The Russian government is planning to invest 150 million rouble (about 3.5 million Euro) in developing an secure open source desktop for public administrations, a Russian business newspaper reported on Wednesday and confirmed by the AFP news agency. According to the news item in Vedomosti, the government wants to reduce it’s dependence on single vendor of a proprietary operating system [...]

The Portuguese Association for Free Software (Ansol) is urging the government to stop buying proprietary software licences without a public tender, and to switch to free and open source software. The advocacy group uncovered that five public administrations in 2009 spent more than 120 million Euro in total on proprietary software licences for operating systems and office applications, without properly [...]

Free Software Foundation (FSF) News: The Free Technology Academy (FTA) and the Free Software Foundation (FSF) announced today their partnership in the FTA’s Associate Partner Network. The Network aims to expand the availability of professional educational courses and materials covering the concepts and applications of free software and free standards. The FTA consists of an advanced virtual campus with course [...]

Scientists at The University of Manchester have developed software for mobile phones that can track your facial features in real-time. Eventually it will be able to tell who the user is, where they are looking and even how they are feeling. The method is believed to be unrivalled for speed and accuracy and could lead to facial recognition replacing passwords [...]

Linpus Technologies, Inc., an open source solutions provider based in Taipei, Taiwan, has announced support for MeeGo™ on the connected TV platform. With this development, the smartTV solution, which was originally targeted at devices powered by the Arm processor, will also run on devices powered by the Intel® Atom™ processor. Linpus Technologies is the developer of Linpus Lite, a netbook-targeted [...]

Gemalto N.V., a digital security outfit based in Amsterdam, Netherlands, just announced that it has filed a patent infringement lawsuit in the United States against Google, HTC, Motorola, and Samsung for use of Gemalto’s security products in the Android operating system, Dalvik virtual machine and associated development tools and products. According to the Gemalto, the patents involved in the suit [...]

Android is all the rage these days. In my meetings and correspondences with consumer electronic vendors around the world it is as if they have totally forgot about the “old“ “embedded operating systems” – pSOS, VxWorks, MontaVista, Nucleus, OSE, or any of the Linux and Unix variants that people have been using for years now. While there are a few [...]

YALI, Yet Another Linux Installer, is the installation program of Pardus, a desktop-oriented Linux distribution with roots in the National Research Institute of Electronics and Cryptology (UEKAE), Turkey. The next stable release of Pardus will be Pardus 2011. According to the release announcement of Pardus 2011 beta, which was released a couple of days ago, YALI will ship with a [...]

Molly de Blanc: In 2007, Amazon announced their music store. It would, they promised, deliver DRM-free music to U.S. Amazon users. And they did just that. With much fanfare, they rolled out Amazon MP3, touting music downloads for any device. On their website, they explain what’s special about their music sales. “DRM-free means that the MP3 files you purchase from Amazon.com [...]

The latest K Desktop Environment, KDE, features two modes of interacting with the desktop – the classic Desktop interface and the Netbook interface. On recent KDE-based distributions that I have reviewed for this website, the default is the classic Desktop, but switching to the Netbook interface is an easy, few seconds process. I posted a few screenshots of the Netbook [...]

Phishing scams are making the leap from email to the world’s voice systems, and a team of researchers in the Georgia Tech College of Computing has found a way to tag fraudulent calls with a digital “fingerprint” that will help separate legitimate calls from phone scams. Voice phishing (or “vishing”) has become much more prevalent with the advent of cellular [...]

For many blind people, computers are inaccessible. It can cost upwards of $1000 to purchase “screen reader” software, but two blind computer programmers have solved this problem. Queensland University of Technology (QUT) graduate James Teh and business partner Michael Curran developed a free, open-source program, called NVDA (NonVisual Desktop Access), which provides a synthetic voice to read the words on [...]

Exactly ten days after Mandriva was forked, another major Free Software has also been forked. And this time, it is OpenOffice.org, the free suite of office applications similar to Microsoft Office. The fork, or the new office suite, will be temporarily known as LibreOffice. It has the backing of community heavyweights, and its development will be overseen by a newly [...]

The Mageia project is a fork of Mandriva Linux. It is a brand new project, announced on September 18, 2010. There is an ongoing discussion about different aspects of the project, and one of those discussion revolves around the project’s logo. There have been some very good and some not so good logos proposed by community members, and what is [...]

Mandriva, one of my favorite Linux distributions, has been forked, and the new distribution is named Mageia. With the well publicized mass exodus of developers and contributors, this does not come as shock. I usually view these developments with caution, but this one I am actually happy about. Here are my reasons: Mandriva’s management has done a very lousy job [...]

Linpus Lite 1.4 is the latest distribution that I am currently reviewing. While the review is in progress, I thought posting a few screenshots is in order. If you are not familiar with Linpus Lite, it is developed by Linpus Technologies, Inc. of Taipei, Taiwan. The company’s main distribution was Linpus Desktop, which was based on the old Mandrake Linux [...]