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Steve Ballmer doesn't seem to have learned the art of shutting up, which is fairly odd given that he is the CEO of a huge corporation. Ballmer gave a talk last week at the Gartner's Symposium ITxpo in Orlando where by all reports he let go not one, but two major gaffes. One involved Yahoo! The other involved his embattled OS: Vista.

One commonly-stated barrier to Linux adoption is that it looks different to the regular computer environment people are used to. Yet, one of the strengths of Linux over other operating systems is that its user interface can be totally replaced to suit any occasion. Here is how to trick it out like MacOS's Leopard, and trick your friends.

HTC's G1, the first Android phone, is a solid competitor to the iPhone, writes columnist Rob Enderle. It's not perfect -- it lacks support for Microsoft Exchange -- but it's close. Apple's notebook upgrades also meet with his approval.

Mozilla has announced the availability of the first Mobile Firefox alpha release. The project, which is codenamed Fennec, aims to bring the desktop Firefox browsing experience to mobile devices like MIDs and phone handsets. This early alpha release delivers a compelling user interface and demonstrates the impressive scope of the browser's potential on diminutive devices, but suffers from performance limitations and instability that reflect the need for significant refinement before it's mature enough for mainstream adoption.

I do have a few songs that are broken and that I can't get somewhere else and can't buy however they are on YouTube. I know, quality is not the best on YouTube but for some stuff you have it might be better. Question is, how could I put those flash videos onto my music player? It's actually very simple but the legality of it depends on where you live. Better check out first if you are allowed to convert YouTube videos into mp3s.

Almost one year ago, LWN examined the GCC plugin mechanism - or, more exactly, the lack of such a mechanism. Despite the increasing level of interest in adding special-purpose modules to the GCC compiler, GCC has no API which allows this addition to be done. So developers working on GCC extensions are faced with the daunting prospect of patching their code directly into the compiler. This situation looked unlikely to change; the Free Software Foundation's fears that a plugin mechanism would be used by proprietary extensions was just too strong. One year later, though, things look a little different; there may be a plugin-capable GCC available in the (relatively) near future.

It was a good week for Linux last week, as it began its 18th year with two significant coups. Generating the most excitement, perhaps, was the long-awaited release on Wednesday of Adobe Flash Player 10, now available -- for the first time ever -- in a variety of convenient packaging formats for Linux.

I attended Openmind last week, an interesting conference organized by the Finnish Centre for Open Source Solutions (COSS) to bring together open source professionals, community members and academics in Finland. In the session about business aspects of open source, in which I gave a talk about FOSS Governance, Nina Helander and Mikko Rönkkö presented the preliminary results of the National Software Industry Survey 2008.

Mandriva Linux 2009 took the centre stage during last week as many Linux users had a chance to install and check out the latest and greatest from the company that recently celebrated 10 years of existence. The reports varied widely, ranging from praise for the excellent way KDE 4 was integrated into the distribution to outright recommendations to skip this release due to a surprisingly high number of bugs. In other words, it's the story of Linux distributions - they will work great on one combination of hardware, but will fail miserably on another. In the news section, Debian presents updated artwork for "Lenny", Linux Mint releases its first stable 64-bit edition, the developers of KPackageKit introduce a new universal way of managing software, and K12LSTP Linux, a Fedora-based distribution for thin servers and clients, becomes K12Linux. Finally, don't miss the latest entrant into the world of BSD-based live CDs - BSDanywhere, or OpenBSD with Enlightenment.

Can I begin with a few disclaimers? I believe that people who create things deserve to be rewarded for their efforts. Which means that I think that stealing entertainment and software is wrong. Actually, come to think of it, if there was a form of copy protection that was never a hassle for paying customers but which effectively prevented piracy, I might enthusiastically support it. (Go ahead, mock me if you must–I’ll wait.) With that out the way, I also believe this: Copy protection (also known in recent years as Digital Rights Management) just stinks. At its best, it creates minor but real inconveniences for the people who pay for stuff; at its worst, it badly screws up their experiences with the products they buy. Let’s just say it–the world would be better off without it.

