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On Monday, I took part in the first Wine Bug Day (one of hopefully many). It was a great success, I managed to rope in some support from some friends specifically Sean and Yorik both of whom are Wine users, not Wine developers (yet!).

And it wasn't just us, there was of course Scott Ritchie who organized the thing, but also several users popped up in #winehackers asking for others to change the status of their bugs. It was all quite exciting in a weird kind of way.

Microsoft Corp.'s unprecedented release last week of more than 20,000 lines of driver code to the Linux community could put pressure on several top suppliers of closed-source drivers to make similar moves. Observers note that virtualization vendor VMware Inc., Wi-Fi chip maker Broadcom Corp. and graphics chip maker Nvidia Inc. still decline to offer their Linux drivers under the General Public License, a free software license widely used in the open-source community.

Local developers are helping to drum up market buzz to boost interest and expertise in open source technology across the country. Development in the mobile arena is particularly hot at the moment, among both individuals and software houses, according to Linux user groups in Singapore.

First there were the "granny" articles, where someone's grandmother presented the simplicity of Linux and emphatically denied being coached by her son into using Linux. Albeit rather a quirky form of humor, they made their points, because the KDE Desktop had indeed matured and was easy to use. I was also tolerant when people started writing about Linux for their children, because I know...

BackerUpper is a tool similar to Apple's TimeMachine. It is intended to create snapshot-backups of selected directories or even your full hard drive. From the BackerUpper project page: "Backerupper is a simple program for backing up selected directories over a local network. Its main intended purpose is backing up a user's personal data." This article shows how to install and use BackerUpper on Ubuntu 9.04 (Jaunty Jackalope).

OpenSSH is the implementation of the SSH protocol. OpenSSH is recommended for remote login, making backups, remote file transfer via scp or sftp, and much more. SSH is perfect to keep confidentiality and integrity for data exchanged between two networks and systems. However, the main advantage is server authentication, through the use of public key cryptography. From time to time there are rumors about OpenSSH zero day exploit. Here are a few things you need to tweak in order to improve OpenSSH server security.

The Coding Studio is pleased to announce that they are now inviting the open source community to become the primary content providers for their Linux screenshots directory. This is an opportunity to promote your Linux distribution of choice, and/or show off your customized installation. They invite both owners and users to participate.

So Google reckons that it can provide the perfect operating system in Chrome, even to the point where according to Google's Engineering Director, Linus Upson, it will herald "the end of malware". That's what he went on the record to say during an interview with New Scientist magazine, in what could end up being one of those 'why did I say that' moments that go down in software development folklore.

We had Microsoft releasing some 20,000 LOC of Linux drivers so that Linux can run faster on their Hyper-V solution. A lot of MS PR saying how they love interoperability and how cool they are. I will be the first to say that I was in shock (and I bet I wasn't the only one). After all, we are talking about a license that their managers explicitly hate so why release code under that license then? I just couldn't help seeing a little hypocrisy involved.... to say the least. It's always cool to say that they had to eat their own words anyway so I didn't take it as a bad thing, after all, as Linus says, we are all developing scratching our own itches.

Liferea developers have announced the availability of the first stable version of the 1.6.x series. Liferea (Linux Feed Reader) is an aggregator for online news feeds. There are many other news readers available, but these others are not available for Linux or require many extra libraries to be installed. Liferea tries to fill this gap by creating a fast, easy to use, easy to install news aggregator for Gtk/Gnome.

You can make MPlayer play h264-encoded video files a lot faster on multicore machines if you graft some libraries from the ffmpeg-mt project into the resulting mplayer binary. We need to recompile for this. First, use Subversion to download the code for MPlayer: svn co svn://svn.mplayerhq.hu/mplayer/trunk mplayer Then the code for ff-mpeg svn co svn://svn.mplayerhq.hu/mplayer/trunk ffmpeg-mt Remove the old libavcodec, libavformat and libavutil code from MPlayer

I am in the middle of CentOS and Ubuntu comparison frenzy. It started with an attempt to assert quality of Linux distributions made for busy people. Today I am considering packaging. When comparing Ubuntu and CentOS packaging systems, first thing that crosses my mind is that, well, size matters. Ubuntu has nearly 70000 packages. CentOS has around 6000.

Well, that's what this commercial seems to tell us. Their claims? That my slow browser is probably "several generations old." They tell me that IE8 is "a huge improvement on the speed scale."

I came across two seemingly unrelated reports, one from the Register, stating that Microsoft will offer a choice of browsers in the EU version of Windows 7 and one from FAS Russia, which began proceedings in a case against several major hardware manufacturers. If this is the shape of things to come, it could mean the OS landscape is about to change.

Last week I wrote a feature for DistroWatch Weekly on the trials and tribulations of installing CentOS 5.3 on my Sylvania g Netbook Meso. I was very pleased when Dag Wieërs, a CentOS developer and long time packager and maintainer of an excellent repository of additional packages for Red Hat Enterprise Linux, posted in the comments section with some useful suggestions and a request that I document how to get the netbook completely functional in the CentOS wiki. That's a project I'll take on when I have everything working to my satisfaction. In the meanwhile...

GoboLinux is a Linux distribution I heard about from a friend who said that it looked interesting for its flagship property - a simpler file structure. I decided to check it out. I downloaded the distribution ISO from their website, which was easy enough, and booted up VirtualBox with that ISO mounted as a drive.

Linus has spoken. 'Nuff said--OK, maybe not.

On 15th July 2009, the Commission of the Federal Antimonopoly Service (FAS Russia) began proceedings in a case against «Acer Inc.», «ASUSTeK Computer Inc.», «Toshiba Corporation», «Hewlett-Packard Company», « Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd.» and «Dell Inc.» for the elements of violating the anti-monopoly legislation. In accordance with the Determination of 20th July 2009, the FAS Russia's Commission, investigating the case, suspended the case until receiving additional evidence. The case will continue on 10th September 2009.

The CoreCD is a text-based release. There is no X-Server, Gnome, or KDE provided. The Feature list is intentionally short: * Bootable Image suitable for a CD or USB thumb drive (~400M) * Text-Based installer * Basic default networking * Entropy and Portage ready

Current Sales Trend Indicates Gadfly Open Source Developers Will Be Nation's Largest Provider of Windows Technology; Microsoft Imperiled CodeWeavers Offers to Buy Microsoft Campus "On Credit"