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The GNU project developed some of the 21st century's most important software. The GNU Compiler Collection is used on Linux systems, BSD/OSX systems, and on Windows. GNAT has, for the most part, replaced any other Ada compiler ever created. The list could go on, but you get the idea. The sad thing about GNU is that it is so ideologically bent that I can no longer support it.

This guide explains how to integrate eAccelerator into PHP5 and lighttpd on an OpenSUSE 11.2 system. From the eAccelerator project page: "eAccelerator is a free open-source PHP accelerator, optimizer, and dynamic content cache. It increases the performance of PHP scripts by caching them in their compiled state, so that the overhead of compiling is almost completely eliminated. It also optimizes scripts to speed up their execution. eAccelerator typically reduces server load and increases the speed of your PHP code by 1-10 times."

Light Leaks are a product of film in the camera being exposed due to a hole/gap in the cameras body letting in light. It is sometimes used aesthetically in photographs creating a sense of vividness or soft blurs of colour – usually red. In this tutorial I’ll show you how to create these light leaks in the GIMP!

Security company Qualys has released a new open source tool, 'BlindElephant', which can accurately fingerprint web applications down to version level in order to better manage the security issues which now plague such software. According to the company, the need for such a tool is pressing. Web applications, including open source apps, are a huge area of potential vulnerability for most organisations and the reason is that it is difficult to assess what is running on a website and to what version number.

Once thought to be unhackable, the Android phone is anything but, according to researchers presenting at Black Hat 2010. Not only has malicious software cloaked in a wallpaper application stolen personal information from infected phones and sent it to a Web site in China, but researchers from Lookout Mobile Security have found a way to take the phones over completely - including top-of-the-line models hawked by major wireless carriers.

The Justice Department said on Thursday it sued Oracle Corp, alleging it defrauded the federal government on a software contract in effect from 1998 to 2006 that involved hundreds of millions of dollars in sales.

Oracle today announced Dell and HP will certify and resell Oracle Solaris, Oracle Enterprise Linux and Oracle VM on their respective x86 platforms. Customers will have full access to Oracle's Premier Support for Oracle Solaris, Oracle Enterprise Linux and Oracle VM running on Dell and HP servers. This will enable fast and accurate issue resolution and reduced risk in a company's operating environment.

I was really pleased to read the announcement that Lockheed Martin’s social networking platform, EurekaStreams, was released as an open source project today. Lockheed is a very conservative company, and while they’re happy to use open source internally and on projects for their customers, this is their first experiment with actually running a project themselves. I think it’s a big deal, not just for Lockheed Martin, but for large corporations who are considering a more open, more innovative approach to software development.

Do you remember the Frankencamera? The API used for the Frankencamera has been released for the Nokia n900 Phone, making the phones camera programmable.

Amazon announced a third generation of its Linux-based Kindle e-reader, featuring a lighter and smaller body, a screen claimed to have 50 percent better contrast, and a battery life of up to one month. Still available with 3G, the device is also offered in a Wi-Fi-only version that includes a WebKit-based browser, the company says.

A happy customer might tell someone. An unhappy customer tells everyone. Converting to Linux before taking a dose of reality might make you a very unhappy customer. Let's be perfectly honest. Linux isn't for everyone-yet. However, Ubuntu, Mandriva, and a few other distributions come close but for now, Linux is a little more difficult to use than Windows.

[For the edification of our readers, another KH article that leaves a bad taste in my mouth..- Scott]

Tabbed browsing has arguably had a significant impact on the way that people use the Web, but the feature hasn't really scaled to accommodate the increasing complexity of the average surfing session. The existing tab management and overflow handling mechanisms that are present in modern browsers are dated and suffer from some fundamental limitations that significantly detract from user productivity.

As part of his Python Development Masterclass, Kunal Deo drew up some golden rules when working with Python. Have you got any Python gems to share?

The recent history of the Amarok music player is like a scaled-down version of KDE's recent past. Like KDE 4, the Amarok 2 series was greeted with a user revolt that has only gradually quieted. And just like KDE 4 inspired Trinity KDE for those who preferred KDE 3, so Amarok 2 inspired Clementine, a fork of Amarok 1.4. The supporters of both Trinity KDE and Clementine make similar claims for their preferences: in both cases, the retro-apps are described as faster, easier to use, and outfitted with a better feature set than the most recent versions. But is that so?

A lot of people was looking forward to use Gnome 3.0 stable release this year on many distributions also known as Gnome shell ”technology part of Gnome 3.0“.

SimplyMEPIS is a simply wonderful distribution. It was the first to offer a complete out of the box experience all tied up in a pretty package. It would be fair to say that it was probably the inspiration for many of the easy-to-use distributions available today.

I’ve been using the latest version (10.04) of Ubuntu Linux since April and there’s a lot to like about it. I announced earlier this year that I was giving desktop Linux another look, and I went with Ubuntu because it is the Linux distribution most focused on a desktop OS. I have lots of observations about the Ubuntu experience and how it compares to Mac and Windows, but I’m going to save most of that feedback for another article.

Even though my goto operating system for servers is Red Hat Enterprise Linux, lately I have been working with Canonical’s Ubuntu Server 10.04 and I will admit that it has so far been a great experience. Just like what is expected of a server operating system, it is not intended for the general user base and focused more toward an experience Linux user; especially when by default there exists no GUI. That is one of the best parts in my personal opinions. Another great thing about the OS relates to its simplified installation process and how everything is automatically installed and to an extent configured should you choose to configure the server as a LAMP, DNS, etc. A couple of years ago, I had reviewed an older 8.10 release here and here and wasn’t impressed. Now, I can see things have changed for the better. Unfortunately I will not be discussing this. But before I get any deeper into this article, I wish to share my experiences with 10.04.

Since GNOME 3.0 has been delayed until March, 2011, it seems there's enough time to rethink the way GNOME Shell looks, especially since a lot of people don't like it (especially from the usability point of view). Some new GNOME Shell mockups were uploaded to GIT recently, showing a lot of similarities with Ubuntu / UNE:

Richard Stallman answers the top 25 questions from reddit readers.

A fascinating interview ...