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You have probably heard of Nepomuk, the semantic desktop technology we've been shipping for a while as part of the KDE Platform. However, so far, you may not have noticed it really doing very much useful for you. So what is this thing called Nepomuk, what can it do for us now and what will it bring us in the future? We asked two of the driving forces behind Nepomuk, Stéphane Laurière and Sebastian Trüg of Mandriva, to tell us about the real Nepomuk features that are already available in KDE software and those that have been introduced with Mandriva Linux 2010.

Dell announced new Ubuntu Linux-ready OptiPlex desktops, including a power-efficient model claimed to be the "world's smallest fully-functional commercial desktop." In addition to the 9.4 x 2.6 x 9.3-inch, Intel Core 2 Duo-ready OptiPlex 780 USFF desktop, Dell announced a 13-inch Vostro V13 laptop that also offers Ubuntu.

NiVi Games (www.nivigames.com) announced that BentBend is now available for Linux. BentBend is a new brain teaser puzzle game. Connect colored cubes two by two to get a rich bonus. Your connections must not cross. BentBend has good music and nice graphics letting you enjoy the game for hours. Go through all the 100 increasingly challenging levels, become a winner and set a new record at high scores.

I have been using GNU/Linux for two years so far, and I'm using Ubuntu (GNOME). Over this period, I have tested a lot of download manager applications; unfortunately, I can't find the one that suits best for me, because what I have in mind was a program which more or less is simple, lightweight and practical. I don't want a download manager which is crowded with features nor a primitive one and certainly I don't want one that works via a command line/terminal!

This tutorial shows how to set up a Mandriva 2010.0 Free (x86_64) server that offers all services needed by ISPs and hosters: Apache web server (SSL-capable), Postfix mail server with SMTP-AUTH and TLS, BIND DNS server, Proftpd FTP server, MySQL server, Dovecot POP3/IMAP, Quota, Firewall, etc. In the end you should have a system that works reliably, and if you like you can install the free webhosting control panel ISPConfig 2 (i.e., ISPConfig runs on it out of the box). This tutorial is written for the 64-bit version of Mandriva 2010.0.

It's the holiday season! Regardless of which holidays you celebrate, it's a good time to connect with relatives and absent friends. GIMP is a great tool for creating your own custom holiday cards; Akkana Peck shows how to do this using your own images.

The computing world is always very unpredictable. That must be why there is a small number of people who make large amounts of money from it: they are in the right (unpredictable) place, at the right (unpredictable) time. Who would have ever guessed that Javascript, a simple scripting language initially thought as a simple means to make web pages “cooler”, would become… drum roll… the world’s new CPU? Read the full article at Free Software Magazine.

Red Hat has long been the poster child of Linux and open source, the distribution that has been there since the beginning, grew up right, got all the luck, usually made the right decisions, and fetched up on top of the pile. Staying at the top of the pile may present a different set of problems. Free and open source software has made its presence felt, the operating system has become increasingly commoditised, free software is rising up the stack, cloud computing and virtualisation are transforming the market for operating systems, and open source (in some form or another) is being adopted or proclaimed by many different companies.

Too many wrongly characterize the debate as "security versus privacy." The real choice is liberty versus control. Tyranny, whether it arises under threat of foreign physical attack or under constant domestic authoritative scrutiny, is still tyranny.

THE GERMAN GOVERNMENT has decided to spend a lot of its citizens' tax money helping them recover from malware directed at Microsoft machines. Spiegel Online reports that the government wants to prop up another industry giant. The German Federal Office for Information Security (BSI) plans to team up with Internet service providers (ISPs) to establish a call centre helping Windows users who have malware problems. Starting in 2010, ISPs will track down customers with infected PCs. These customers will then be directed to a special website offering advice on removing the malware. If this does not work there will be a call centre where a staff of about 40 will try to fix the problems. There is no indication about how much the German government intends to spend on the project.

I am very happy to announce that the Mono C# compiler is now C# 4.0 feature complete.

Red Hat held the Red Hat Virtual Experience 2009 today and it was awesome. What was it? It was a completely online conference that offered everything you'd find at a traditional face-to-face show like the annual Red Hat Summit. I was hoping Red Hat would use this event to introduce / announce RHEV for Desktops but no such luck. I guess we'll have to continue to wait until January.

How to Configure compiz Fusion in Ubuntu 9.10(Karmic). Compiz is a compositing window manager that uses 3D graphics acceleration via OpenGL. It provides various new graphical effects and features on any desktop environment, including Gnome and KDE. Compiz Fusion is a collection of plugins and a configuration system for the Compiz compositing window manager. It was created from the remerging of Beryl into Compiz.

Massive storage usually equates to a massive footprint on your desk or place of work. The Western Digital ShareSpace is, for its 8TB storage allocation, relatively compact – about the size of a toaster and much smaller than a desktop-size server…

Now gamers can play the games they want, on whatever platform they want! With CrossOver Games, you can run many popular Windows games on your Intel, OSX Mac or Linux PC. Whatever your tastes, be they first-person shooters, fantasy, strategy, MMORPGs, or more, CrossOver Games provides the capability to run many popular games titles.

According to a recently released report, based on a sample of 3 million users collected over a period of 3 months, approximately 45% of the time, users submitted their login information to the phishing site they visited.

When installing an innocuous "waterfall" screensaver from Gnome-Look.org, an Ubuntu user noticed something strange: apart from the screensaver not being on GNOME's approved list, it also contained a script that performed some peculiar substitutions.

At the heart of every serious software development project is the use of some kind of version control code repository. For Ubuntu Linux, that version control system is its own Bazaar (bzr) system, which make it easier for the project to encourage and manage developer participation. Now thanks to a new effort from Ubuntu's commercial sponsor Canonical, Bazaar is now set to receive commercial support.

I have been using Android-powered phones since the release of the g1 and have always been happy with the Android Market. One of the first things I did after buying the g1 was make a list of what I felt were "essential apps". One of the tools I needed was a text editor, because, let's face it, with a "mini computer" in your pocket you'll need a way of creating and editing text files. After testing several text editors I found that Text Edit was the best.

The Institute of Electrical & Electronics Engineers (IEEE) has started work on WiFi the next generation. While that news in itself might not exactly rock your socks off, the small matter of a big speed increase might. Word is that WiFi TNG could be fast, very fast indeed. Anyone fancy some 1 gigabit per second wireless networking?