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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.

I was clicking through the website as quick as I could so I could get the game downloading, when reality came crashing down on top of me as I hit the downloads page and was asked to choose between a Windows and an OSX client. What is a Linux user to do?

Android is fairly unique in the ways it allows multiple applications to run at the same time. Developers coming from a different platform may find the way it operates surprising. Understanding its behavior is important for designing applications that will work well and integrate seamlessly with the rest of the Android platform. This article covers the reasons for Android's multitasking design, its impact on how applications work, and how you can best take advantage of Android's unique features.

The Consumer Electronics Linux Forum (CELF) announced a call for papers for the next Embedded Linux Conference Europe (ELCE), scheduled for Oct. 27-28 in Cambridge, UK. CELF is looking for a variety of technical presentations focused on the use of embedded Linux in consumer electronics products.

Virtual Linux is accomplished through many techniques, ranging from emulation to platform to OS virtualization. Indeed, Linux is a unique operating system in its breadth of virtualization solutions that are available. In this article, we'll explore the various ways that virtualization is achieved and then review the various solutions provided through virtual Linux. When we talk about virtualization solutions, we tend to talk about specific products offered by specific companies. But when we talk about virtualization solutions with Linux, we instead talk about a rich and diverse open source ecosystem.

On Saturday, April 10th, I was in Austin Texas for the inaugural Texas Linux Fest (TXLF), a community-run FLOSS conference. The idea to stage the show arose last August during OSCON, picked up steam in the fall, and in the end a little under 400 people turned out — including speakers and volunteers — which most considered a successful number for a first year event.

There are very few things that you can accuse Linux of sucking at, but one thing that most geeks can agree on, is that Linux sucks at hardware support. So is hardware support the main hurdle that Linux has to overcome to become mainstream?

PlayOnLinux 3.7.6 is now available. Two major bugs fixed Using an old wineversion to install a program caused problems and Compatibility with Lucid Lynx Install window crashed when the user clicked on Install button.

..ECMA CLI would have given the web both strongly typed and loosely typed programming languages. It would have given developers a choice between performance and scriptability. A programming language choice (use the right tool for the right job) and would have in general made web pages faster just by moving performance sensitive code to strongly typed languages.

For the first time in five years Novell is hosting a BrainShare conference for EMEA (Europe, the Middle East and Africa) partners and customers. Novell Chief Marketing Officer and Channel Chief John Dragoon says the event is sold out. Here are the details.

In which Area 51, the Roswell UFO Incident and our hero, Frank Adversego (of course) figure prominently

Virtually all of Chrome's April expansion came at the expense of Microsoft Corp.'s Internet Explorer, which dropped 0.7 percentage points to finish the month at 59.95%, the first time that IE has fallen under the 60% mark.... Mozilla Corp.'s open-source Firefox, on the other hand, was up last month, albeit by only 0.07 percentage points to 24.6%. April was the second month in a row that Firefox trended up, a victory of sorts in light of the fact that it had lost ground for four straight months starting in November 2009.

While you wouldn't spot me in the wild wearing the "scanner ring" I would certainly not mind owning this beauty. This is the W200 Wearable Computer it's a powerful computing device designed to be attached to the user's wrist for hands-free operation. Depicted here with windows CE, but it's available running Linux. The ultra rugged version is Linux only. (obvious as Linux is much more "rugged" after all ;-)

Understanding the fundamentals of Linux is the basis for being productive as a system administrator. Coupling each of the tools available, and knowing which tool to use at the right time, is the key to effectively managing complex administration projects. Mark Sobell has again compiled a great collection of applications and utilities in A Practical Guide to Linux Commands, and his experience shows in this second edition.

Sys-V init has long been the standard solution for booting. It's kind of easy to work with, it kind of works and everybody kind of knows it. However, being open minded, let's look at an alternative approach. There are quite a few alternatives. All of them focus on improving boot times. This is accomplished by starting and running different processes simultaneously and asynchronously. Doing type of boot attempts to use all (more) parts of the hardware simultaneously and avoid having to wait for slow hardware.

LXer Feature: 03-May-2010

The big news this week was Ubuntu 10.04 being released and all the hoopla surrounding it, but not to be missed was HTC's settlement with Microsoft over a Android patent deal, the challenges of Linux netbook design, Sony starts to feel the heat for blocking Linux installs on its PS3 and put windows to its most appropriate use, make a bootable Linux USB stick with it. Enjoy!