Contributor agreements that aggregate the copyrights of open source code in favour of a single corporate sponsor are a sure sign of a community where one member has more rights than the rest. And equality is the key to success.

A collaborative activity dubbed Project Harmony is now under way between corporate and corporate-sponsored participants in the free and open source software communities (not to be confused with the Apache Java project of the same name). The project seeks to harmonise the various participant and contributor agreements - collectively termed "contributor agreements" by some - used by many open source projects. Read More

The Linux Mint team has released the final version of Linux Mint 9 ("Isadora"), based on Ubuntu 10.04. Linux Mint 9 features a new software manager with 30,000 packages, a new backup tool, and menu and interface improvements, says the team.
The Isadora release follows up on Linux Mint 8 ("Helena"), which released an RC1 GNOME version in November, and a final KDE release in early February. (Based on Ubuntu 9.10 ("Karmic Koala"), Linux Mint 8 added improvements such as new OEM installation features, an option to ignore updates, and "menu places" that can be configured by users.) Read More

LinuxCertified Inc, a leading provider of Linux training and services, today announced its next Linux Device Driver Development Course class to be held in South Bay, CA from September 20th - 22nd, 2010. Read More

If you've been a desktop Linux user for any length of time, chances are excellent that you remember a company once called Linspire. At its time of creation, Linspire was brought forth with a very specific mission: Make desktop Linux easy to use while 'one-uping' Microsoft Windows.

Perhaps this is why the original name of both the company and the operating system they sold was called Lindows. After various legal battles with Microsoft however, Lindows eventually became known as Linspire as part of a settlement agreement.

Now for the big question: Why is the Linux community 'reasonably' happy with Ubuntu while Linspire was almost immediately painted as a mockery within Linux universe? Read More

How to Install iTunes on Ubuntu Linux: If you are new to Linux and have been using iTunes for managing your iPod, iPhone, or iPad, you may find it frustrating that there is still no native support for iTunes on Linux.

If you only have an iPod, you may try first any of the iTunes replacements that we have featured here. However, if iTunes is really a necessity and that you can't live without it, there is a simple way to install it on Linux. Read More

As I alluded to recently, the second round of Windows 7 vs. Linux benchmarks -- with the first round consisting of Is Windows 7 Actually Faster Than Ubuntu 10.04 and Mac OS X vs. Windows 7 vs. Ubuntu benchmarks -- are currently being done atop a Lenovo ThinkPad W510 notebook that is quite popular with business professionals. With the high-end ThinkPad W510 boasting a dual quad-core Intel Core i7 CPU with Hyper-Threading plus a NVIDIA Quadro FX 880M graphics processor, we began this second round of cross-platform benchmarks by running a set of workstation tests. In this article we are mainly looking at the workstation graphics (via SPECViewPerf) performance along with some CPU/disk tests. Read More

Analyst group ABI Research has predicted that Linux will account for over 62 per cent of the market for non-smartphone mobile devices by 2015. “The number of Linux-oriented initiatives recently seen in the mobile industry indicates that Linux will be a key technology in the next generation of netbooks, media tablets, and other mobile devices,” commented the report’s author Victoria Fodale.

In its report, the group states its belief that despite the growing number of Linux variants in the mobile devices market, their unification around a base of upstream components gives vendors the best possible outcome of sharing costs whilst still differentiating their offerings to the market place. Read More

Music education is a field of study connected with the learning and teaching of music. Music is an essential part of the fabric of our society, and the intrinsic value of music is widely recognized. Human culture uses music to carry forward its ideas and ideals.

The benefits of music education should not be underestimated. Studies have shown that music education can offer a marked improvement in a child's reading skills. By receiving training in complex rhythmic and tonal skills, music education enhances cognitive performance in reading skills. Music education also helps with mathematics and science. The skill of keeping a steady rhythm, working out how long a note is, thinking about complex patterns are just a few examples of how music helps in this way. Read More

In recent months LinuxLinks Towers has been consumed with playing games. In fact, some might contend that game playing has become so excessive that real life has been neglected to a degree. We have seen team challenges, leaderboards, and even the odd wager. Healthy competition to say the least!

Many of the LinuxLinks crew grew up playing games on the ZX Spectrum, an 8-bit personal home computer. By today's standards, the games were simple with basic graphics plagued by attribute clash and primitive sound generation. However, this did not stop the best games being incredibly addictive. The famous Crash magazine (a monthly publication devoted to the ZX Spectrum) used to rate games by their addictive qualities. This was often the rating that interested us the most. Read More

As part of its effort to graduate its Chrome browser to the upcoming Chrome OS, Google is working to add device orientation to the browser's capabilities.

Not that orientation — the ability for an app or OS to know that up is up and down is down — is all that revolutionary of a breakthrough. Developers have been tapping to that ability on the iPhone (UIDeviceOrientation) and Android-based devices (SensorManager) for some time. Read More