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The European Commission - Directorate for Competition has officially dropped its antitrust charges against Microsoft, after Microsoft agreed to provide users of its Windows operating system a choice of web browsers. Under the new deal, Microsoft will avoid future E.C. fines and, from March, consumers will have a choice of up to twelve other web browsers. "Millions of European consumers will benefit from this decision by having a free choice about which web browser they use," said Commissioner Neelie Kroes.

In the item we ran yesterday about GNOME and the GNU Project, one aspect got snowed under a little bit. It turns out a claim made in the iTWire article about the role a blog post by Miguel De Icaza was false, and even though the claim wasn't ours, I did repeat it, and therefore, should correct it too. I also need to offer apologies for not framing the opening of the article clear enough - had I framed it better, a lot of pointless discussion and name-calling could've been avoided.

Watch a fun video based on 8 IT predictions of rPath. Everyone has their predictions for the new year but do they often prognosticate using an animated video? The folks over at rPath created a clever video animation depicting their reasonable and humorous predictions for 2010. rPath might be best known for its online virtual appliance builder. You can also download rBuilder. They're also known for release automation, cloud computing, virtualization, self-service IT and much more.

Puppy Linux is something different, a tiny version of Linux that can be stored on a USB memory drive, will run in memory, and can be used for working on the move.

Avant Window Navigator(AWN) has always been my favorite dock application. It was by far the most easy to use and far better looking dock application when compared to Gnome-Do or Cairo-Dock. But that was some years ago.

Today, Red Hat (NYSE: RHT) announced that it had reached an agreement to settle a class-action lawsuit from some of its shareholders that started back in July 2004. Settling the lawsuit will cost Red Hat $8.8 million,

I have at least four machines running at all times – all using one monitor. Not only does space dictate this setup, so to does budget. Because of this I am relegated to using a KVM switch. If you’re not sure what a KVM switch is, it is a device that allows you to use multiple machines with only one monitor, mouse, and keyboard. Some KVM switches even allow the sharing of a single audio output source (speakers). There is one problem that can arise when using a KVM switch with a modern Linux distribution. This problem has to do with the latest releases of Xorg. Because Xorg no longer uses the xorg.conf file, it depends upon receiving identification signals from the monitor in order to automatically adjust the display. On a single system/single monitor setup this works perfectly. But in some instances a KVM switch will get in the way and the X Windows display will be far from ideal (and some times not even usable). How do you get around this situation? In this article you will read a few tips that will help you get around this.

Cherrypal has released a device touted as the "world's first $99 laptop" and announced an upgrade to a previously released netbook. The "Africa" has a seven-inch display and runs Linux on a 400MHz ARM9 processor, while the "Bing" has an Atom N280 and offers five hours of battery life.

Do you think that converting your clunky, maintenance-burdened physical desktop OS to a clunky, maintenance-burdened VM will save you some money? Think again.

Designed to manage hundreds and even thousands of photos, digiKam provides top-notch searching capabilities that can help you to find the photos you want in several different ways.

The Ubuntu Developers Summit (UDS), held November 16-20 in Dallas, while kicking off the development cycle for the next Ubuntu release, "Lucid Lynx", had a surprising amount to interest a kernel hacker with embedded tendencies. The Summit covered a wide range of topics from low level kernel details, to best community practices, but the ARM netbook support sessions were particularly interesting. At this UDS, the Ubuntu ARM developers set out to enable support for many ARM machines in a single distribution, a difficult task due to the lack of a standard firmware interface on ARM systems; a familiar problem to embedded developers. This report covers the solutions debated at UDS — including Kexec bootloaders and the flattened device tree — and the choices made for the next Ubuntu release.

Don't get me wrong, there's a lot about Ubuntu to like — a lot I like — but I tend to write fairly critically about what seems to be the world's most popular free, open-source desktop operating system because not just I — but the rest of the user and developer communities — hold it up to a higher standard. And Ubuntu doesn't always measure up.

Ubuntu is more than a desktop operating system. That continues to be the message from Canonical, which is promoting another Ubuntu Server Edition user survey in a bid to better understand how customers are deploying the server operating system. Here’s the scoop.

My recent article about transitioning slide show backgrounds in GNOME garnered quite a bit of attention, so here's my first reminder of how to do the same thing in other desktop environments. This one will show you how to create a custom slide show backgrounds in KDE3.

After a long wait, Mozilla finally releases version 3.0 of Thunderbird. This latest version of Thunderbird brings much changes and makes it even more powerful than its ancestor. In this article, we take a look at the Thunderbird 3.0 and show you what you are going to expect in this great software.

For the past three years, Jono Bacon has worked as community manager for Ubuntu, one of the largest and most diverse projects in open source software. Consequently, when he recently published his thoughts on building and managing communities, people listen. More unusually, as I found out in a recent interview, when people like me critique his book, he listens, too, with a view to improving the second edition.

In order to appease European regulators, Oracle has made a number of commitments to the future of MySQL. According to a statement overnight (Australian time), Oracle has made a number of public commitments regarding MySQL in order to ease the concerns of European Union regulators investigating the proposed Oracle – Sun merger.

U.S. innovation slowed this year for the first time in 13 years as the recession cut into budgets, and costs to protect inventions rose. The system is broken.. Pushing patents through the system is easier said than done: The decline in filings this year has brought to light a number of problems with the antiquated American patent system.

According to AndroLib, Google's Android Market has just crossed the 20,000 application milestone. The new milestone comes just over three months after reaching the 10,000 mark and shows strong application growth for the open source mobile operating system.

Downloading YouTube videos is among the first things you will look for once you get Ubuntu installed in your computer. Let me introduce you the easiest way to download(or save?) YouTube videos in your Ubuntu machine.