Unixster

It all originated from the need to host GNUmed Live CDs, VMware images and so on. Nothing comes for free and there was no way we could host these images on the GNUmed servers. That is why we started the GNUmed Live project on sourceforge. This gives us the room we need to offer GNUmed in a form that allows users to try GNUmed without going through the whole installation process.

Well, it’s been a few weeks since the launch of Apple’s comically named “iPad,” and there’s no doubt the world has much to think over. That’s particularly true for those in the FOSS community, of course, given the decidedly closed nature of Apple’s new device. Fans of Cupertino may be swooning with delight, but the picture is less clear for those of us in the rest of the world. The new device is “a frightening step backward for computing and for media distribution,” according to the Free Software Foundation.

The many thousands of free games available for Linux has made it difficult to select which ones deserve a special mention. For this article, our objective is not to necessarily select games which have flawless graphics and sound, but instead to identify games which are highly addictive and have great playability. It has taken us weeks of heated discussions to whittle down the games into just 42 titles.

Free online encyclopaedia Wikipedia is celebrating a new milestone – an article on Norwegian actress Beate Eriksen added on Monday took the English-language version of Wikipedia over the three million article mark. The encyclopaedia, which first went online in January 2001, now contains a total of more than 13 million articles in more than 200 languages. The English-language Wikipedia, as the oldest version, remains the leading version. The German version is second with more than 940,000 articles, and the French version is third with 840,000 articles.

The Register’s latest video webcast, an expert look at open source and traditional proprietary software models, is now available on-demand from the Reg archives. This broadcast explores the relative merits of open source and traditional proprietary software, and discusses how they can best be made to co-exist happily. El Reg event moderator Tim Phillips welcomed Steve Harris of Novell and Freeform Dynamics’ Tony Lock into our swanky London studio. Joining the chaps over the wire from across the pond were Frank Rego of Novell and Jose Thomas of Microsoft.

Sixteen years ago today, Ian Murdock announced the "imminent completion of a brand-new Linux release". The release was to be called the Debian Linux Release and was the start of one of the most popular community based distributions of Linux. It also became the basis for the Ubuntu Linux distribution. Debian GNU/Linux is renowned for its community’s commitment to a free software philosophy.

What do all these licenses do for you? That’s the 64 license question. Today I’m pondering if the current open source model is still valid or if it’s outdated. Do we need licensing for open source software? Do we need the GPL, LGPL, APL and all the other licenses that plague…er, grace us? If your software is free and open source, why bother with a license at all? The software writer owns the copyright so why put users or potential users through the paces of licensing? What exactly is to be gained by creating and enforcing a license for this kind of software?

This tutorial shows how you can set up a Kubuntu 9.04 desktop that is a full-fledged replacement for a Windows desktop, i.e. that has all the software that people need to do the things they do on their Windows desktops. The advantages are clear: you get a secure system without DRM restrictions that works even on old hardware, and the best thing is: all software comes free of charge. Kubuntu 9.04 is derived from Ubuntu 9.04 and uses the KDE desktop instead of the GNOME desktop.

Boxee is a cross-platform freeware media center software with promising new social networking features. Boxee is based on XBMC media center, an award winning open source project. Since i had already tested the latest XBMC 9.04, i was not expecting anything dramatic from an alpha release of Boxee. I was way wrong.