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Audio is a fitting topic for the first day of the Linux Plumbers Conference. Users want sound to Just Work, and there's lots of working code in individual projects. But so far, it seems like nobody has everything quite plumbed together in an annoyance-free way. Lennart Poettering, a lead developer of PulseAudio and Red Hat employee, moderated the miniconference and started with a summary of the state of Linux audio: "it's a mess." The audio miniconference came up with two steps toward cleaning up the mess, though. First, come up with a coherent story for application developers on what sound API to use, and how. Second, clean up the often-confusing array of user-visible audio level controls.

The open source Python programming language is on the verge a sweeping revamp in the form of version 3.0 of its platform -- a release will deviate in many ways from the current, mainline Python 2.x series. So how do you meet the needs of current 2.x Python developers while transitioning to the bleeding edge of Python 3.0 development? That's where the new Python 2.6 release comes into play.

Ubuntu 8.10 Beta was released today and I'm glad to post the ubuntu 8.10 Beta screen shots here. I will say this..... I've always enjoyed using Ubuntu and Ubuntu based distributions. Ubuntu has always made my life on my desktop easier... So enjoy the ScreenShots below.

When a network is small and most of its users interact chiefly with services on the Internet at large, it's easy to get by simply by assigning numeric Internet Protocol addresses to your nodes rather than names. As the network grows, however, and as internal services (wikis, mail servers, media servers, and more) come online, recalling numeric addresses becomes unwieldy. One solution is to implement Domain Name Server (DNS) and Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol (DHCP) with dnsmasq, and thereby cache external DNS addresses for performance reasons, dynamically assign IP addresses to all of the members of your network, and manage everything from one location. This article shows you how.

With Xapian and Omega you can quickly build a powerful search interface for your Web site. You'll be able to index your HTML, PDF, and PHP content and search for it by metadata or words contained in the documents. The shared library that implements the actual index is called Xapian. Omega is a set of tools built by the Xapian team to let you use the library for index and search if you are not a software developer. Since Omega uses Xapian, if your distribution's package repository includes Omega, then when you install it you'll install Xapian as a dependency.

It emerged in a recent conversation that the Linux Foundation (LF) is not quite so isolated from the issue software patents. In fact, OIN seems somewhat close to this ‘umbrella’ establishment, which Jim Zemlin mentioned in his ‘letter’ published by BusinessWeek last year.

Your occasiodaily dose of FOSS news as delivered by your host, Marcel Gagné (aka WFTL). Today's newscast features political debates the day after, China spying on Skype users, RedHat in government, ODF in government, and 100 reasons.

A group called Nathive has officially launched its Alpha-stage, open-source image editor for GNU/Linux. The Nathive editor runs on a GNOME desktop, is open to developer modification, and aims to be "simple, lightweight, and easy to install and use," says lead developer "Markos."

Get a better understanding of all those "strange" characters UNIX users are typing. Learn how to use pipelines, redirections, operators, and more in UNIX.

My post the other day, Does Using Gmail Mean You're Stupid, produced some thoughtful comments from people that made me me think harder about the advantages and disadvantages of Cloud Computing. As part of my continuing discussion on Cloud computing I spoke to the chairman and CTO at Alfresco, John Newton, and I asked him is views on Cloud Computing. His responses may surprise you.

Jiri Kosina cautioned that there is still an unknown bug affecting the e1000e driver currently in the 2.6.27 kernel, "rendering the cards unusable for most of the i-am-not-a-hacker users (and remember, even Dave Airlie bricked his laptop completely to death, when trying to restore eeprom contents)" When asked how to duplicate the bug, Jiri noted that the inability to reliably reproduce the bug added to the difficulty in debugging the problem, "apparently it is some kind of race, as it usually takes multiple cycles to trigger".

Businesses are catching on to Ubuntu. The latest example: Gameloft, a major mobile games developer, has moved more than 1,000 desktops to Ubuntu, The VAR Guy has learned. But Gameloft isn’t alone. The VAR Guy’s research is tracking hundreds of companies moving to Ubuntu. Here’s the scoop.

Apple releases iPhone developers from nondisclosure agreement ... copyright board keeps music royalties the same ... Visa tries Android as a payment platform ... Motorola looks to Android as its potential savior, and more.

Project splert was updated to version 0.03 today.For those who don’t know splert is a tool that lets you convert the multi-client instant messenger pidgin (connects to gtalk, msn, yahoo, jabber, etc) into a full blown answering machine and much more.

A judge of the New Jersey Superior Court has prohibited the scheduled release of a report on the security and accuracy of the Sequoia AVC Advantage voting machine. Last June, Judge Linda Feinberg ordered Sequoia Voting Systems to turn over its source code to me (serving as an expert witness, assisted by a team of computer scientists) for a thorough examination. At that time she also ordered that we could publish our report 30 days after delivering it to the Court--which should have been today. Three weeks after we delivered the report, on September 24th Judge Feinberg ordered us not to release it. This is part of a lawsuit filed by the Rutgers Constitutional Litigation Clinic, seeking to decommission of all of New Jersey's voting computers.

we're always interested in efforts to apply open source principles to efforts outside the software realm. Drew Endy, an open source biologist currently working at Stanford, is a good example of why. Along with several researchers at MIT, Endy is working on synthetic biology and the engineering of standardized biological components and devices, known as BioBricks.

Microsoft plans to continue charging licensing fees from handset makers for using its mobile operating system and not follow the free offerings of Google and Nokia, Chief Executive Steve Ballmer said on Tuesday. The pressure on Microsoft's high licensing fees has increased over 2008.

Lynis is a handy, simple-to-use security auditing tool by Michael Boelen, who also wrote Rootkit Hunter. It's free GPL-licensed software that can be used on Linux, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, PcBSD, Mac OSX, or Solaris.

Zivios is an open source web based identity management application featuring single sign on, certificate authority, user, group and computer provisioning with remote management of services. Zivios is an n-tiered PHP-5 application and uses MySQL and OpenLDAP as its data store, with OpenLdap being the primary back end for identity management and application integration and MySQL being used for panel specific data.

There are several definitions of "open access." One is making open source code available to a community of smart cookies who can debug and modify it using open source mechanisms. Another is offering up low-cost or free software development kits (SDK) to encourage creative applications for a given platform. Another is offering middleware that allows an application developed once to run on multiple platforms. And, finally, in mobile networks, open can mean using a phone and its applications on any carrier's compatible network.