The 451 Group is reporting that venture capital funding for open source vendors was down 12.2% last quarter, compared to Q3 2007. They say that while this is a larger drop than seen in the overall market, it's not quite as dire as it may seem at first glance.

Ah, cryptographic security: a boon to those who understand the algorithms, but all too often a lost cause to those who don't. The secure HTTPS protocol for Web surfing is widely accepted, but has one fatal flaw: users ignore certificate error warnings. A Firefox extension called Perspectives aims to close that security hole. Firefox pops up a security warning whenever it encounters an SSL certificate that doesn't match the domain name of the site on which it is found, or is self-signed. Both situations are commonplace; gmail.com, for example, uses a certificate issued for mail.google.com, and many non-commercial Web sites use self-signed certificates because they don't want to pay yearly fees to a certificate authority such as VeriSign.

I have now completed the first draft of the patches to add MPX support to Compiz-Fusion. These are only the first draft patches, so there are still tons of bugs to be fixed. After I fix those bugs, I’ll begin work on the Input Redirection patches for the rest of Compiz-Fusion. Below is a video of all the work done so far with IR/MPX.

Envizions has announced an "open source hybrid Linux gaming system" aimed at game developers. The EVO Smart Console is based on a 2.9GHz, 64-bit Athlon, includes its own Linux distro called Mirrors Evolution, and offers game-play, Internet access, VoIP, and HD video playback, Envizions says. Marketed with the 1950's-era tag line of the "System of Tomorrow," the EVO Smart Console will sell for as little as $250 with rebates. It will offer "cloud" based computing applications, Amiga-based games, and an Akimbo-based VOD (video on demand) service with over 10,000 titles, says Alabama-based Envisions Computer Entertainment Corp.

Have you had the need to find a port on a switch that a box is plugged into?? This script will help you do it in a automated fashion.

Wikipedia - When that other online encyclopedia just won't do ;) Previous entries, in backward chronological order, you may be interested in include our posts on accessing the Farmer's Almanac, accessing the International Dictionary, checking out the world's weather, spewing out famous quotations on pretty much any subject, doing encyclopedia lookups, accessing the online Thesaurus, translating between different languages and, of course, using the online dictionary.

Now, to those of you who operate under the assumption that Corporate Linux has any viable interest in the Linux Desktop, I am about to cause you great amounts of disappointment and angst. You in particular need to pay attention to what is said from this point and absorb it to the best of your ability. Your life may need to take a new direction if yours hinges on the Linux Corporate working with the Linux Community At Large. Again...This is what you said to me.

LXer Feature: 19-Oct-2008

Some of the big news this week included OpenOffice.org 3.0 coming out, Dell finally starts advertising their Ubuntu offerings and Cisco and Microsoft step up their courting of Linux developers. Also, Installing DSL on your hard drive, Linux gets a seat on all of Qantas's new Airbus A380's, Wikipedia moves over to Ubuntu servers, Russia's open source revolution and Carla Schroder shows us how to do professional level photography work on Linux without going to jail.

Windows is far from being the only game in town.The Apple Mac's secure and stable OS X operating system has a fiercely loyal band of devotees, and the user-friendliness of Linux distros has persuaded many people to take advantage of a seemingly endless supply of free software. Until now, the problem has been sharing resources between the operating systems, and both Linux and OS X are traditionally seen as isolated from Windows for this reason. However, this is no longer the case. Read on to find out how to configure Linux, OS X and Windows to freely share each other's resources, and in some cases, even log into each other.

On October 22, government and private industry experts will debate the issues and opportunities presented by collaborative software development models at the Government Open Source Conference (GOSCON) Portland, Oregon. The distinguished panelists have direct experience with successful public/private consortiums based on the open source software model in which developers as well as business and technical users collaborate to create new applications while sharing both the costs and the benefits.