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The front-runners for replacing the expensive MS Office are openOffice.org and Google Docs, but which one is right for your business?

What is Linus Torvalds' secret to managing the Linux development community? And is it a technique that can be applied elsewhere? You might be surprised by the answer.

Ubuntu was famous for being brown, even though it was probably half-orange for most of its storied existence. Mark Shuttleworth and Co. mostly blew that notion out of the water in Lucid Lynx (10.04 LTS), which is purplish and dark. I'm pretty simple about these things, so I looked at what came with the Lucid install and ditched the default Ambiance theme in favor of Radiance. I also dumped the purple wallpaper by clicking on the Background tab and selecting the Cosmos slide-show background, which not only presents a nice outer-space view but periodically changes the image (hence the "slide-show" portion of the name).

I spoke to Jeff Teper, Microsoft’s Corporate VP of the Office Business Platform, who runs the SharePoint engineering group. I asked him to clarify something has puzzled me: the licensing for Office Web Apps. From a technical point of view, Office Web Apps is an add-on for SharePoint; it does not require the paid-for SharePoint Server (success to Microsoft Office SharePoint Server), but neither is it free – you may only install it if you have a volume license for Microsoft Office.

Right now you have multiple desktops but only from the applications point of view: you can move applications from one desktop to another and that's it. There is currently a mockup posted @ Gnome Shell Design Playground website (and a lot of discussion about it on the Gnome Shell mailing list) which seems very interesting:

I recently got visualizations back on my Linux system by way of XMMS. I cannot resist sharing a few screen shots.

In all honesty, are there any open source applications that you prefer and would use in exclusion to others? For example, do you like OpenOffice.org more than Microsoft Office or iWork? If so, do you like it enough that you would install OpenOffice.org on any system that you were using (even if your OS were closed source, such as OSX or Windows)? I might could see someone using OpenOffice.org instead of Office 2k7 (as I've met no one who really likes the new ribbon interface), but what about audio programs? Would you use Exaile, Amarok, or Rhythmbox instead of iTunes, Foobar2000, or some other application?

This article provides few simple scripts to scan and monitor network using combination of bash and ping command. Obviously, these scripts are no match to a full monitoring dedicated software like nagios but they could be useful for a small home brand networks, where implementing sophisticated monitoring system can become an overhead.

The release of GNOME 3.0, the popular desktop's first major release in eight years, promises to be the major free software event in autumn 2010. Where is GNOME now? What can we expect of GNOME 3.0? Of GNOME 3 as a series of releases? When I asked Stormy Peters, the executive director of the GNOME Foundation, where to go for answers, she directed me to Vincent Untz. A director of the GNOME Foundation and one of the senior members of the GNOME Release Team, Untz is better positioned than almost anyone to offer an overview of the project from both a general and a technical perspective.

This is wakamura a 100cm high little robotic pall , originally developed to be used in house as a baby sitter. It has face recognition for 10 faces and understands 10000 words. It's powered by Linux and it's developed by mitsubishi.

I've tried many different things in the hope of solving my Gwibber/Me Menu/Social bar problem in Ubuntu Lucid. That problem, for those not reading along (you're the better for it, I assure you) is that for some reason even after I start Gwibber and send a social-broadcast message (to Twitter in my case), the "social bar" in the upper panel's Me Menu does not appear. Here's how I finally "fixed" my Gwibber/Me Menu situation.

Valve Corporation has today rolled out their Steam Mac OS X client to the general public and confirmed something we have been reporting for two years: the Steam content delivery platform and Source Engine are coming to Linux. This news is coming days after we discovered proof in Steam's Mac OS X Client of Linux support and subsequently found more Linux references and even the unreleased Steam Linux client. The day has finally come and Linux gamers around the world have a reason to rejoice, as this is the biggest news for the Linux gaming community that sees very few tier-one titles.

As long as I can remember I had been using the Netscape web browser which evolved to Mozilla and now Firefox. I still use Firefox and have grown so comfortable with it that I don’t really desire to move onto anything else. Needless to say, Mozilla’s products are not perfect and there is always room for additional features and what I believe to be necessities in order to function in today’s world of computing.

Ubuntu gets a new, fast desktop interface. For some time now Ubuntu chief Mark Shuttleworth has been pushing developers to speed up boot times in the Linux operating system. Now he has revealed Unity, a new interface that is aimed at netbooks users. He's also announced Ubuntu Light, a fast, light, version of Ubuntu that will offer almost instant-on boot times

Did you know your drive was SMART? Actually: Self-Monitoring, Analysis, and Reporting Technology. It can be used to gather information about your hard drives and offers some additional information about the status of your storage devices. It can also be used with other tools to help predict drive failure.

Cherrypal announced its first two netbooks to run Android. The Cherrypal Asia is available in seven-inch ($99) and 10.1-inch ($148) models, both of which run Android 1.6 on an ARM9-based Via VT 8505 processor clocked at 533MHz, and offer 256MB of RAM, 2GB of flash storage, Ethernet, WiFi, and USB connectivity, says the company.

This tutorial shows how you can set up an Ubuntu Studio 10.04 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.

In March, we announced a set of labels for use by people creating KDE software, to demonstrate their association with KDE. We chose three options: Powered by KDE, Built on the KDE Platform and Part of the KDE Family and asked for artwork for badges and banners to illustrate these terms.

The Bordeaux Technology Group released Bordeaux 2.0.4 for Linux 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.

Linux has no shortage of music players, and even KDE has at least two: JuK and Amarok. The one you decide to use is truly a matter of preference, and it would be pointless for me to attempt to convince you to choose Amarok. It is, however, my music player of choice. I mostly use it solely for the purpose of playing music, ignoring any additional features, but once I started exploring the latest version, I noticed that Amarok has several extraordinary widgets.