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Don’t panic Ubuntu fans but your favorite desktop Linux distribution has fallen to fourth place in DistroWatch’s latest ranking. It’s obviously way too early to say whether Ubuntu, in actual use, is declining or not. However, if this is any indication of which way the wind is blowing, it’s time for Ubuntu to take notice.

One of the most anxiously-awaited Linux releases in quite some time --Linux Mint 12 -- is now available for download on the Linux Mint Mirrors worldwide According to this ZDNet article, some are hoping that this release will be the "Peacemaker" of the recent Linux desktop disputes, between Gnome 2, Gnome 3 and Ubuntu Unity.

The KDE community is proud to announce that next year's Akademy will be held in Tallinn, Estonia from the 30th of June to the 6th of July. Akademy is the annual world conference held by the KDE community to celebrate the Free Software desktop and work towards the future of KDE. Akademy 2011 in Berlin ended a few months ago. It was part of the Desktop Summit, which was a great success. Next year's Akademy awaits us in Tallinn, the capital of Estonia. read more

This tutorial shows how you can set up an OpenSUSE 12.1 desktop that is a full-fledged replacement for a Windows desktop, i.e. that has all the software that people need to do the things they do on their Windows desktops. The advantages are clear: you get a secure system without DRM restrictions that works even on old hardware, and the best thing is: all software comes free of charge.

In this week's KDE Commit-Digest we have included a feature on updates in Plasma Active from Marco Martin. In addition, the usual list of updates: Window Thumbnail support for QML in Plasma Workspaces Mouse cursor size is now configurable, Oxygen mouse cursors (pseudo) scalable Basic routing activity added in Marble read more

One year after the Radeon and Intel drivers supported precise vblank timestamps, there's a new patch for enabling this support in the open-source NVIDIA (Nouveau) driver...

Linus Torvalds has issued a Thanksgiving Linux kernel update for those not in a food-induced coma from this American holiday. The delicacy is the Linux 3.2-rc3 kernel...

Knight talks about his gaming roots, and how it changed his life in subtle but fundamental ways.

PHP is a widely used and often misconfigured server-side scripting language. Vulnerabilities are caused mostly by not following best practice programming rules.

Most recently, we installed a small 4 computer center at Furaha House. Coming to a strange country and falling into a completely foreign culture is most usually a shock. Furaha House is a non profit organization that aids African refugees and immigrants in learning the language, customs and all the while striving to be productive citizens in their new country.

The Horowhenua Library Trust, the birthplace of the Koha integrated library system, the first such open source project, finds itself in a peculiar position today, that of having to fight to regain rights to its own name.

Kindle Fire users may have to damp their enthusiasm for rooting their devices: unless they’re prepared to chase up some other fixes and put up with some inconvenience, rooting the device kills video access.

In November 2001, IBM made its Java tools IDE and platform, developed for WebSphere Application Studio, available under an open source licence. It was the beginning of Eclipse, which now claims 65 per cent of the Java IDE market. But why was Eclipse founded and what has been its impact over a decade?

I recently had a fun experience. My Mageia 1 Linux system seemed to be experiencing hard lockups requiring a push of the reset button to “resolve”. By “hard”, I mean no keyboard input, no program updates showing in X and sometimes no ping response from another PC on the LAN. I had run some updates, including a new kernel update, and these lockups appeared after running the updates. Cause and effect. Yes? Well, no. It turned out I was having a hardware problem. Here is how I figured that out.

We all know these arguments. An outsider comments on Linux distribution plurality and says that the lack of a unified platform is what hurts Linux adoption. This argument is not without its merits, but it isn't exactly a valid argument anyway. The first main issue with it is an obvious one. If no one singularly owns and controls Linux, no one would be able to pull all variants off of the virtual shelves and standardize the community on a singular distribution. Beyond this, there exists an entirely different yet practical reason for distribution plurality that people tend to overlook.

I just released RapidDisk version 1.3b. Within the next week I will post a patch of 1.3 for the Linux 2.6.18 kernel. You can read more about this on the project’s wiki page. Also, just a reminder to all those interested, recently I created a Google+ page for the project, if you wish to stay posted on the latest news of this open source project.

Here are some references for shell script developers, man page creators, README writers, etc. While documentation styles are a bit haphazard and vary with OS and programming language, there are some standards.

The Mailman package from the Debian/Ubuntu repositories comes with a configuration for Apache, but not for nginx. This tutorial shows how you can use the Debian Squeeze/Ubuntu 11.04/11.10 Mailman package in an nginx vhost. Nginx is a HTTP server that uses much less resources than Apache and delivers pages a lot of faster, especially static files.

I was pretty firm, if not too much so in explaining to him....again...that Windows programs did not work on Linux. I made it a point to remind him that I spent well over an hour going over this stuff with him then spent another 10 minutes on the phone with him explaining the difference between "download" and "install". I thought I was done. No.

It's time for a new Humble Bundle! This time, it's about the Introversion team, and it contains 4 great indie games: "Uplink", multi-awarded game "Darwinia", "Multiwinia" (a multiplayer version of Darwinia) and "Defcon". BUT... If you pay more than the average cost of the bundle (now 3.63$), you will get also the multi-awarded "Crayon Physics Deluxe" and "Aquaria"!!