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Flourish is University of Illinois at Chicago's free annual conference dedicated to celebrating and elevating open source software and open culture in the Midwest. Through talks, workshops and coding sprints, attendees experience and reconnect with the philosophies and technologies that make the open source movement a key driver of innovation. Flourish is also a great opportunity to meet up with old friends and to make new ones.

This article shows how you can build your own video community using lighttpd with its mod_flv_streaming module (for streaming .flv videos, the format used by most major video communities such as YouTube) and its mod_secdownload module (for preventing hotlinking of the videos) on Ubuntu 9.10. I will use FlowPlayer as the video player, a free Flash video player with support for lighttpd's mod_flv_streaming module. I will also show how you can encode videos (.mp4 .mov .mpg .3gp .mpeg .wmv .avi) to the FLV format supported by Adobe Flash.

File sharing just became legal in Spain, changing the rules on what is legal, and what is fair. In a court ruling that will surely shake the Spanish and European legal scene for years to come, a Spanish judge has today declared not only that sites containing links to copyrighted information are legal, but that torrenting copyrighted information for non-profit reasons is also inside of the law. If you think that we are in some way confused, or kidding, here is a quote from the judge in question: “P2P networks are mere conduits for the transmission of data between Internet users, and on this basis they do not infringe rights protected by Intellectual Property laws” It is hard to confuse what that means. Provided that the sharer of the information is not profiting (garnering any revenues whatsoever), off of the transfer, then the action is legal now in Spain according to this new precedent.

Proprietary giant is licensing open source to its partners. What is going on? Over the past few weeks Microsoft has been licensing Linux to a number of its partners, most notably Amazon. Although the idea of Microsoft, a company steeped in proprietary software, licensing open source software is ludicrous it's not completely unexpected. It's also not the first time Microsoft has played the Linux patent game and we can expect to see more deals in the future. So what's going on?

Autopackage is a distro neutral method of packaging up software for distribution to the Linux platform. It provides a sleek GUI for doing so and even installs itself from the first .package file you run on your system.

Measuring at just 2 x 2 x 2.2 inches this is the smallest Desktop PC. And it's running Linux, one more point for Linux coolness.

OpenShot video editor has steadily improved since its official release 2 months ago. OpenShot 1.1 even got included into upcoming Ubuntu Lucid 10.04. That news itself speaks volumes about quality and functionality of this budding new video editing app for Linux.

Cloud computing is known as the next big thing in IT. But what is it exactly? In a cloud, the key players are the user and provider. Users have access to the cloud resources in form of (web) services, containing the functionality of software (inside the browser), platforms or infrastructures. Let’s see what’s behind it…

Exposing a system to the Internet means that you’ll soon (within hours) experience login attempts from random locations, from people you don’t know and from those with unclear motivations. DenyHosts is an SSH security tool in the form of a python script that helps prevent brute force and dictionary-based attacks against your systems. On my home system, I have at least one such attempt added to my /etc/hosts.deny file per day. I use DenyHosts to maintain that stealth watch over my insignificant system here in my dusty little corner of the Internet that I call home.

Software patents have long been the source of a great deal of concern in the free software community; patents are by far the biggest restraint on our ability to program our own computers. Those who worry about these things have expected that attacks might come from patent trolls, or from software companies with fading prospects. Apple's lawsuit against HTC shows that the real threat may come from a different direction. HTC is not normally thought of as a Linux company; it is a Taiwanese manufacturer which provides cellular phone handsets to a number of other companies.

From Mark Shuttleworth himself: "The default position of the window controls will remain the left, throughout beta1. We're interested in data which could influence the ultimate decision. There are good reasons both for the change, and against them, and ultimately the position will be decided based on what we want to achieve over time."

The world of Linux applications continues to expand and improve, so check out Eric Geier's roundup of ten great Linux applications you might not have discovered yet: media players, Web page designer, video creation, run Linux on Windows, Windows apps on Linux, and more.

It's Sunday now in Deventer and, except for Lukas Tvrdy, all Krita hackers have gone home -- or, in the case of your author, stayed home. Time for tea and writing a recap of the whole sprint and hackfest!

These are testing times: if you want to experience the latest advances on the Linux desktop, you have to be prepared to test things and accept that stability is a secondary feature. The continued development of KDE 4 is the perfect example. Many of its users have felt like guinea pigs over the last couple of years, while its developers have filled in the missing blanks on the path to a fully operational desktop.

Alfresco Software, which specializes in open source enterprise content management, says it more than doubled its partner network in 2009. But here’s the really interesting part: Alfresco partners are earning $10 to $15 worth of services for every dollar of Alfresco Enterprise subscriptions sold. Here are the details.

Bring the mightiness of Vim to Firefox! If you’re ready for a fully keyboard-driven browser, the Vimperator add-on for Firefox can help you do away with mouse-based drudgery and add the awesomeness of vi-like keybindings to Firefox 3.5 and later.

Last year MTE gave you a hands on review of the beta release of Ubuntu One, Canonical’s answer to the popular Dropbox file syncing service. Ubuntu One allows users to have a local folder on their computers linked and synced with a folder on an Ubuntu One server. They can also share files with their other computers and even with other users. This was good news for many mobile Ubuntu users who needed the flexibility that online storage space affords them. Unfortunately, KDE users, those who use Kubuntu, were left out of the initial release. In order to use Ubuntu One, they would have to install the Gnome client or use only the web-based interface.

This'll be short. I read a review of the current incarnation of Ubuntu 10.04, code named "Lucid Lynx" at the In a Tux blog this morning. The author pointed out a number of flaws, great and small, with the Lynx but finished up the review by saying, "This version of Ubuntu 10.04 is not a stable or final release of Ubuntu, so some of these thing my change. Please do not judge them to soon" (and the spelling errors are the sole property of the In a Tux author). Since the Daylight Savings Time change has "jet lagged" me into near-incomprehensibility (and that's hard to spell when you're really tired), I wasn't quite sure when the Lynx was to be released and I decided to look up the release schedule at Ubuntu.

It’s popular to hate on IE8, and easy to do! But the truth is, Firefox could take a few cues from stodgy old Internet Explorer. From user-friendly features to deployment tools, there are still a few things that IE does better.

We, my partner and I receive a regular advertising newsletter from Dell, because our company is on their mailing list, apparently although we have never purchased a single Dell, we are one of their best customers (the deal is offered to quote "our best customers"). The latest one was pushing a special rate on Dell Laptops and desktops with Windows 7, around $1750. So I rang the up and asked for a price with Linux.