Spotify is a free and legal service which gives you access to millions of songs. They achieve this by licensing the tracks from record companies in a similar way to radio stations, and they pay for it with advertising. When I first heard about it, like many others I couldn’t see what all the fuss was about. I also discovered there was no Linux version, so I pretty much gave up on it.

It has been a while since we last had any major to report on VIA with their open-source efforts, but this morning they have finally published DRM code that supports their Chrome 9 IGP hardware. The announcement regarding this new Chrome 9 DRM was made on the dri-devel list and was made up of three patches.

By sheer chance and very good fortune, I now own an ASUS N10J netbook. Or notebook. The N10J came preloaded with Windows Vistaster Business, it should be no surprise to anyone that it runs like a terminally ill DOG. I have installed a variety of Linux distributions on it.

Mozilla has released Firefox 3.5.1 to fix the recently reported security vulnerability in the Just-in-Time (JIT) JavaScript compiler, an exploit for the Windows version of which is already doing the rounds. Attackers can exploit the vulnerability to inject and execute code on vulnerable systems.

Last week, Microsoft extended the terms of their Community Promise to implementations of the ECMA 334 and 335 standards. You might think this means it's safe to write your software in C#. However, this promise is full of loopholes, and it's nowhere near enough to make C# safe.

Many people will agree that the single biggest weak point of Linux on the desktop is the lack of commercial games... Enter PlayonLinux. PlayonLinux uses custom Wine scripts to set up an independent environment for each application you install. This allows you to have independent Wine settings for each game, rather than trying to make a single prefix work for every application.

So in this small tutorial we will try to achieve similar effect using Gimp.This effect is actually a simple mask trick. To get started we will first need to download an image from where we can isolate a colour part from a desaturated background. I have already selected an image for you to get started.