Last year Russia announced an ambitious plan to use free software for all its schools. Now, it seems, things aren't going so smoothly. Funds have been cut back, faulty discs containing free software were sent out - and Microsoft is offering special deals on Windows XP...

In one of my earlier postings I did a compare and contrast of the various different features Cedega and Codeweavers offer. Today I am going to try leave my opinions aside and stick strictly to the numbers. Source Engine games are some of the most popular played today so I feel it is only fitting I use them to test the Wine software we have today.

Today I’d like to take a look at a newly released distribution, Mandriva 2010. In the past I’ve found it to be a well accomplished and easy to use desktop distro, even if the last release wasn’t quite as stellar as I’d hoped. How would this version stack up? Let’s find out.

The ability to log important events or errors for problem diagnosis and then checking of application execution is very important. The ability to log certain statements selectively while others are not logged, depending on the context in which the application is running, is also important. An application that is deployed in Apache Geronimo can use any custom logging mechanism to log its messages. However, Apache Geronimo uses log4j and slf4j for logging server log messages. Applications deployed in Geronimo can also leverage the functionality of these logging frameworks.

Increasing raw throughput over its predecessor by a factor of ten, the new Sun Constellation supercomputer was officially launched today.

Mark Cuban, the Dallas Mavericks owner has a plan to kill Google by paying the top 1K sites a cool million each to leave the Google index and move to Microsoft, but could such a plan ever work and would it be worth the risk to abandon Google?

It is time for a new q4wine release tagged as version 0.114, this new release includes new Italian translation and translations updates for Spanish, Ukrainian and Portuguese (Brazil) locales. I'd like to introduce at this time the new Wine Registry readwrite engine, which allows reading existing Wine configuration keys during the Fake Drive update process. Also I added some more wine configuration options in the Fake Drive Wizard dialog.

Kiwi vendor's asked to log their capability to support free software on the desktop

About a week ago, we wrote about gaining some space on your Linux Desktop (but the tutorial was focused on Ubuntu) by removing the titlebar of maximized applications - which can be achieved either with Maximus or Compiz. But at the time, we only provided some keyboard shortcuts to handle these windows. Read on to find out another way to do this and also how to use DockBarX for some even more optimization.

The FreeNAS developers have announced the availability of version 0.7 of FreeNAS (code named Khasadar), a FreeBSD-based Network-attached storage (NAS) UNIX-like server operating system. FreeNAS includes a full Web configuration graphical user interface (GUI) and supports the FTP, NFS, CIFS (Samba), AFP, rsync and iSCSI protocols and software RAID (0,1,5).

This tutorial shows how you can enable Compiz Fusion on an Ubuntu 9.10 (Karmic Koala) desktop (the system must have a 3D-capable graphics card - I'm using an NVIDIA GeForce FX 5200 here). With Compiz Fusion you can use beautiful 3D effects like wobbly windows or a desktop cube on your desktop.

Finally an exhaustive guide for Ubuntu 9.10 aimed at end-users. This is the third version of Eva's useful guide - the previous ones had a great success. Give it a look!

LinuxMint8 RC1 out this , this beta release comes with new features and improvements, My first impression when I first installed Helena RC1 was that the team of LinuxMint are really doing a great Job,see also LinuxMint8 RC1 Video tours

Google isn't content with providing us with fast search and a fast browser: we need a faster protocol between servers and browsers. The search giant would like us to start forgetting about HTTP:// and learn to love SPDY://. Ars takes a look at the proposal as well as its strengths and weaknesses.

I'm surprised that more people in the Linux community aren't talking about Lenovo's smartbook, which it announced yesterday. Powered by a Qualcomm ARM Snapdragon processor and sold by AT&T, the new smartbook is Linux-based. Lenovo has had an up and down relationship with supporting Linux, and smartbooks may represent a good way for the company to get back on track with an open source platform.

China-based Menq has launched a smartbook/mini-netbook that runs on an ARM9-based Samsung S3C2450 processor, and offers WiFi, Ethernet, SD storage, and a 7-inch 800 x 480 display. According to one review, the Menq EasyPC E790 costs only $80, and though it ships with Windows CE, can also run Android.

The Wine development release 1.1.33 is now available. The source is available now, Binary packages are in the process of being built, and will appear soon at their respective download locations.

For almost 3 years, Apple’s iPhone has set the standard for mainstream smart phones. Recently, Apple has taken over a large portion of the smart phone market, now manufactures like Nokia are taking the iPhone threat seriously and bringing out new phones to try to compete. One phone that looks like it has a real chance to compete with the iPhone is Nokia’s new N900 phone/internet tablet. Here are 15 ways we think that the N900 is better than the iPhone, and a few reasons why the iPhone is still better.

You can now deploy opentaps Open Source ERP + CRM on Amazon EC2 using new Amazon Machine Images for opentaps. These images allow you to deploy an Amazon EC2 server with opentaps with demo data pre-installed on either a MySQL or PostgreSQL database. To use them, just search for “opentaps” under “Community AMIs” when launching a new Amazon EC2 instance.

A Microsoft executive was quoted in an interview as saying "what we've tried to do with Windows 7...is create a Mac look and feel in terms of graphics". Microsoft's Brandon LeBlanc said in a blog that Mr Aldous's comments were "inaccurate and uninformed".