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As some try to release Lebanon’s government from the clutches of political paralysis so it can start tackling economic policy, a small but mighty group of advocates say the solution to many of the country’s economic and social woes lies in free technologies... “Security would improve because the country will depend on itself [for its electronic security] instead of depending on others”

Are you wondering what Linux and Free/Open Source software have to offer you? Check out Cynthia Harvey's monster list of 715 FOSS applications for all occasions and all operating systems.

Novell throws FOSS under the bus to make a deal with Microsoft. Pamela Jones wonders why bother with Groklaw, if helping companies like Novell only leads to getting the shaft yet again?

There's the release of Wine 1.3.10 on this Christmas Eve for those with extra time to test the newest Wine over the holidays. Wine 1.3.10 has a number of changes worth checking out...

Ubuntu Linux spent the last few months of 2010 dropping bombshells on the Linux world. Founder Mark Shuttleworth is clearly intent on shaking the foundations of his popular Linux distro and pushing it, and Linux at large, in new directions.…

Due out today is the latest GNOME 3.0 development snapshot, GNOME 2.91.4, and because of that in recent days there's been a slew of GNOME package check-ins. Landing yesterday was GTK+ 2.91.7, the latest version of the GTK+ 3.0 tool-kit that plays one of the most important roles on the GNOME desktop. While it's getting late in the release cycle and this GNOME tool-kit has already delivered lots of new features, the changes keep rolling...

A month ago we reported that two versions of Mandriva were coming soon after a number of its developers had left the project to form the Mageia Linux distribution after Mandriva's parent company was facing some financial hardship and its future was questionable during this period. The two versions of Mandriva being worked on were Mandriva 2010.02 and Mandriva 2011, with the former having been released today...

Besides gaming being one of the last strongholds for Microsoft Windows users from switching over to Linux (though this is beginning to change), accounting software is an area that is even in worse shape under Linux -- free software or not -- aside from the available web-based accounting solutions. GnuCash is one of the Linux desktop accounting packages for small businesses, but it's not the greatest; I am still an Intuit customer for their superior financial products. GnuCash 2.4.0 was released yesterday and sadly it really doesn't change the situation at all...

It was just last week that Theo de Raadt, OpenBSD founder and developer, posted an email that claimed the Federal Bureau of Investigations paid OpenBSD developers to leave backdoors in its IPSEC network security stack. Since then early audits have found some questionable code, contributors denied any wrongdoing, and the original source reaffirmed his allegations.

Akkana Peck introduces David's Batch Processor, a Gimp plugin that makes editing big batches of photos a breeze. Resize them for the Web, make them lighter or darker, crop, rotate-- DBP does it all.

For anyone that happens to be on holiday this week (or just have excess time otherwise), there is another lively and polarized discussion that's been taking place for the past several days on the DRI mailing list. What does it involve if it's not about developer disagreements amongst themselves? Embedded GPU driver support on Linux, of course. This mailing list thread just reaffirms how the situation is a great big mess...

Spit and polish desktop beta goes live Mozilla has released a new Firefox 4 beta for Android and Maemo, hot on the heels on its latest desktop beta.…

2010 was a big year for enterprise Linux releases and the Linux kernel as the business world grows ever-more reliant on Linux.

Oracle's VM VirtualBox virtualization software just went into beta two weeks ago, but since then they have put out four beta releases. Now though Oracle is already ready to announce the official release of VM VirtualBox 4.0...

It’s test day time again, folks, and this one’s a biggie! You may have read about the brand new initialization system, systemd, written by Lennart Poettering. At the moment, we’re planning to use it as the default initialization system for Fedora 14. Obviously, this is a bold step with a fairly new piece of code.

Richard Stallman answers the top 25 questions from reddit readers.

A fascinating interview ...

Two years ago at GUADEC, the annual developer's conference for GNOME, it was announced that GNOME 2.30 would be released as GNOME 3.0. With GNOME's long-standing tradition of putting out major updates every six months, this put the GNOME 3.0 release to be in March of 2010. Last November it was then decided to delay GNOME 3.0 to September of 2010 to give developers more time to prepare on this first major overhaul to the GNOME desktop in years. It's just been announced though from this year's GUADEC conference happening this week that GNOME 3.0 will now not be released until March of 2011.

Whether you are an owner of an ATI FirePro V3800 that retails for just over $100 USD, the proud owner of an ATI FirePro V8800 that goes for over $1,300 USD, or any of the FirePro products in-between, you will want to update your graphics driver when AMD puts out their next stable software update. Back in March AMD put out an amazing FirePro Linux driver that increased the performance of their workstation graphics cards already on the market (and the other Evergreen-based workstation cards that entered the market soon after) by an astonishing amount. Our independent tests of this proprietary Linux driver update found that the performance in some workstation applications had increased by up to 59% by simply installing this updated driver while other OpenGL tests had just improved rather modestly with 20%+ gains. AMD though is preparing to release another driver update for Microsoft Windows and Linux that ups their workstation graphics performance even more! We have run some tests of this new beta driver against their older driver with both their low-end and ultra-high-end FirePro products and have found the improvements again to be astonishing.

The new Amazon EC2 Cluster Compute Instance may be a game changer in HPC

The government of India has unveiled a prototype of a touchscreen, tablet computer which it expects to sell for $35 initially... The Indian prototype is impressive--especially at a $35 price point. The device runs on a variation of Linux.