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We have reached the Fedora 12 Beta, the last important development milestone of Fedora 12. Only critical bug fixes will be pushed as updates leading up to the general release of Fedora 12, scheduled to be released in mid-November. What's new? Optimized performance, smaller and faster updates, NetworkManager broadband and other enhancements, next-generation (Ogg) Theora video, graphics support improvements, automatic reporting of crashes and SELinux issues, new Dracut initrd generation tool, PackageKit plugins, Bluetooth on-demand, Moblin graphical interface for netbooks, PulseAudio enhancements...

Red Hat has announced the first and only beta of its next Linux development release, Fedora 12. Emperor Constantine the Great knew a good means to hold a crumbling empire together when he saw it - namely, Christianity - and by code-naming the 12th release of Fedora after Constantine, Red Hat is by no means suggesting that the Linux empire is crumbling or that the warring between the political, military, and religious powers that led to Constantine's ascension to rule is somehow also going on in the Linux arena. Rather, Red Hat is emphasizing Constantine's openness to new ideas.

Mirage is a Banshee plugin which can automatically add acoustically similar songs to the ones you have already added. This is a very useful plugin if you are an avid banshee user. All you need to do is, add the kind of song you want to play into the special playlist and this playlist will automagically generate similar sounding songs.

Five years ago, on the 20th of October, 2004, Mark Shuttleworth and the "warm-hearted Warthogs" from the developer team announced the first official Ubuntu release.

Vega Strike is an free and Open Source 3D Action-Space-Sim (works on Windows, Linux and Mac OSX) that lets you trade, fight, and explore in a vast universe . You should definitely try this if you are a fan of movies such as Star Trek, Star Wars, or anything else involving spaceships of all sizes in space fighting, merchandising, and exploring. The physics is very realistic, and it feels a lot like flying an actual spaceship. Just one slight crash into a mothership causes damage, and just one hit from a space pirate sends sparks flying all over the place.

Marvell has announced four processor families -- Armada 100, Armada 500, Armada 600, and Armada 1000 -- based on ARM cores. Touted as "a top to bottom solution for mobile computing and intelligent devices," the SoCs offer single or dual cores with clock speeds from 400MHz to 1.2GHz, the company says.

Following a number of Windows Mobile 6.5 based phones, smartphone market newcomer Acer has now announced its first Android model. It's based on a Snapdragon processor, likely clocked at 1 GHz, with 256 MB RAM. The Android 1.6 operating system (code named "Donut") is housed on its internal 512 MB Flash drive and there is a microSDHC slot for adding extra storage. The 3.5 inch capacitive touch screen has a resolution of 800 × 480 pixels.

Technology companies negotiate a particularly messy obstacle course from the moment of conception -- jumping hurdles associated with venture capital, fending off and holding their own with fierce (and worthy) competitors, constantly changing and innovating products and services to meet the demands of the customer base. Open source companies have an additional complicating factor -- the business model is mysterious to many potential customers, and competitors (fierce, worthy, or otherwise) are often 800 pound gorillas with names and logos recognizable to CTO, CIO and Luddite alike.

Even while pushing his new SharePoint cloud services, Steve Ballmer understands the recent Sidekick data loss incident isn't going away. But he's doing his level best to minimize it and its impact on Microsoft's cloud strategy.

There are many Linux based mobile platforms available today: Maemo, Openmoko and Android. Of these, it is probably Android that has created the most noise in and out of open sources circles. Until now however there have not been many successful devices running Google's mobile OS, and the ones that exist didn't present much of a challenge to the iPhone. Things are starting to change however.

In late August we started asking our readers for any questions they had for NVIDIA about Linux and this graphics company's support of open-source operating systems. Twelve pages worth of questions were accumulated and we finally have the answers to a majority of them. NVIDIA's Andy Ritger, who leads the user-space side of the NVIDIA UNIX Graphics Driver team for workstation, desktop, and notebook GPUs, answered these questions. With that said, there are some great, in-depth technical answers and not the usual marketing speak found in many interviews. While Linux is our focus, Andy's team and his answers for the most part apply equally to NVIDIA drivers on Solaris and FreeBSD platforms too. There are many questions that range from the status of new features in their proprietary graphics driver to why it is unlikely there will be any official open-source support from NVIDIA to download percentages of their Linux driver.

This is an introduction to a case study that was published recently, this case study is a good example for everyone of us, if we need to extend the use of opensource and especially Linux we need to start from the basic, that are our children, and the best place where to start , are the schools .

Italian remote access specialist NoMachine announced a version of its X Windows-based, Linux-compatible NX Remote Access solution for small businesses. The NX Small Business Server, which offers up to 10 concurrent sessions, incorporates last month's release of NX 3.4.0, which added multi-monitor support.

You may have heard of Andrew Wyatt, a lead developer for Eeebuntu which recently posted on his personal blog that he is fed up with Ubuntu and he will abandon the project. Well, he is not abandoning Eeebuntu, but instead, Eeebuntu will switch to Debian.

SpringSource (which, it's easy to forget, is now a division of VMware), introduced Spring 3.0 today, a major new version of the company’s Java development framework. SpringSource is targeting developers focused on web and service-based applications with the new release. This release of Spring's framework is the first since VMware's acquisition of the company, and version 3.0 is backward compatible with version 2.5. It has full REST support for web applications.

Some of the best software available is open source, but non-proprietary software has enemies as well as friends. Not surprisingly, then there's been plenty of fog on Capitol Hill about free and open source software (FOSS) for a decade now.

Just how important are computer operating systems, anyway? We're going to get an indication Thursday morning, when Microsoft Corp. is scheduled to launch Windows 7, successor to the much-maligned Windows Vista and what many critics believe is the replacement for Windows XP that Vista should have been. XP will be exactly eight years old next Sunday, and that is kind of old. In late August, Apple Inc. launched Snow Leopard, which has had a good reception among users and critics. I've reviewed Snow Leopard and shall review Windows 7 in due course. My early impressions of Win7 are positive, however.

Americans buy new cell phones every 18 months, Europeans buy them every 15 months, and the Japanese every 9 months. Global replacement rates for digital cameras range between two and three years. And U.S. businesses replace their PCs every four years. Where do most of these used products go? Directly into the trash. Indeed, in the United States alone, consumers throw away 400 million electronic products each year.

[If that hardware ran FOSS it would keep much of it from having to be thrown out in the first place. - Scott]

Linux vendor MontaVista Software is expanding its Carrier Grade Linux (CGL) product offering to include new next generation LTE (define) wireless and networking capabilities. MontaVista Carrier Grade Edition 5.1 is the first major release of the platform in nearly two years, and remains compatible with most of the underlying architecture from the CGE 5.0 release. With MontaVista Carrier Grade Edition Linux widely deployed in network equipment at service providers around the world, change is not always a good thing and neither is being on the bleeding edge of Linux development.

As major PC makers prepare to introduce Windows 7 systems on Oct. 22, upstarts like System76 are maintaining their focus on the Ubuntu market and preparing to preload Ubuntu 9.10 on a range of PCs starting Oct. 29. Here’s a preview of what’s to come.