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I finally managed to get a child in front of the XO PC from the One Laptop Per Child project. I thought I would share my observations from watching her interact with this interesting tool.

Mozilla has released beta 3 of Firefox 3.0, with around 1300 ‘individual changes’ from beta 2, with fixes for stability, performance, memory usage, platform enhancements and user interface improvements. Firefox 3.0 beta 3 is here, with plenty of improvements set to send Firefox’s percentage of market share soaring ever higher once the final version is released to the public.

"Andrew [Morton] was looking for someone to run a linux-next tree that just contained the subsystem git and quilt trees for 2.6.x+1 and I (in a moment of madness) volunteered. So, this is to announce the creating of such a tree," began Stephen Rothwell, resulting in a lengthy thread discussing the current Linux kernel development process. In a follow up email announcing the first linux-next release, Stephen went on to explain, "it has two branches - master and stable. Stable is currently just Linus' tree and will never rebase. Master will rebase on an almost daily basis (maybe slower at the start)."

Make no mistake about, the Linux 2.6.x kernel is a *large* undertaking that just keeps getting bigger and bigger. Apparently it's also getting harder to maintain as well in terms ensuring that regressions don't occur and that new code is fully tested. That's where the new 'Linux Next' effort comes in.

I'm running Kubuntu Gutsy Gibbon (7.10) on one of my main workstations. As with its sibling Ubuntu, it's an endlessly-entertaining blend of really nice stuff and really irritating stuff. The nice stuff is nearly-current releases of fast-moving applications like KDE, Digikam, Krita, KWord, and other apps that I use a lot, easy-on-the-eyes graphics, a good set of default applications, and nicely-organized menus. The irritating stuff is they still don't pay enough attention to delivering reliable basic functionality in core functions like networking and printing. Both often require manual tweakage to get them to work correctly, and even then you may be foiled by a Helpful Daemon.

LXer Feature: 13-Feb-2008

Here is a roundup of articles from the 2008 SCALE 6x conference in Los Angeles.

The beta 3 version of Firefox 3, released this week, will probably be the last version of the browser based on the original Mozilla platform, celebrating its tenth anniversary next week. Work is already underway on a revamp of Firefox's underlying platform - Mozilla. It was on February 23, 1998, that Netscape announced the creation of the Mozilla website as the "focal point for developers interested in modifying and redistributing Netscape client source". It was an historic time for the embryonic open-source movement. Netscape's move happened around the same time that open-source evangelists Bruce Perens and Eric Raymond formalized open-source development with the Open Source Definition.

This guide explains how you can enable a remote desktop on an Ubuntu desktop so that you can access and control it remotely. This makes sense for example if you have customers that are not very tech-savvy. If they have a problem, you can log in to their desktops without the need to drive to their location. I will also show how to access the remote Ubuntu desktop from a Windows XP client and an Ubuntu client.

Hmmm - my son reminded me that today is considered a very special day for millions of people around the world. Almost forgot. So let’s ask one of our favourite mascots, and ask what day it is:

Last year leading up to the release of Ubuntu 7.04 "Feisty Fawn" and Ubuntu 7.10 "Gutsy Gibbon" we had published several articles looking at various aspects of this desktop Linux distribution. These articles had varied from looking at Ubuntu's power consumption for the past six major releases to presenting the visual history of Ubuntu and how its graphics have evolved since Ubuntu 4.10. With Ubuntu 8.04 "Hardy Heron" shipping in just two months, we are once again looking at Ubuntu from several points of view. In this article, we are looking at Ubuntu's boot performance for the past five releases through the use of Bootchart for measuring its boot time, disk throughput, and the running processes.

I am a fan of affordable technology. I like relatively cheap gadgets, and I like open source. When I heard about Asus’ Eee PC, I took it with a certain grain of salt. I thought that maybe it was just another company trying to take a piece of the pie from the One Laptop Per Child initiative. Then the more I read about the OLPC, the more I realized that the two gadgets may have been created for different purposes. The OLPC is a non-profit, educational-social project, while the Eee PC is an affordable subnotebook being sold with the intent for profit.

This tutorial describes how to hide information within Binary Executable using Hydan . In other words Binary Executable is used as carrier.

It’s St Valentine’s Day in much of the western world (and, it seems, the World of Warcraft too). Did you know Linux is unique among operating systems due to its inherent romanticism? Here’s how Linux helps sling forth Cupid’s arrows on this day. Spice up your love life with these seven sure-fire tips.

If you've ever had that sick realization that you made a mistake immediately after emptying your Trash or deleting a file with Shift-Del, then Magic Rescue may be the cure you're looking for. Magic Rescue searches block devices for particular file types, then restores them to a designated directory where you can sort through them. Although subject to certain limitations, such as how recently a file was deleted and the availability of a definition for the file header of a given format, Magic Rescue is not difficult to use. It even features a man page with a few mini-tutorials. However, it does require organization and planning in order to use effectively.

Plug-in development in Eclipse is somewhat of an art form. If you're new to the concept of plug-ins it can be quite burdensome learning the myriad tools Eclipse has to help you write plug-ins. The purpose of this article is to help you learn some basic plug-in development skills with some best practices sprinkled in for good measure.

Whether it is a big or small update, every month AMD releases a new Catalyst package for both Linux and Windows for their supported ATI Radeon products. Last month in the Catalyst 8.01 Linux driver the changes had just consisted of a few bug fixes and nothing more. Today the Catalyst 8.02 Linux driver has been released, and like last month, it's short on the change-log. The fglrx changes are very brief and the driver version is still in the 8.45 release stream and wasn't even bumped to 8.46.x.

Have you ever said, "This program is pretty nice, but I wish it would ..."? For applications that offer the capability, scripting gives users the ability to customize, extend, and tailor a program to meet their needs. Scribus, a free page layout program that runs on Linux (and Mac OS and Windows) uses the Python programming language for user scripting. Python scripting in Scribus can drastically improve your work flow, and it's relatively easy for beginners to not only use scripts, but also write them.

Unlike a lot of the events that I discuss in my Blog, the Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit is a "by invitation only" event with a twist. Normally for "invitation only events", the potential attendee sits by the phone with their prom clothes on, waiting for the call that may or may not come. In this case the Linux Foundation wishes to engage "leaders of the development, ISV, distro, end user, non-profit and vendor communities". In other words, a representative form of governance, rather than a full democracy. Therefore leaders of various communities are encouraged to apply, with no guarantee of admission.

After a number of years in development Linux Test Drive is becoming a reality, from the page:

The Free and Open Source Developers conference, one of Europe's finest free technical conferences, opens its doors Saturday the 23th in Brussels, Belgium. In anticipation of the main track talks, a batch of interviews with FLOSS project leaders have been published at the FOSDEM website. You can read up on Linux in Hollywood, Perl6, klik2 and much more at fosdem.org/2008/interviews. The event features a busy line-up of project development rooms, a Lightning Talk track and a social beer tasting event the night before.