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Kate Stewart is the manager of the PowerPC team at Freescale. As such, she has a basic customer service problem to solve: people who buy a board from Freescale would like to have some sort of operating system to run on it. That system, of course, will be Linux; satisfying this requirement means that Freescale must operate as a sort of Linux distributor. At her linux.conf.au talk, Kate talked about a new initiative aimed at helping distributors to ensure that they are compliant with the licenses of the software they are shipping.

It happened like this. Recently our online banking authentication procedures changed. For the better I might add. While these security measures are far more secure they also prevented me from accessing our joint bank account whenever I wished. The end result was that I didn't check the account status often enough and an automatic payment didn't go through. Enough was enough I shouted out the window at two o'clock in the morning. After dodging a few smelly shoes and empty beer bottles I decided to set up my wifes phone to enable it to use the new security measures..

Making scripting fun again. Vimscript provides excellent support for operating on collections of data, a cornerstone of programming. In this third article in the series, learn how to use Vimscript's built-in lists to ease everyday operations such as reformatting lists, filtering sequences of filenames, and sorting sets of line numbers. You'll also walk through examples that demonstrate the power of lists to extend and enhance two common uses of Vim: creating a user-defined function to align assignment operators, and improving the built-in text completions mechanism.

Facebook's re-written PHP to transform the dynamic language for fast performance on web-scale server farms without adding additional hardware. The site's engineers have announced HipHop, which turns the popular and dynamic PHP code into highly optimized but static C++ and then compiles it using the GNU C++ compiler, g++. The change has been released to the community under the PHP license, and you can read more here.

Some time back I wrote about creating a number of konsoles automatically using dcop. Although we were at the time well into the KDE4 era I had not yet upgraded since there were still things that weren't quite working with KDE4, most of these have now been fixed so I've upgraded some of my systems to KDE4, which means it's time to update the original code to now use dbus.

With the introduction of Ubuntuzilla repository, it has become even more easier installing latest Firefox updates in Ubuntu. No more command line burn outs, just use the Synaptic instead.

Leeenux Linux is a netbook distribution for the EeePC 701G, and is now available as version 2.0, complete with many new applications. The Linux distribution focuses on ease of use, even on the 8.9 inch display of the EeePC 701G. Leeenux is also perfect for use on other Netbooks, and uses Ubuntu Netbook Remix and Easy Peasy. The distribution contains only free software.

Bugs are a reality of software development, and a pain for both coders and users. Security bugs are a particularly nasty variety, and in an effort to kill as many as possible, Google is now coughing up cash for catching Chrome and Chromium glitches. The new program, modeled on Mozilla's successful Bug Bounty program, will pay rewards to bug-catchers who report "interesting and original vulnerabilities" in the code of either the Open Source Chromium browser, or Google's Chrome implementation. Google's Chris Evans, who announced the program on the official Chromium blog, described it as both a "token of our appreciation" for existing contributors and an incentive for new participation.

One of the key values at Facebook is to move fast. For the past six years, we have been able to accomplish a lot thanks to rapid pace of development that PHP offers. As a programming language, PHP is simple. Simple to learn, simple to write, simple to read, and simple to debug. We are able to get new engineers ramped up at Facebook a lot faster with PHP than with other languages, which allows us to innovate faster.

I've been looking for a lightweight distribution to use on my Dell desktop with older hardware. While searching for a worthy candidate I almost immediately ran across last week's release of PC/OS 10. With a familiar Ubuntu base and new improvements such as Google Chrome and Skype, I thought PC/OS 10 Webstation was worth a look.

Viruses. They happen to almost everyone. If they don’t happen to you, it’ll be your cousin Stan who get joins the malware-of-the-month club, and you’re the only person he knows who can fix a computer. The problem is, things are so screwed up that Windows won’t even start properly. And if it does, the virus has embedded itself so deeply that you can’t access the files and tools you’d need to remove it. Enter Linux. By booting from a Linux Live CD or USB, you can remove the offending programs manually or with a Linux-based anti-virus program. This guide will cover creation of a bootable USB Linux system as well as a comparison of the antivirus software options.

KDE has released the third release candidate of the next version of the KDE (Linux Desktop Environment) Software Compilation.

Ubuntu Tweak is a cute little application meant to make the life of Ubuntu user a lot more easier. It has a number of small workarounds which are really useful especially if you are a newbie Ubuntu user. Some of Compiz animations like "Show Windows" is not at all easy-to-find, if you are not using Ubuntu Tweak.

Open Tech, an open source partner program organized by Tech Data, has gained a new member. Specifically, KnowledgeTree, an enterprise content management company, has joined Open Tech. The VAR Guy welcomes the news but our resident blogger wonders: Are VARs starting to embrace Open Tech and the rival Open Source Channel Alliance? Here are some clues.

The open source legal profession has established the International Free and Open Source Software Law Review (IFOSSLR) to discuss topics including copyrights, licensing, software patents, open standards, case law and statutes in the open source arena. The IFOSSLR now appears in its second issue.

How many SUSE subscriptions can you get for $240 million? Today I read a thought-provoking article over at SD Times, which detailed the state of the partnership between Novell and Microsoft. According to David Worthington's missive things are going pretty good for the two competitor/partners, though if you really read the piece there seems to be a key detail missing: what Microsoft is getting out of their investment in this partnership. And what an investment it has been: an initial payment of US$348 million to Novell... with US$240 million tagged specifically for those infamous subscription certificates for SUSE Enterprise Linux to hand out or resell to interested customers. Indeed, this was the thrust of the SD Times article: that Microsoft is almost through passing these coupons out. The thought that was actually provoked came from this sentence in the article: "A total of 475 customers have used an unspecified number of coupons, according to Microsoft."

Miguel de Icaza is a polarising figure amongst licence jockeys like Richard Stallman, but there is no denying his ability to get things done. We caught up with Miguel and asked him about Mono, Gnome, and much more besides…

Kupfer 1.0 Pandora's Box had been released. Kupfer is Linux alternative to Gnome DO, which will remind you of Quicksilver for Mac and you can use it to to summon an application or document quickly by typing the first parts of its name. It can also do more than getting at something quickly: there are different plugins for accessing more objects and running custom commands. Kupfer 1.0 finally introduces some of the advanced features found Quicksilver such as commands with many objects and global hotkeys to any custom command.

Phoronix Media has announced the immediate release of Phoronix Test Suite 2.4 (codenamed "Lenvik"), as the latest update to their open-source testing framework that delivers immediate and measurable advantages to its customers. The Phoronix Test Suite 2.4 software is compatible with a greater number of operating systems, introduces support for mobile platforms, offers a new range of test profiles, and other features to further solidify its premiere position within the computer benchmarking industry.

Following the news that the iPad would not support the Flash plugin, some people have been clamoring for the death of Flash. Not so fast cowboy, that horse ain't dead yet!. Although it is true that Flash is far from perfect it is currently a necessary evil because so many web games and web application are written in Flash.