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Linux users love to chat, and few topics are so prevalent among users as distributions. A big one is a distro's suitability for beginners. Drawing in eager new users is the only way to grow the Linux community. Successful recruitment often hinges on making sure that newcomers start with a distro tha...

The information security industry, with all its raging debates, has rallied around a small corpus of best practices. One of the highest on this list is full-disk encryption, which security experts regard as sacrosanct. This is the encryption that ensures that someone who snatches your device won't b...

What happens when Apple and Palm representatives vaguely mention the ability to use and defend their patents, and then one anonymous source from Google vaguely states that Apple asked Google to not implement a certain technology in a recently release product? You get a whole lot of blog headlines ke...

As editor for LinuxInsider for more than a year now, I figured the time was right to start walking the walk with my personal machine. So I took my Dell Inspiron 1150 to this year's LinuxWorld Conference & Expo with the intention of switching my operating system to one of the many Linux distros.

IBM fired the opening salvo at this year's LinuxWorld Conference and Expo, and to the surprise of no one, it was aimed squarely at Microsoft. Sure, it was the low-hanging fruit -- Microsoft's an easy target. It's kind of like taking pot shots at John McCain at an Obama fund-raiser. But here, the amm...

Facebook has come up with a new plan to fight off its competitors: open sourcing its application platform. Citing multiple sources, TechCrunch reports that Facebook is planning to form an open source community around its API, which it launched just a year ago. We can expect that the four pillars of ...

Here I was all ready to post my thoughts on user interfaces and ease of use, when news surfaced that the SCO Group has received an investment of $100 million to take it private. The company once claimed to own the rights to Unix and then proceeded to sue IBM and Novell for infringing its intellectua...

The world of open source mobile platforms is starting to get a little crowded. Over the past couple of days, rumors began flying that Dell is getting into the game with a phone based on Google's Android platform. Dell denies it, but the amount of attention that is being paid to this segment of the m...

A couple of developments in the mobile applications space have my head spinning. First, the LiMo Foundation announced it has increased its membership by adding six new members. Then, Yahoo introduced its mobile developer platform at CES, taking pains to point out that its apps will be compatible wit...