This tutorial is supposed to guide the reader through the features of the Cinnamon desktop, Mint's new desktop environment to be used in Linux Mint 13. Cinnamon concentrates on holding on to classic design and functionality in times where Gnome 3 and Unity come up with different innovations to the user interface.

The European Parliament is on the verge of adopting a directive reforming standards, reform which would introduce FRAND patent licensing terms, an undefined term which has been seen as a direct attack on the fundamental principles of Free and Open Source software. The Business Software Alliance has been very active trying to get FRAND terms into the directive.

Autologin and passwordless login play a critical role in the physical security posture of your computer. In KDE, they are very easy to configure. But being easy to configure does not mean that you should. Why?

From a security perspective, passwordless login falls in the same category as autologin. It is, therefore, not recommended to enable it for an account with management privileges.

What some mainstream open source projects, like openSUSE and KDE, would like from other projects, that'll help them do their job better.

This tutorial shows how you can install an Apache2 webserver on an Ubuntu 11.10 server with PHP5 (through PHP-FPM) and MySQL support. PHP-FPM (FastCGI Process Manager) is an alternative PHP FastCGI implementation with some additional features useful for sites of any size, especially busier sites.

We’re going to tackle mail merge. Mail merge is a powerful, time-saving word processor feature for addressing mass-mailings and form letters. It’s easy but a little weird in LibreOffice, so follow along and learn how to be a mail merge guru.

If you browse the Web today, your browser will probably download and run nonfree JavaScript software on your behalf. You should be able to say no to that software—but to date, that hasn't been practical. JavaScript License Web Labels are our newest effort to make this easier.

The folks behind DuckDuckGo have been deftly positioning the search engine as one you should be using, if you are tired or want to avoid snooping by Google and others like it. It is a message that I have bought into, and I think you will too, once you get to know how Google and other search engines track and bubble you.

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A French laptop buyer has won a refund from Lenovo after a four-year legal battle over the cost of a Windows license he didn't want. The judgment could open the way for PC buyers elsewhere in Europe to obtain refunds for bundled software they don't want, French campaign group No More Racketware said.

I just finished writing my third e-book about Perl one-liners. Perl one-liners are small and awesome Perl programs that fit in a single line of code and they do one thing really well. These things include changing line spacing, numbering lines, doing calculations, converting and substituting text, deleting and printing certain lines, parsing logs, editing files in-place, and many more.

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LibreOffice, the community-driven fork of OpenOffice, appears to have a very healthy and growing group of code contributors. The Document Foundation has published new stats that portray the climbing rates of developer involvement both in terms of numbers of people and numbers of code commits.

This tutorial shows how you can install and run ownCloud3 on a Debian Squeeze or Ubuntu 11.10 system that has nginx installed instead of Apache (LEMP = Linux + nginx (pronounced "engine x") + MySQL + PHP).

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There are different reasons people use Unix-like operating systems, including configurable, availability free of charge, powerful command line interface an many more. Some people are motivated by the moral issue: they reject non-free software.

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GNU Generation is an ongoing community and competition to involve pre-university and high school students (approximately age 13-18) in Free Software. Once registered, students work on a project. Each year, participants will be evaluated based on their contribution to Free Software. All active contributors will receive a complementary membership to the FSF, and the top contributors will win a GNU/Linux netbook! The community has currently 98 participants.

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SMPlayer may have been dead for a while, but it seems very active now, with two releases in just one month. The latest SMPlayer 0.7.0 brings basic support for YouTube and MPlayer2 as well as other new features.

On January 30th, 2012, I started a petition requesting that the U.S. government broaden their use of Free Software and Open Source software to save money. I deeply believe that this one step is PART of the solution to the problem of the crushing national debt that the United States is currently facing. Software expenditures are a very small part of our national budget.

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"Apparently, every Chinese manufacturer is breaking the GPLv2 by not releasing the sources for their modified Linux kernel[...]What is the Free Software Foundation doing?"

Today is the last day of the FSF's membership drive-- and they have really been turning up their game lately. If you appreciate free software, please join and help meet the goal!

Join here! https://my.fsf.org/associate/support_freedom?referrer=6894

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Yes, Microsoft is demanding — and in many cases, receiving royalties — from companies selling devices that run Android, an operating system based on Linux. This shows that its place in the world remains complicated. Though it’s moving to the web, it is still very much a company that makes money selling software — and it still has an interest in protecting this business.

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Learn how to use Drush, a Drupal command-line shell, which makes a Drupal administrator’s job easy. It lets you perform internal cleanup, do a fresh Drupal install, install and enable modules, or create users, without the aid of a GUI.