players out there: the tiny ones that don’t get in your way but often lack important playlist features or format support, and the monstrous software beasts that drag your system to a halt and insist on “importing” the files you’ve already organized. I had been stewing over this for years, and nearing the point of writing my own, when I found Exaile – a GTK music program originally modeled after KDE’s Amarok. This may be the first music player since Winamp 2.95 that I don’t despise, and here’s why.

The jury verdict last Friday in favor of Red Hat and Novell in a case based on bad software patents owned by "non-practicing entities" is an important victory for the open source community. Those in the business of acquiring bad software patents to coerce payments or bring lawsuits should be worried. Two such businesses were plaintiffs in our case, and they did their best to confuse the jury in one of their favorite locales, eastern Texas. But it didn't work. The jury unanimously found that the patents were not infringed, and, even worse for the plaintiffs, that the patents were invalid.

Sony Computer Entertainment America (SCEA) faces a class action lawsuit following a recent an update to its PlayStation 3 console that removes the ability to put alternate operating systems on the console. The late March update for the PlayStation 3 restricts the installation of an alternative operating system to the console's native OS. The feature, called 'Install Other OS,' has been removed, three years after the console's introduction, "due to security concerns," the company said in a blog post.

In this article series by Reynante Martinez, we will learn how to go about creating a underwater scene from scratch. We will begin by creating the terrain for the underwater environment. In the sequel of the article, we will learn how to add vegetation, pebbles and corals. After which we will discuss how to add distant terrains, lighting effects and finally composition.

A new beta build of VirtualBox, ... free x86 virtualization software, makes it possible to run Mac OS X as a guest operating system…no shenanigans or flaming hoops to jump through, just pop in the $30 retail Snow Leopard upgrade disc and go.

Yes, Riverbed in some ways leverages open source and also contributes some testing components back. One of their bigger open source projects is something that internally carries the codename of 'Flamebox'.

This tutorial shows how you can set up an Ubuntu 10.04 (Lucid Lynx) desktop that is a full-fledged replacement for a Windows desktop, i.e. that has all the software that people need to do the things they do on their Windows desktops. The advantages are clear: you get a secure system without DRM restrictions that works even on old hardware, and the best thing is: all software comes free of charge.

Tony is going to host audio tutorials and podcasts that are relevant for the blind using Linux: follow his guidelines and you'll produce audio tutorials very useful for all potential Linux users, not just those with vision problems!

It finally happened. I have a Starcraft2 closed beta key! What feels like decades ago now I had applied for a Starcraft2 beta key on Battle.net and had all but given up hope after many months of waiting when a friend was kind enough to give me one of his invite passes. I entered the key into my account and was thoroughly excited when I saw the beta appear in my downloads.

Firefox is the most popular and widely used free software application and boasts more than a billion downloads and more than 350 million users. The H discusses its history, present and future with Mitchell Baker, chair of the Mozilla Foundation.

There has been some debate about which platform represents the sweet spot for Android? Is it best suited as a smart-phone? Can Android dominate the netbook market? Maybe it can excel in the mid-market as a flexible and capable touch-tablet?

The RadeonHD Linux driver that came about in 2007 following the announcement of AMD's open-source driver strategy has had an interesting history. This driver was developed by Novell's developers, but now they are even dropping it from their openSUSE distribution.

At a US federal court in Marshall, Texas, Red Hat and Novell have won a legal victory in a dispute that started in 2007 about intellectual property rights. The jury found that several of the charges brought against the two Linux distributors by patent licensing firms were unfounded. As Red Hat announced on Friday, the patents were found to be "invalid and worthless." The jury found that the three patents were not "important inventions" as had been claimed.