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I was about five years old when my father showed me my first computer. It was an old 8086, and it had 5.25 floppy drive, a shiny new 3.5 floppy drive, and a 10MB hard drive. When he gave it to me, it ran nothing but MSDOS. As a starter machine, I didn't really care. I was just stoked to have a computer, and when my father showed me how to get to video games, and how to type a text document, I was thrilled. In 1993, my father got himself a Pentium machine, and I received his 486. The 486 also had DOS on it, but when I tried to play my old games everything went by too quickly. I asked my dad what was wrong, and he said that the games I had been playing relied on the CPUs clockspeed. At this point, he gave me a thin orange book, Understanding Microprocessors, which was published by Motorola. He also showed me a book on his shelf that taught me a bit about electricity. A month after this encounter, I went back and asked him if there were any operating systems that would run in protected mode. He told me, yes.

Am I asking for too much here to want an equally easy install experience on Linux for FOSS software as I enjoy on Windows? If Linux is ever to gain any sort of real market share in the desktop market I feel this is some thing that must happen. But maybe I am wrong.

The browser maker moves the Dragonfly debugging toolkit to publicly hosted servers, setting up the BSD-licensed software as an open project.

Attention developers: This "improvement" you call kernel mode setting is pretty much a regression for users of my particular video chip, the Intel 830m, and could be equally useless for other Intel video hardware. Do you think that maybe figuring out why kernel mode setting doesn't work in these cases is the thing to do? And how about dropping in some code that automatically turns off kernel mode setting on hardware that doesn't like it until you deal with this show-stopping bug?

A few days back we reported on a new Mutter release, which is the window and compositing manager for GNOME 3.0, and now with the GNOME 2.29.91 beta release coming up on Wednesday there is also the release of another new GNOME 3.0 component. Perhaps the single biggest new component for the GNOME 3.x stack is the GNOME Shell and this is the package that just reached version 2.29.0. GNOME 2.29.0 brings a lot of improvements.

Hall agreed to serve pro bono publico (at no charge, for the public benefit), and asked the court for a declaratory judgment that the patent was unenforceable. Katzer responded by bringing a SLAPP suit against Jacobsen. SLAPP is a law that was meant to defend little folks sued by big rich companies, but is increasingly used in just the other direction. And the judge upheld this, which meant that Jacobsen would have to pay Katzer's lawyer's fees before the case was even decided. After some court argument, the unreasonable fees asked were reduced to $14,486.68 and $16,976.25, for two lawyers used by Katzer, and Bob Jacobsen paid them.

If you have been following my live tweets today you will know that day 1 of the "New Millenium Learners Conference 2010" taking place here in Vienna at the moment was really interesting. The opening session led by people from the Austrian Ministry of Education introduced some of the projects that the Ministry has been working on in Austria. Our small Austrian OLPC project in Graz was also mentioned but unfortunately due to time constraints the information on all the projects remained relatively superficial.

Microsoft and Amazon.com have reached an agreement that gives each company a license to the other's patent portfolio, in a way that could revive one of the Redmond company's longest-running controversies. That's because Microsoft says the deal grants Amazon patent-related "coverage" for its use of open-source and proprietary technologies in its Kindle e-reader, and for its use of Linux-based computer servers.

[You smell what I smell? Microsoft FUD.. - Scott]

Occasionally, your editor will be struck by a series of topics all associated with a common theme. The recent fuss about Android's presence (or the lack thereof) in the mainline kernel ties in well with a couple of other items of notice: the Nexus One phone and the role of free software on the Android platform in general.

In this article, which is the second article of the article series, we will cover how to install PHP-Nuke on a local machine running an Apache/MySQL/PHP (AMP) environment. We will not cover the installation of AMP here; you can find a walkthrough of installing the XAMPP package in Appendix A. This package includes PHP, MySQL, Apache, and much more, and is a quick way to get yourself a working AMP development environment.

Days later you receive an email from your reputable vendor that your RMA refund request has been denied, because you installed Linux on the laptop. You contact your vendor's customer service group, and are again told, "No refund. You installed Linux."

Microsoft and Amazon announced on Monday that the two have entered into a patent cross-licensing deal. As part of the pact, Amazon will pay Microsoft an undisclosed amount of money, though the two sides did not disclose more details. The deal covers both Amazon's Kindle product as well as the company's use of Linux-based servers. Microsoft has maintained that many implementations of Linux infringe on its patents and has signed numerous licensing deals that cover Linux with both companies that sell Linux-based software and those that use the operating system in their hardware.

Edubuntu is Ubuntu customized for the classroom, with a wealth of educational applications for different age groups. Eric Geier reveals some of the many treasures in Edubuntu.

We have extremely promising open source media editing applications for Linux like the Jokosher audio editor and PiTiVi video editor, both built on the powerful GStreamer framework, reaching a point of maturity where the focus can shift from making sure the underlying infrastructure of the application is solid to adding all the cool features that everyone's been waiting for. These apps will make multimedia editing simple and easy yet still fully featured. Projects like the recently announced VideoLAN Movie Creator (you know, from the people behind the VLC media player) and OpenShot are certainly cool projects which show that FOSS video editing is really progressing, but PiTiVi will still be my NLE of choice. VLMC is sure to be a great product, but being cross-platform drives the focus away from our OS of choice, and OpenShot while perhaps adding as many features as quickly as possible, lacks the same focus on proper design that PiTiVi has.

The Microsoft Browser Ballot screen will begin arriving in Europe this week, but according to a YouGov survey commissioned by Mozilla, 77% of Britons don't know it is coming. Microsoft announced its plans to provide a choice of browser, as required by the European Commission, last week. The ballot will be delivered to Windows computers by means of a software update and will prompt users that they have "An important choice to make" before offering a randomised selection of alternative browser choices.

Google Chrome is growing and so is it's arsenal of extensions. Google Chrome recently stole the limelight from Safari browser and became the third most popular web browser in the world. And Slideshow is a beautiful yet functional image viewing extension for Google Chrome.

Mozilla's mobile Firefox browser is coming to Google's Linux-based Android operating system. Although the porting effort is still at an early stage of development, it is moving forward swiftly. Mozilla's developers achieved an important milestone this week by demonstrating that the browser can run on the Nexus One smartphone. Due to the highly experimental status of the project, Mozilla has not yet published packages for testing, but that didn't deter us from getting our grubby mitts on the goods. As our readers know, we just can't resist the doughy flavor of half-baked software, and we will gladly brave the bugs for a chance to taste test the new hotness before it really heats up. In order to get our own hands-on look at Firefox on Android, we had to compile it from source code.

MediaInfo 0.7.28 is released. This tool supplies technical & tag info about a video or audio file.

I have heard of my geeky friends talking about this Linux stuff. I wasn't sure what it was so I asked them about it. Honestly, I thought they were trying to sell me some religion the way they jumped all over me trying to explain what Linux is. They did make some very good points though. I have always felt uncomfortable with using a pirated version of windows but I can't justify the expense of buying an original version. I am also tired of all the problems I have been having because of virus and spyware infestations. These Linux guys tell me that they don't have any problems with that stuff.

Cloud Linux Inc.'s CEO is set to take the stage at this week's Parallels Summit in Miami. The big question: Does the hosting and cloud world need yet another Linux distribution -- this one known as CloudOS? Here are some clues that may answer that question.