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The educational community has discovered open source tools in a big way. Analysts predict that schools will spend up to $489.9 million on support and services for open source software by 2012, and that only includes charges related to operating systems and learning management systems. Teachers, professors and home schoolers are using open source applications as part of their educational curriculum for a wide variety of subjects.

After weeks of concern about the "catastrophic state of it's finances" and an indefiniete delay in the release of version 2010.1, the French website LeMagIT is reporting that Mandriva has been saved by new investors. The article quotes Mandriva Director General Arnaud Laprévote: "Today the company found investors who decided to invest in the company, in order to give balance to the organization and to find a good economic model."

Empathy is the default IM client in Ubuntu starting from Ubuntu version 9.10 Karmic Koala. Though Pidgin was in many ways a favorite for a lot of people, Empathy has always been the better alternative for me. And it is good to have Empathy by default in Ubuntu 10.04 "Lucid Lynx".

Looks like the Android netbooks are coming: Toshiba introduced their Dynabook AZ Series which is equipeed with an Android 2.1 OS. Toshiba AC100 The AC100 is a mobile internet device with a 10.1 inch LED screen and "up to 8 hours" of battery life. According to Toshiba, it "combines smartphone functionality with netbook usability".

Talks are under way between Google and Dell to bring Chrome OS, the search giant's cloud-centric operating system, to Dell's computer lineup, according to a Dell executive. Dell wants to be "on the forefront" of "unique innovations" like Chrome OS that will hit store shelves in the next few years, Amit Midha Dell's president for greater China and South Asia recently told Reuters.

When I find an outstanding distro, such as Fedora, I prefer to buy the media from an on-line vendor as a way of showing my support. Most of the time the money goes directly to the vendor, however, I happened upon the Sponsored Media Program today and found a vendor who participates in this program.

The ARM processor family is a complicated one, with many different variations, leading to large numbers of separate sub-architectures in the Linux kernel. A quick glance at the ARM directory in a recent kernel tree shows nearly 70 different sub-architectures, each corresponding to a different CPU or system-on-chip (SoC). That complexity has made it harder to develop new products for new or existing ARM devices. A new organization that was formed by six silicon vendors, Linaro, seeks to simplify that landscape, and allow easier—faster—development of ARM-Linux-based products.

The Linux Foundation today announced the addition of new sessions and keynotes for LinuxCon 2010. The announcement finalizes the list of speakers and professional session planned for the conference, which will take place in Boston August 10-12. In the newly added sessions, Red Hat's Matthew Garret will discuss what he's learned from recent Android/Kernel community talks. MySQL author Monty Widenius will discuss why he forked with MariaDB. Canonical's Matt Asay will comment on the success of the Linux desktop. Hank Janssen of Microsoft will explain the physics behind the Hyper-V drivers built for Linux.

The Call for Presentations for the Ohio LinuxFest 2010, to be held in Columbus, Ohio, September 10-12, ends on June 30th. In addition to the regular tracks about Free & Open Source Software, this year OLF announces a FOSS Medical Track.

The last two years have seen the KDE desktop not only rewritten from scratch, but adding innovation after innovation. Sooner or later, the moment had to come when its breakneck pace of development slowed -- and, judging from the second beta, that moment is the upcoming 4.5 release. Not that KDE 4.5 is short of changes. However, most of them are either concerned with stability and appearance, or minor enhancements. By contrast, new applications or directions are few. You might call the 4.5 release a consolidation and refinement of the improvements made in previous releases in the KDE 4 series.

Unless you are one of the few who have upgraded to Froyo, or you have rooted your Android phone, chances are, you are still not able to tether using your Android phone. Those who are seeking a solution, PdaNet is the easiest way available to provide tethering to your Mac or PC. PdaNet allows you to, without rooting your phone (and thus keeping your warranty intact), share your phone’s data connection with your computer, enabling you to go online on it through your phone and its data plan. Obviously, this requires a data on your wireless plan for your phone, but if you’ve got an Android phone, in all likelihood you’ve also got data, so let’s move forward!

I'm not an Apple fan. But there are a couple of things Apple does right. Apple's success is the ability to focus on just a few features and make them work well. So well that everyone else wants to copy them. Compare this with Microsoft or Linux.

For the last few years I have had an interest in configuration management of IT infrastructure. While by no means an expert I have a considerable amount of experience with the problems associated with mass server configuration and have come to believe it also one of the most under-served disciplines in systems management. In a previous life I had an operations role maintaining primarily Linux servers and other open source infrastructure. In 2006 I worked on launching the open source NetDirector project, a graphical tool for configuring open source infrastructure like Apache, Samba, LDAP and NFS servers. During that time the challenges of maintaining server configurations started to really come to light for me.

What good is a browser unless you can tweak it, hack it and bend it to your will? No good at all. The more you can hack it, the better it is. And that means that Firefox must be a great browser as when ever you feel that you know everything about it you come across a bunch of hidden (and some not-so-secret) tips and tricks available that will crank Firefox up and pimp your browser. Make it faster, cooler, more efficient. So today I have come up with 3 amazing firefox tricks you might not be aware of.

Someone left a comment on one of my posts similar to, "Linux won't be popular on the Desktop until it runs Windows applications." To which I silently responded, "Huh? and, "You've got to be kidding me." We have WINE for running Windows applications and it works reasonably well for those who care to spend the time to work through any problems with it. I don't think the Linux Community needs to spend time on such an undertaking. Is anyone asking Apple to run Windows applications so that it will gain popularity? No? Then, why should Linux? If you want to run Windows applications, run them on Windows.

This weekend, Google proudly announced GoogleCL, a set of new command-line tools for some of its popular services, such as Google Calendar, Google Docs, Blogger, YouTube and Picasa. GoogleCL will allow you to upload photos to Picasa and videos to YouTube, add Google Calendar events or contacts on Google Contacts, edit Google Docs documents or post on your Blogger blog… all straight from the Linux terminal. Well, you will say now… “Who needs this stuff? We are in mid 2010 and command-line is for geeks only.” You are right! But this is a very good opportunity for some developers to create a nice graphical user interface (GUI) for this command-line tool.

"This article has been bounding and jumping around in the nether regions of my mind for quite a while now. It decided today that it needs to be set free." ... "As an advocate for using FOSS in general and Linux in particular I have pondered this apparent conundrum for a long time. With FOSS and Linux I get “free” software and it is worth quite a lot to me in terms of usability and function."

With jQTouch, web developers can build smartphone interfaces for their existing web applications by simply transforming an existing Document Object Model (DOM) structure into an interface that works, looks and feels like native iPhone or Android application. In this tutorial by Mambe Churchill Nanje, we will learn how to develop such an application.

When a developer creates a new application, he must start writing it very early in the Ubuntu development stages to be able to get his application in the official Ubuntu repositories (Universe) or else the only way he can provide that application to the current Ubuntu release is through a PPA - which is not easy discoverable by the users. But Ubuntu 10.10 Maverick Meerkat wants to change the game: according to the whiteboard of the "Implementation of delivering apps post-release" blueprint, a new Ubuntu repository "extras.ubuntu.com" will be created and new applications will be uploaded to this repository even for the already released Ubuntu versions.

If you're new to the Linux or open source community, you might not have heard of live disc or USB distributions yet. They let you run a operating system on PCs without installing anything on the hard drive. It loads directly from the CD/DVD disc or USB flash drive. Many full Linux desktop distros, such as Ubuntu, can be ran in this live mode. However, there are also live distros created for a wide-variety of other specific applications and solutions. Here we'll review several of these. Let's get started!