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Your Linux computer may have hundreds of applications installed. How can any system menu be organized sanely? How can anyone find anything? Bruce Byfield examines the different approaches taken by the Gnome and KDE teams to deal with this.

With just a few modifications and some experimentation, your Ubuntu box can realise its untapped potential. We have identified 8 tips to help you achieve this. Most of the tips are really easy to implement, and are perfectly safe.

What the heck is happening in Redmond? Is Microsoft really giving away antivirus software? Yes, friends, it appears that they are. Come on Microsoft, we really want to hate you. I've carried this Microsoft voodoo doll* around with me for years--stabbing it every time I have to pay money for one of your products on a new laptop or desktop computer. I cringe when I see "Vista Ready." And, I almost hurl penguin when I have to activate my software. So, somebody please pinch me, wake me up, take the needle out of my arm and tell me it's all been a bad trip.

A group from the ETH technical institute in Zurich is working together with software giant Microsoft on a new kind of operating system called Barrelfish. The first results are now available under an open source license.

A new wave of women's liberation is crashing on an unexpected shore, the world of free and open source developers. The FOSS communities might pride themselves with being the promoters of free, open and transparant. It is a world where a meritocracy rules, where you are judged by your skills and not by who you are of who you know. Right? Wrong!

Hot on the heels of Android 1.6 (code name Donut), the Android development team has now released version 1.6 rel 1 of the Android NDK (Native Development Kit). The NDK is a toolkit comparable with the standard Android Software Development Kit (SDK), which allows Android developers to write parts of their applications in native code languages such as C and C++.

Learn about the virtualization capabilities of both HP-UX® and AIX®, the fundamental differences between virtualization products on HP and IBM® and how they integrate with the hardware platforms in which they run. The intent of this article is to educate you and also to help you make informed decisions as to which platform works best for you, from a feature and functionality standpoint and for your long-term strategic goals.

LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP) is an open source Web development platform that uses Linux as operating system, Apache as the Web server, MySQL as the relational database management system and PHP as the object-oriented scripting language. In this Simple tutorial we will explain you how to install LAMP server on your Slackware 13. The installation will be done in 3 steps:

Microsoft has received support from an unexpected quarter in the dispute over Chrome Frame, an extension which embeds Google's Chrome browser in Internet Explorer. Mike Shaver, Vice President Engineering for Mozilla Corporation, gives his views in a blog posting in which he criticises the plug-in.

My ambition was to implement a small (better tiny) appliance for monitoring network health and network resources, short and longtime trends, running under VMware Server or VMware ESX. So I had an eye upon all components which are implemented on the system, to be as leightweight as possible. This was also the reason why no SQL DBMS based software was used. The appliance is based on Ubuntu Jeos LTS (8.04.3 at the time of this writing). Almost all used components are from the related repositories. This tutorial shows how the appliance was implemented.

Plymouth, the nifty boot splash program developed by Red Hat to replace RHGB and leverages kernel-based mode-setting to provide a flicker-free experience, is in the process of picking up more features. Committed to the Plymouth repository is now a DRM plug-in.

In a posting on his FSF blog, Richard Stallman has apologised for "repeating a criticism of Mac OS which I cannot substantiate and must presume is false". The claim, that Mac OS X has a backdoor which could install changes without the user's permission, is one that Stallman has repeated, but he now says there "is no basis to claim there is one".

Bletchley Park, the top secret code breaking hub that played a pivotal role in the outcome of World War Two, has finally been awarded development funding of some £460,500 ($735,500) from the Heritage Lottery Fund.

I loved Amarok 1.4 and even used it in Gnome. Then, I really hated all the 2.x series until this 2.2 RC1. It's kind of slow, but it finally looks like a real music player and reminds me why I liked Amarok so much. I'm currently using it in Ubuntu Jaunty and since there are only .deb files for Ubuntu Karmic posted on the announcement download link (actually those are for version 2.2 beta), I thought I'd let you know how to install it in Ubuntu Jaunty (and Fedora, thanks to Fedora-ES).

Google Summer of Code has again been a huge success for KDE this year. 37 out of 38 projects were finished successfully. Much of the work done during these projects is already merged into trunk and will be available for the users with the KDE 4.4 release in January 2010. Thanks to all students and mentors for their great work! Below you will find a short interview with each of the students, asking them about the cool things they have been working on for the past few months.

"With the up coming release of GIMP 3.0, I think that GIMP should be renamed to simply “Wilber.” Though it would no longer be an acronym for “GNU Image Manipulation Program”, but it would totally eliminate any possibly offensive terminology in exchange for a name everyone can love, especially the young, and it would give GIMP a chance at the big times."

Exaile is a music manager and player for GTK+ written in Python. It incorporates automatic fetching of album art, lyrics fetching, artist/album information via Wikipedia, Last.fm scrobbling, support for many portable media players including iPods, internet radio such as shoutcast, and tabbed playlists.

Once upon a time HP and DEC computers were made by engineers for engineers. The biggest difference between them was that some HP customers wore ties. Having just taken delivery of a HP Mini 5101 pre-loaded with Suse Linux Enterprise Edition 11, it appears that HP still has some engineers left, hiding deep within, perhaps only coming out at night. Certainly the suits running HP don’t seem to want customers to know that Suse is an option. And Novell doesn’t seem all that keen on its adopted child, either.

In an interview with TechCrunch this week, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer goes out of his way to avoid naming Google instead calling them "the incumbent."

When I first began using Linux back in 2001, the themes I saw were beautiful but they don't compare to some of the themes I'm seeing lately. I'd like to show you some themes which will, in my opinion, spark more interest in GNOME themes.