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Wine-Reviews and Bordeaux T-shirts now available at freewear.org Well, first, our T-shirts are free as in speech but not as in beer, I mean, you can wear them orwards, backwards and sideways, and we will not sue you for sharing them with your friends. We think different, and give preference to quality over amount of colours

DigiKam main developer Gilles Caulier has released version 1.0 of the KDE photo management software just in time for Christmas 2009.

Intel announced its new "Pineview" Atom processors, touting a 20 percent improvement in average power consumption and a smaller package size. The N450, aimed at netbooks, is a single-core Atom processor clocked at 1.66GHz, while the D410 and D510, single- and dual-core respectively, target entry-level desktop PCs, the company says.

After a wave of operating system releases, it's easy to become somewhat bored with the software side of computing. Windows 7 is here and looking like the "real" Vista for many; Mac OS X 10.6, meanwhile, adds spit-shine to Leopard and gives its engine a good tuning too. In the Linux camp, distributions are taking regular steps forward in usability. But it's all become rather routine; a case of incremental improvement rather than revolution. So where's all the real fun happening? Where are the radical new ideas, the Wild West code commits and the geekery and hackery that really drive innovation?

One of the difficulties open source software faces is in implementing support — where it is even possible to do so — for the wide variety of codecs, formats, and other proprietary technologies that users have come to rely on. One such technology is Microsoft's Silverlight framework, which until early this year, was a no-go for Linux users. That changed in January, when the first version of the Moonlight project — a collaboration between the Novell-sponsored Mono project and Microsoft, begun in 2007 — was released, providing Linux users with Open Source Silverlight support. Also included, provided that Moonlight has been obtained via Novell and meets certain other conditions, is a license to Microsoft's free but closed-source Media Pack, containing codecs needed to decode audio and video streams.

With the end of the next kernel version's main development phase, the most important new features of Linux 2.6.33 have been determined: DRBD, Nouveau, support of the Trim ATA command and a bandwidth controller for block devices. The developers have also improved the Radeon drivers and the support of Intel Wi-Fi chips. New stable kernels also fix a vulnerability in the code of Ext4, but will shortly be superseded by even more current versions.

Digikam is a powerful and complete photo management tool for KDE. Among its many features is the ability to run batch processes, thanks to the Kipi plugin set, which is also used in other KDE software like Gwenview. With a few simple clicks, users can manipulate multiple photos simultaneously, without having to remember long command line strings or taking countless hours to edit each file.

It has been roughly a month since Tech Data launched Open Tech — an open source channel partner initiative. Why is the big distributor interested in the open source market? And how is Open Tech performing so far? I caught up with Tech Data VP Stacy Nethercoat for answers. Here's the interview.

There are probably more than 250,000 Free and Open Source Software tools available to solve problems. How can an administrator support the largest subset possible? Debian provides the most cost effective way.

What is it that really holding Linux & FOSS software back from absolute domination? In a sentence "go read the source code". The thing that's meant to be its strength is its greatest flaw. But its fixable, fix this one, stand well back, watch the World Change!

If your new year's resolution is to kick the Microsoft habit, here are some Linux versions you might want to look at.

Jolicloud aims to be a solid netbook OS that "just works." But then, don't they all? Paul Ferrill takes it for a spin and learns if it lives up to the hype.

A first shot at creating a port of the Qt toolkit to Google's Native Client (NaCL) environment allows Qt applications to run as applets within a browser. The port is not yet complete, but it already offers mouse and keyboard support, rudimentary support for the QtGUI and QtCore libraries and several more complex widgets. The biggest problem with the current port though is that the event handling in NaCL is polling based which makes applications spin using 100% of the CPU; the developers descibe this as "not quite our preferred style".

With the purchase of NBC Universal, Comcast's power grows unabated. It may be up to cities and towns building their own municipal networks to find a way to fight that growing hegemony.

Continuation of a tutorial for non-geek Linux users, this time explaining what a "Distro" is and why it is important that you know about the Distro concept.

Announced today the release of Openoffice3.2 RC1, the new release comes with new features and improvements. Note that the final release of Openoffice 3.2 is planned for XX January 2010.

digiKam team have announced availability of digiKam 1.0.0. The last stable release was 0.10.0 in 2009-03-18; 8 months ago. This version brings a long list of new features and bugs-fixes: 30 features have been added and 485 bugs have been closed since last version.

Google Map Saver is a portable software program that feels more responsive and less complicated to use. The user can enter a location or point of interest and the program will download the available data from Google Maps. Then just click on the Go! button and the map of the location will be displayed, this process takes only a few seconds on a fast Internet connection.

When Google first announced its Linux-based Android mobile phone platform just over two years ago, many were sceptical. After all, the reasoning went, the world of mobile phones is very different from that of computers. Similar doubts greeted the first Android phone, the HTC Dream (also known as the T-Mobile G1), when it appeared last year. But something strange has happened in the last twelve months, with a growing chorus of approval for the Android platform and its phones.

As Mark Shuttleworth transitions Canonical’s CEO crown to Jane Silber, The VAR Guy believes there are at least nine major Ubuntu priorities that Silber will need to address. Here’s a look at the challenges — and opportunities — awaiting Silber when she assumes all of Canonical’s CEO responsibilities in March 2010.