Developers can now access the source code of the end-user client, content creation tools and server in order to make modifications, enhancements or to create their own virtual worlds. This move marks a milestone in Ryzom's long history and dedication to the free software movement. In order to ensure that Ryzom continues to grow and foster as a free software project, Winch Gate is now releasing Ryzom under the terms of the Free Software Foundation's GNU Affero General Public License.
Winch Gate is also excited to provide the free software community with high quality professional artistic assets including 3D objects, animation tracks, particle effects and thousands of textures. All of the Ryzom artistic assets will be licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike to ensure that they and any derivative art will be available to all free software projects. These assets will be hosted in a new online repository in partnership with the Free Software Foundation.

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Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu, today announced that it will provide its own fully-independent certification for junior-level system administrators to help them with Ubuntu deployments in their office environments. The e-learning course version will be available shortly after the Ubuntu 10.04 LTS (Long Term Support) release on 29 April 2010 with students able to study in the classroom from June 2010 and the new exam available from October 2010.

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We are excited to share with you news of our first public step toward our next major Red Hat Enterprise Linux platform release with today’s Beta availability of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6. Beginning today, we are inviting our customers, partners and members of the public to install, test and provide feedback for what we expect will be one of our most ambitious and important operating platform releases to date. This blog is the first in a series of upcoming posts that will cover different aspects of the new platform.

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Another utility that has received small but telling improvements is the user-admin tool. The simplest of these is the ability to remove the home directory along with the account. Now, when you type in a user's name when creating a user, the user management tool automatically suggests a short name for the account. Usually, the short name is simply the user's name in lowercase letters and with the spaces between names left out, but the tool also resolves name conflicts by removing letters from the end of the duplicate. Even more usefully, you receive a warning if changing a password would break an encryption keyring or an encrypted directory. Other small but welcome enhancements include unlimited scrollback of the command history in GNOME Terminal, and the ability of file-roller to add support for a compression type. Although, strictly speaking, neither is strictly needed, since an experienced user can easily work around them, both are the type of small convenience that make a desktop quicker and easier to use.

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Each release we determine the best default web browser and the best default search engine for Ubuntu. When choosing the best default search provider, we consider factors such as user experience, user preferences, and costs and benefits for Ubuntu and the browsers and other projects that make up Ubuntu. Up until Ubuntu 9.10 these defaults have always been Firefox and Google. Earlier in the 10.04 cycle I announced that we would be changing the default search provider to Yahoo!, and we implemented that change for several milestones. However, for the final release, we will use Google as the default provider. I have asked the Ubuntu Desktop team to change the default back to Google as soon as reasonably possible, but certainly by final freeze on April 15th. It was not our intention to "flap" between providers, but the underlying circumstances can change unpredictably. In this case, choosing Google will be familiar to everybody upgrading from 9.10 to 10.04 and the change will only be visible to those who have been part of the development cycle for 10.04.

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The GNOME Project is proud to announce GNOME 2.30, the latest stable release of the popular Free Software desktop environment and applications suite. GNOME 2.30 builds on previous GNOME releases and brings hundreds of improvements for users and developers, including enhancements for user management, Web browsing, support for Facebook chat, and new productivity features. GNOME contributors have added improvements across the board for GNOME 2.30 in accessibility, productivity applications, Web browsing, instant messaging, and games. This release includes hundreds of new features, enhancements, and improvements over the GNOME 2.28 release from September 2009.

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Sony plans to release a new Playstation 3 firmware update worldwide this week in hopes of combating potential software piracy. System update v3.21 will disable the console's "Install Other OS" feature, which allowed users to install the Linux operating system. The feature is currently only available in PlayStation 3 models released prior to the "slim" redesign that launched in September 2009. The update will go live on April 1. SCEA's corporate communications director Patrick Seybold notes on the PlayStation Blog the feature is being removed due to "security concerns."

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NVIDIA's open-source Linux efforts as it concerns their GPU support have historically been minimal. The xf86-video-nv driver has been around that provides very basic 2D acceleration and a crippled set of features besides that (no proper RandR 1.2/1.3, KMS, power management, etc) while the code has also been obfuscated to try to protect their intellectual property. However, NVIDIA has decided to deprecate this open-source driver of theirs. No, NVIDIA is not working on a new driver. No, NVIDIA is not going to support the Nouveau project. Instead, NVIDIA now just recommends its users use the X.Org VESA driver to get to NVIDIA.com when installing Linux so they can install their proprietary driver.

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