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I gave gNewSense a spin this weekend. It's mostly a good experience, but I am sticking with Debian for now. Here's why.

Whenever the topics of background wallpapers for plasma comes up, 99% of the time first question is: can they be animated? Animated backgrounds would be cool, but the consistency with which people ask that is pretty impressive. So before I continue on let me just get that question out of the way: "Yes, background wallpapers can be animated." Whew! Now on to what I've been doing with backgrounds since yesterday

TinyME Test 6 was announced today on Distrowatch.Com and we thought we would take a quick look at it. This little distro packs a big punch and we enjoyed the ride. Take a short look at our Flash Video of TinyME Linux based on the user friendly PCLinuxOS.

The technical manager of the JackLab project, Oliver Bengs, released the final 1.0 version of the JackLab Audio Distribution (JAD) today after a development period of over eight months. JAD 1.0 is based upon openSUSE 10.2 with the addition of a real-time Kernel for fast audio processing with the professional audio server JACK. JackLab 1.0 is the most comprehensive selection of open source audio and multimedia software to date. The Enlightenment D17 window manager (with ‘KDE-lite’ tweaks) is used by default, with the option of using the full KDE 3.5.7 instead.

Not only is AMD providing the open-source community with their ATI GPU specifications, but they have also been partnering with Novell on the development of a new open-source display driver. We've been telling you about AMD's open-source work all month, and today the new driver is finally available for download. It is still very much a work in progress and isn't much further along than the open-source R500 Avivo driver. However, this new driver does support the Radeon HD 2000 (R600) family. This new X.Org driver is called RadeonHD and in this article we have some initial information to share with additional articles coming later in the day.

In what the New York Times is calling a "stinging rebuke," the European Court of First Instance issued a much-awaited judgment at 9:30 AM today in Brussels, Belgium, affirming almost all of the March 23, 2004 holdings by the European Commission that Microsoft had abused its dominant position to further expand its market share. But while the victory is a significant one for the European Commission, how great a defeat is this in fact for Microsoft? Perhaps less than first meets the eye, on which more below.

Cuban authorities are seriously preparing to quit the Windows operating system and use the GNU/Linux free software instead, thus avoiding any sanctions for using this computer system by the Windows´ owner, the giant Microsoft Corporation.

Welcome to the Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter, Issue #57 for the week September 9th - September 15th, 2007. In this issue we cover Dell's remastered Ubuntu 7.04 ISO, Andrea Veri becomes a MOTU, Ubuntu Finland delivers Ubuntu to Finnish parliament representatives, and, as always, much much more!

This article shows how you can install and use PDFedit on an Ubuntu Feisty Fawn desktop. PDFedit is a free and open-source editor for manipulating PDF documents.

This summer, in a perfect storm of activity, the cell phone suddenly became a full-fledged wireless computer. Those prime-time TV commercials promoting the iPhone downplay the telephone application to emphasize data-rich Internet media capabilities -- email, Web surfing, GPS navigation, music, photos, and video -- all on a cell phone. Hard on Apple's heels, a blitz of new handhelds is beginning to vie for attention, led by Motorola's US launch of the Linux-based RAZR2 V8, now taking place. Has Linux become a contending competitive platform, pushing open source to the front of the stage in this market?

Today, Sept. 17, Linux turns 16 -- old enough to drive in some states, not to mention that in some Southern states, Linux is old enough to marry its cousin. Want to sign a card to Linus and the rest of those who made the operating system what it is today, or tell us how you got started with Linux? Getnix.com has a card to send the principals ready for you to fill out.

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) has announced two standards aimed at bringing order to the web. In early September W3C introduced Web Services Policy 1.5, giving developers a way to connect web services standards such as SOAP 1.2, WSDL 2.0, and XML Schema to new Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) based applications. And last week it gave a boost to what W3C calls the "semantic web" with the long-awaited announcement of the standard for Gleaning Resource Descriptions from Dialects of Languages (GRDDL).

Linux users are as evangelical about desktop environments, the all-encompassing graphical user interface software responsible for providing everything from taskbars to office suites, as they are about operating systems. It shouldn't come as any surprise, then, that the first major release in over five years of the most popular desktop environment available is causing quite a stir. Due to be released on December 11th, KDE 4.0 is bringing exhilarating graphical, usability, and functionality improvements to the Unix-like systems it is designed for—and Windows users will get a taste, too.

The fact that Linux is big business for IBM should come as no surprise to those who follow Big Blue. During the last decade IBM has steadily ramped up its Linux efforts to the point where it has now become a core offering across IBM's server and software product lines. In this interview, IBM's Inna Kuznetsova spoke about her role at IBM, the challenges she faces and her view on Microsoft's patent allegations and GPL version 3.

A European Union court on Monday dismissed Microsoft's appeal against the 2004 ruling which found the company had abused its dominant market position to score over rivals. Microsoft's lawyers failed to impress the European Court of First Instance, which not only dismissed the case but also rejected the appeal against the €497 million ($690 million) fine imposed on the company. Red Hat has issued a statement about the Commission's ruling, stating that it is great news for innovation and consumer choice, both in Europe and around the world.

Nautilus, the official file manager for the GNOME desktop, can help you perform tasks from browsing the filesystem to accessing Samba shares on your local network or FTP sites on the Internet -- and more. Here are a couple of tips and tools that will allow you to open a terminal window from Nautilus and resize and rotate images without opening any other program.

Armed with a One Laptop Per Child computer and kitted out in a Geek Freedom League t-shirt, South African deputy minister of science and technology, Derek Hanekom, opened Saturday's Software Freedom Day event at the departmental offices in Pretoria. On this note, he spoke of the importance of developing free software for the country's development, noting the difference between free as in costs nothing and free as in freedom to share and do with it what one wants without restrictions.

Google has proved unable to restrain itself from gloating over the ISO (International Organisation for Standardisation) decision not to approve Microsoft's request that the OOXML specification be fast-tracked for approval. The search giant promptly fired off a blog entry slating both the specification and the way the application was handled.

In conjunction with Software Freedom Day, the Free and Open Source Software Foundation for Africa (FOSSFA) has made a call for governments to purchase hardware that will not limit its choice of what software to run. The foundation, which promotes the use of free software and open source methods within Africa, said that during all the debates about FLOSS (free, libre and open source software) it was often forgotten that in many cases the hardware was locked into some proprietary operating system. The use of non-restricted hardware would benefit both governments and citizens, it argued.

Russia may have bowed out of the Cold War, but with the release of ALT Linux Personal Desktop 4.0, Russia has become a contender in the Linux arms race. Equipped with KDE 3.5.7, OpenOffice.org, Firefox, a modern infrastructure, and good multimedia support, ALT Linux is a potential weapon of mass adoption. ALT Linux is a Russian Linux distribution with several versions for differing needs. ALT Linux Ltd provides commercial support options for corporate customers, but also offers no-cost downloads of Personal Desktop for home and small office users. It is released under the Berne Convention for the Protecton of Literary and Artist Works, which reads very much like an open source license.