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Zenoss Inc., the corporate sponsor of Zenoss Core, today announced the release of the 2010 Open Source Systems Management Survey. Based on more than 950 completed surveys gathered at the USENIX Large Installation System Administration conference each year from 2006 and 2009 and within the Zenoss open source systems management community from 2007 through 2009, the survey’s purpose was to determine usage patterns for systems management software and particularly the usage of open source software to solve IT management needs of large organizations.

Journalist and digital rights activist Danny O'Brien came to GUADEC to try to educate GNOME hackers about the threats facing journalists, their computers, and their online communication from governments and organized crime. But free software can help, so he wanted to outline the features that he thinks could be added to desktops to help secure them and protect the privacy of all users, not just journalists. Part of his job as internet advocacy coordinator for the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) is to talk to internet developers and "persuade them to think about how journalists in repressive regimes are affected" by the choices those developers make.

There's no question that gaming on the Android platform has heretofore been relatively underwhelming, but that looks like it's all about to change. It seems that Sony Ericsson -- a company that has yet to even introduce an Android 2.0 device -- is at work on a project to redefine gaming on Google's mobile platform. We now know (via a trusted source) that the company is actively and heavily developing a brand new gaming platform, ecosystem, and device (possibly alongside Google) which are already in the late stages of planning. And we've got the goods on it.

In this article we focus on "Global" Actions, that is, those that should always be enabled. These types of Actions are not very different from standard Swing Actions. For example, you might want to create "New Task" and "Edit Task" Actions that can be invoked from the menubar and toolbar of the TaskManager.

Remobo is a free software which can be used to replace the paid versions of existing difficult to use VPN setups as it can create a VPN instantly and securely. It lets you login easily and add users to your buddy list, and create a secure network for you. In private chat messaging, the file sharing client helps share information within the buddy list as well. Remobo lets you control your computer and access files securely while away from the system.

Here is yet another small hack that a lot of you might find really useful. This hack adds a useful 'Open in Terminal' option in the right click menu in GNOME/Nautilus.

In our last article we discussed the benefits of leveraging the services of other applications before attempting to duplicate existing functionality in our own applications. Built-in applications such as Maps, Email, Phone (yes that is an application too), SMS, Media Player, Camera and others are all at our disposal and may be called upon to bring sought-after functionality to our applications.

Has Facebook stolen your privacy? Take back the logs, take control of your data and make Facebook irrelevant. Richard Smedley explores two worlds of social networking - one good, one evil…

Last summer, a new organization was announced with the goal of promoting the uptake of open source software by the U.S. federal government. Now that organization has completed its first quite successful year of operations, and its celebrating by announcing an awards program to recognize those that have been most influential in advancing its goals. Maybe you know someone who's contributions to open source should be recognized.

Free software is a different beast from gratis software. Free software activist, Richard Stallman, discusses the importance of freedom across all modes of computing. The software developer and political activist is best known for his creation during the early 1980's of the GNU Project, which combined with Linus Torvalds' kernel programming efforts in the early 1990's to form what we today refer to as the Linux operating system.

This guide explains how to integrate XCache into PHP5 and lighttpd on an OpenSUSE 11.2 system. From the XCache project page: "XCache is a fast, stable PHP opcode cacher that has been tested and is now running on production servers under high load." It's similar to other PHP opcode cachers, such as eAccelerator and APC.

Researchers at Russian security company Kaspersky Lab say they've discovered the first malicious software program to target Google's Android mobile operating system. The application masquerades as a media player, according to a Kaspersky blog post. But if it is installed, the rogue application begins secretly sending SMSes (Short Message Service) to a premium rate number presumably belonging to the hackers who created it.

A plug computer sounds like such a good idea, until you realize that before you can actually put it to some practical use, you need to install and configure some software and applications -- a task that requires time and technical skills. Fortunately, the recently announced Amahi Plug Edition solution provides a better and easier way to turn a plug computer into a useful device.

The Free Technology Academy (FTA) is an international institution based in Europe, whose goal is to provide online education, at master level, about Free Software. I interviewed FTA director Wouter Tebben to know how the FTA works and what are its plans for the next year.

The opentaps Open Source ERP + CRM has released version 1.5M1. This new version is designed to allow users to get up and running on opentaps quickly and help developers with customizing opentaps.

Canonical developer Rick Spencer has blogged about the recent discovery of a canonical-census package in the Ubuntu repositories. Although initial speculation suggested Canonical was tracking the users of pre-installed systems with Ubuntu, Spencer points out that the idea of the census package is actually to count the number of OEM installed Ubuntu system without identifying the users of those systems.

Organizations that are interested in using open source in their own products but are wary of intellectual property issues might want to examine a new, mostly free, assistance program just launched by the non-profit Linux Foundation.

Here it is time for new q4wine release tagged by the 0.119 version.

GNOME Shell is a new completely revamped user interface for GNOME. GNOME Shell brings a new window manager called Mutter which is a combination of Metacity and Clutter. This reportedly makes Compiz unnecessary(and incompatible too).

Google's Android has won partial re-admission to the Linux kernel, but much work lies ahead for a full re-entry. Code written by Linux kernel maintainer Rafael Wysocki has been adopted in the kernel tree that re-implements Android's wake locks feature — to stop a device from completely shutting down — in what has been called a "socially acceptable way".