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The KDE and GNOME communities are looking for a host for the Desktop Summit 2011, the combined annual conference featuring KDE's Akademy and GNOME's GUADEC events. Following up on the successful Gran Canaria Desktop Summit, the second edition of the combined event in 2011 will be the premier place to learn about, discuss, and work on free software on the desktop. The goal of the desktop summit will be to present and discuss the state of the art of free software for end users, do community building, enable cross-community collaboration, and enable partners from industry and other communities as well as individuals to get informed and involved.

It took me ages to learn bash redirection properly, and I still have to concentrate sometimes to keep my &s and my >s straight. Here's the lowdown in case you, too, have intermittent brain failure on this one. Bash has three standard file descriptors: stdin, stdout and stderr, which refer respectively to input, output and error output. By default, all of these are directed to the terminal, so all input comes from the terminal, and all output (regular and error) will go to the terminal.

LinuxCertified,Inc. a leading provider of Linux training, will offer weekend Linux system administration bootcamp on March 27th - 28th, 2010 in South Bay (CA). This workshop is designed for busy information technology professionals and is designed to cover the most important Linux administration areas.

Last week we delivered benchmarks of Fedora 13 Alpha and Ubuntu 10.04 (along with testing the Fedora 11 and 12 too), but today we have a new set of comparative benchmarks that are covering the latest development versions of Ubuntu 10.04, Mandriva 2010.1, PCLinuxOS 2010, and openSUSE 11.3. Here they are.

eBox Platform is a unified network server that offers easy and efficient computer network administration for small and medium-size businesses. It can act as a gateway, an infrastructure manager, a unified threat manager, an office server, a unified communication server or a combination of them.

This is the fourth Linux-based smartphone development we have covered in Linux User & Developer. Check out earlier issues of the magazine for the coverage on Openmoko, Palm Pre and Google Android. This alone proves that Linux is already a big thing for smartphone or embedded development…

Are you a practice, clinic or any other health care institution that is using medical open source software in daily routine? And wasn't it quite hard for you to find the right software, to get it up and running and to finally customize it to your needs without having any experienced users or reference sites at hand?

Mobile platforms like Apple's iPhone and Google's Android have become a key focus for open source developers. And the trend is only increasing, though new research has found that over the course of the last year, there has been a shift in which mobile platform has the most open source development activity.

I thought Linux in general and Xorg in particular were throwing those of us with "older" Intel video chips under the virtual bus. I couldn't even get Ubuntu Lucid Lynx (10.04) Alpha 3 to boot on my Intel 830m (aka i830m and in my case Intel 82830 CGC)-equipped laptops, where my old standby of dropping i915.modeset=0 or nomodeset on the boot line would clear things up. Today I decided to download and burn the daily build ISO of Lucid for March 15.

Flourish is University of Illinois at Chicago's free annual conference dedicated to celebrating and elevating open source software and open culture in the Midwest. Through talks, workshops and coding sprints, attendees experience and reconnect with the philosophies and technologies that make the open source movement a key driver of innovation. Flourish is also a great opportunity to meet up with old friends and to make new ones.

This article shows how you can build your own video community using lighttpd with its mod_flv_streaming module (for streaming .flv videos, the format used by most major video communities such as YouTube) and its mod_secdownload module (for preventing hotlinking of the videos) on Ubuntu 9.10. I will use FlowPlayer as the video player, a free Flash video player with support for lighttpd's mod_flv_streaming module. I will also show how you can encode videos (.mp4 .mov .mpg .3gp .mpeg .wmv .avi) to the FLV format supported by Adobe Flash.

File sharing just became legal in Spain, changing the rules on what is legal, and what is fair. In a court ruling that will surely shake the Spanish and European legal scene for years to come, a Spanish judge has today declared not only that sites containing links to copyrighted information are legal, but that torrenting copyrighted information for non-profit reasons is also inside of the law. If you think that we are in some way confused, or kidding, here is a quote from the judge in question: “P2P networks are mere conduits for the transmission of data between Internet users, and on this basis they do not infringe rights protected by Intellectual Property laws” It is hard to confuse what that means. Provided that the sharer of the information is not profiting (garnering any revenues whatsoever), off of the transfer, then the action is legal now in Spain according to this new precedent.

Proprietary giant is licensing open source to its partners. What is going on? Over the past few weeks Microsoft has been licensing Linux to a number of its partners, most notably Amazon. Although the idea of Microsoft, a company steeped in proprietary software, licensing open source software is ludicrous it's not completely unexpected. It's also not the first time Microsoft has played the Linux patent game and we can expect to see more deals in the future. So what's going on?

Autopackage is a distro neutral method of packaging up software for distribution to the Linux platform. It provides a sleek GUI for doing so and even installs itself from the first .package file you run on your system.

Measuring at just 2 x 2 x 2.2 inches this is the smallest Desktop PC. And it's running Linux, one more point for Linux coolness.

OpenShot video editor has steadily improved since its official release 2 months ago. OpenShot 1.1 even got included into upcoming Ubuntu Lucid 10.04. That news itself speaks volumes about quality and functionality of this budding new video editing app for Linux.

Cloud computing is known as the next big thing in IT. But what is it exactly? In a cloud, the key players are the user and provider. Users have access to the cloud resources in form of (web) services, containing the functionality of software (inside the browser), platforms or infrastructures. Let’s see what’s behind it…

Exposing a system to the Internet means that you’ll soon (within hours) experience login attempts from random locations, from people you don’t know and from those with unclear motivations. DenyHosts is an SSH security tool in the form of a python script that helps prevent brute force and dictionary-based attacks against your systems. On my home system, I have at least one such attempt added to my /etc/hosts.deny file per day. I use DenyHosts to maintain that stealth watch over my insignificant system here in my dusty little corner of the Internet that I call home.

Software patents have long been the source of a great deal of concern in the free software community; patents are by far the biggest restraint on our ability to program our own computers. Those who worry about these things have expected that attacks might come from patent trolls, or from software companies with fading prospects. Apple's lawsuit against HTC shows that the real threat may come from a different direction. HTC is not normally thought of as a Linux company; it is a Taiwanese manufacturer which provides cellular phone handsets to a number of other companies.

From Mark Shuttleworth himself: "The default position of the window controls will remain the left, throughout beta1. We're interested in data which could influence the ultimate decision. There are good reasons both for the change, and against them, and ultimately the position will be decided based on what we want to achieve over time."