Since Oracle acquired Sun Microsystems last year, the future of the Solaris and OpenSolaris operating systems have been called into question especially as the OpenSolaris 2010.1H release was missing and has been that way for months now with no official communication from Oracle. A new OpenSolaris release hasn't come in more than a year and we still are left wondering if or when it will arrive.

Throughout the relatively short history of Digital Restrictions Management, we have seen various methods of user restriction come and go. Now, there is a new threat on the horizon: UltraViolet. A soon to be implemented DRM scheme, UltraViolet -- or should that be Ultraviolent -- is a joint effort between companies such as Sony, Adobe, Cisco, HP, Microsoft and Intel.

One of the many arguments against allowing patents for software (alongside the principle argument that software is made up of algorithms, which are essentially mathematics, which is pure knowledge and hence is not patentable) is the fact that software is anyway covered by copyright law.

An easy way to make ordinary white cloud on blue skies into dramatic significant parts of your photographs. This is a very simple trick to do in GIMP and the results are great!

The largest difference is that Amarok's design philosophy is influenced by the current interface design theories, while Clementine's are more oriented towards stone geeks, including every detail imaginable.

Support for certain classes of hardware has often been problematic for the Linux kernel, and 3D graphics chips have tended to be at the top of the list. Over the last few years, through a combination of openness at Intel and AMD/ATI and reverse engineering for NVIDIA, the graphics problem has mostly been solved - for desktop systems.

It is pretty much impossible to manage a help desk without some kind of help desk tracking system. Eric Geier rounds a sampling of five of the best Free/Open source help desk software systems.

I had a request this week to check out davfs2. This neat open source utility allows you to connect to a WebDAV server as a regular filesystem, meaning that applications that don't support WebDAV can still access resources shared via WebDAV.