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A few weeks ago I was working on a PC when I needed to grab the motherboard driver CD. In a perfect world, the CD would be located in a nice protective sleeve, safely kept away from the nasty elements that encompass the IT tech area (read: coffee, scratches, and the occasional jelly doughnut). But in this case, it appeared someone had taken this CD and wiped it.

The July 2011 update for KDE is now available. KDE SC 4.6.5 is this new release, and as usual for KDE monthly point releases, it just brings a variety of bug-fixes and translation updates...

Following last week's completion of the Radeon driver power management tests against the AMD Catalyst driver, now it is time to turn the tables on NVIDIA. In this article are some power consumption and thermal tests when comparing the latest open-source "Nouveau" driver code against NVIDIA's closed-source proprietary driver.

Netflix has launched a certification program for its Netflix HD application, awarding its first seal of approval to Texas Instruments' OMAP 4 processor and WiLink 7.0 chipset running on Android 2.3. TI's dual-core OMAP 4 won the certification thanks to its ability to play 1080p video at 30fps and its on-chip support for DRM (digital rights management)....

With the great popularity of C, you would think that a wide variety of solutions would have flourished

Microsoft has entered into a patent-licensing agreement with Wistron that for the first time covers Google's Chrome OS as well as Android. The agreement -- announced a day after a Microsoft-led consortium beat out Google for Nortel's wireless patents -- covers smartphones, tablets, and e-readers, suggesting Wistron may be working on a Chrome OS tablet....

Webian Shell is a web-based shell that is designed to run full-screen and function as the primary user interface for your computer. At the moment, it's still at the proof of concept stage, but 0.1 is runnable without making any modifications to your system. As it features some interesting ideas, it's worth having a play around with.

Last week we delivered results looking at the power consumption of Ubuntu 11.04 versus Windows 7, which was interesting in its own right, but in this article is a brief look at where Apple's Mac OS X operating system fits in between the power consumption of Ubuntu Linux and Microsoft Windows.

Celebrating the US Independence Day, while many Americans are spending time with their families, drinking (usually nasty) beer and BBQ'ing, others talking to Microsoft, the Red Hat virtualization team has released a new version of libvirt. The libvirt 0.9.3 release brings many changes...

Android left nude as enemies shrug on extra IP armour Apple, Microsoft, RIM, EMC, Ericsson and Sony all chipped in to buy the patents, which cover critical 4G and wireless broadband technologies, leaving Google empty handed.…

Last month when publishing Fedora 15 vs. Ubuntu 11.04 benchmarks in some of the disk workloads the Fedora Linux release was behind that of Ubuntu Natty Narwhal. Some users speculated in our forums that SELinux was to blame, but later tests show SELinux does not cause a huge performance impact. With Security Enhanced Linux not to blame, some wondered if Fedora's use of LVM, the Logical Volume Manager, by default was the cause.

Red Hat came a step closer to its goal of being the first Linux vendor to make $1 billion in revenue in one year while taking another step with its MRG offering. The GNOME foundation and Sabayon Linux also saw forward momentum, and Linux 3.0 got a speed bump.

The Sabayon community released version 6.0 of its Gentoo-based Linux distribution, moving up to Linux 2.6.39.1, but opting for GNOME 2.32.2 and KDE 4.6.4 desktop environments instead of the controversial GNOME 3.0. Sabayon 6.0 adds support for the Btrfs filesystem, switches to LibreOffice 3.3.3, and updates to version 1.0 of its Entropy package manager....

More details have surfaced about Android 3.2, including support for seven-inch screens and Qualcomm processors. The release may appear on Amazon.com's Android tablets, which are rumored to be arriving in August bearing Texas Instruments processors and could hasten the fall of the monochrome Kindle....

In a case that could threaten open source GPL licensing in Germany, a Berlin court yesterday began hearing a lawsuit from German DSL router vendor AVM against web-filtering software firm Cybits. AVM charges that by modifying Linux kernel code in router firmware, Cybits is infringing on copyright, while Cybits' defense claims GPL licensing permits it to alter the code....

The Veterans Affairs Department has awarded The Informatics Applications Group Inc. of Reston, Va., a $5 million contract to be the custodial agent to manage VA’s open source community to modernize its VistA electronic health record.

The language road in computer science is littered with the carcasses of what was to be "the next big thing." And although many niche languages do find some adoption in scripting or specialized applications, C (and its derivatives) and the Java language are difficult to displace. But Red Hat's Ceylon appears to be an interesting combination of language features, using a well-known C-style syntax but with support for object orientation and useful functional aspects in addition to an emphasis on being succinct. Explore Ceylon and find out if this future VM language can find a place in enterprise software development.

Nokia announced its long-awaited MeeGo Linux-based follow-up to the N900 phone -- but when this ships later this year it may well be the company's first and last MeeGo device. The Nokia N9 features an OMAP3630 processor, up to 64GB storage, a 3.9-inch AMOLED display, an eight-megapixel Carl Zeiss camera, NFC, and a & Harmattan& UI with swipe-gesture support, says the company....

If you spend most of your time typing on your keyboard (and I hope you don’t use that mouse very frequently, if you care for your wrists, that is), getting up to speed and practicing to become a better and faster typist is well worth the time and effort. And measuring something is the first step to improve it.

Freescale Semiconductor announced a series of 28nm-fabbed QorIQ multicore processors, featuring a 64-bit PowerPC core clocked up to 2.5GHz. The Linux-ready Advanced Multiprocessing (AMP) QorIQ series will debut in early 2012 with the T4240, offering 12 cores dual-threaded to 24 virtual cores, numerous acceleration engines, and cascading power management, says Freescale....