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Computer science veteran Andrew Tanenbaum presented the third version of his Minix operating system at the FOSDEM 2010 conference on February 6-7 in Brussels, Belgium.

More than 2,600 partners will converge at this week’s VMware Partner Exchange conference in Las Vegas. Lots of news will surface at the conference. But I’m looking behind the curtains for new clues involving VMware’s strategy for Zimbra, the recently acquired open source email provider. Here’s an update.

All of these require a working setup with ifuse, gvfs, libimobiledevice (aka libiphone) etc as per our previous article. In today’s article, StoneCut reviews GTKpod, Rhythmbox, Banshee and Songbird and their current status regarding iPhone/iPod syncing.

Many eons ago, GNOME 1.4 still lived, and it was good. It was extremely configurable and hackable. You could use either Enlightenment or Sawfish as the window manager, and could customize it to your heart’s content. It was even friendly to homegrown GTK+ hacks. And then tragedy struck: the GNOME maintainers decided that 1.4 needed a ground-up rewrite, and thus GNOME 2.0 was born.

Deep inside millions of computers is a digital Fort Knox, a special chip [TPM] with the locks to highly guarded secrets, including classified government reports and confidential business plans. Now a former U.S. Army computer-security specialist has devised a way to break those locks.

Many people use BitTorrent clients to download popular movies, music, and television shows for free, although this practice is illegal in several countries. But legal issues aside, distributing files through torrents is an excellent way to reduce server bandwidth and spread them quickly. For example, many Linux distributions will distribute their ISOs using torrents in addition to their server mirrors. BitTorrent makes distributing large files easy and fast because the files are hosted on users’ computers. In order to download the files associated with torrents, you need a BitTorrent client. KTorrent, a KDE project, is a feature-rich client that is completely self-contained from the moment you start searching for torrents until the last chunk finishes downloading. Ktorrent is available for download in most Linux repositories and requires minimal KDE dependencies to run.

After just a few weeks, SourceForge has backed off its policy of imposing a blanket ban on all users trying to access the site from countries on the U.S. “banned” list. Instead, it announced on Sunday that it’s putting the decision in the hands of each project that hosts on the site. According to SourceForge’s Lee Schlesinger, the company has no way of knowing which projects should or shouldn’t trigger a block.

The Microsoft Office productivity suite has risen to become the dominant application of its type for business IT management. But there are open source office productivity suites available that may provide a suitable alternative to Office, depending on your requirements. Despite the scores of additional features found in products like Microsoft Office, most workers only need a simple word processor or spreadsheet to complete their day-to-day office tasks. If your staff are not “power users” then having a full-blown office suite on their desktop can be overkill. In this edition of 5 open source things to watch, we take a look at office suites that can manage you business information without emptying the company coffers.

Our story so far: Security expert Frank Adversego comes under suspicion when the Library of Congress is hacked by a mysterious cracker with motives unknown and a taste for the bizarre. To protect himself, Frank had better get to the bottom of things – fast.

Last month many developers were scurrying to prepare for the 2.6.33 merge window. When they weren’t doing that, here are a few of the items that were under discussion, starting with the Big Kernel Lock…