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In the week ending 13 October - Firefox 16 arrived but was withdrawn to fix more security holes, WoW fell victim to a mass extinction hack, and the Linux Foundation proposed a Secure Boot solution. Also, building a GSM network and how Moore's Law has affected the use of technology

So you have installed a fresh copy of Ubuntu 12.10 Quantal Quetzal. Canonical offers a number of new features in Ubuntu 12.10 which we have already talked about. This post is to help an Ubuntu newbie to get a more comfortable Ubuntu experience. Because you do need to configure few things or install some applications to get the seamless and pleasant computing experience with Ubuntu. The post is actually a checklist of the stuff which I mostly do every time I install Ubuntu. Lets see the must to-do stuff after installing Ubuntu 12.10..

Gamecaster is a graphical frontend for open source project glc. It can capture real time footage of any Linux game that uses ALSA for sound and OpenGL for drawing.

Jim Whitehurst presented on Saturday morning at the 2012 installment of TEDxRaleigh, speaking to a sold-out crowd in Raleigh’s Lincoln Theatre. Now in its third year, TEDxRaleigh has brought together local innovators, researchers and thought leaders to give local flair to a wildly successful national event.

Lightweight Linux distro usually comes in the file size ranging from 20MB to 50MB and they are best suited to use on a old computer. Recently, I come across this tiny Linux distro that weighs only 12MB and it boots up really fast. I am referring to Tiny Core Linux. Weighing at 12 MB, Tiny Core Linux is one of the tiniest Linux distro I have ever seen. Being a barebone distro, it only comes with a few essential applications that are required for it to boot up and run properly. It also comes with a graphical desktop, but if you are looking for a turnkey solution, this is not the one for you.

In mid-September, the 3.6 kernel appeared to be stabilizing nicely. Most of the known regressions had been fixed, the patch volume was dropping, and Linus was relatively happy. Then Nikolay Ulyanitsky showed up with a problem: the pgbench PostgreSQL benchmark ran 20% slower than under 3.5. The resulting discussion shows just how hard scalability can be on contemporary hardware and how hard scheduling can be in general. Borislav Petkov was able to reproduce the problem; a dozen or so bisection iterations later he narrowed down the problem to this patch, which was duly reverted. There is just one little problem left: the offending patch was, itself, meant to improve scheduler performance. Reverting it fixed the PostgreSQL regression, but at the cost of losing an optimization that improves things for many (arguably most) other workloads. Naturally, that led to a search to figure out what the real problem was so that the optimization could be restored without harmful effects on PostgreSQL.

Now The Linux Foundation has stepped in with a solution which will allow every (and not just one distro or only Linux distro) open source operating system to run on UEFI secure boot systems.

Telling the time on Linux is more complicated than it might seem at first glance. To start with, the time command on Linux doesn't tell the time:

NVIDIA developer Robert Morell has proposed removing a marker for the Linux kernel's GPL licence from a Linux kernel driver interface, apparently in order to permit the use of the interface with proprietary drivers. A discussion thread on the topic has seen several key kernel developers express clear opposition to the proposal and debate over which developers would have to consent to such a change.

Patrick Verner announced a couple of days ago, October 10th, the immediate availability for download of the Parted Magic 2012_10_10 Linux operating system for partitioning tasks.

EA CIO Mark Tonnasen spoke at BoxWorks this week about the need for CIOs to lead their companies from traditional IT maintenance roles to more modern ones around service.

For those Intel Sandy Bridge owners wondering if there's any worthwhile performance improvements when upgrading from Ubuntu 12.10 with Mesa 9.0 and the Linux 3.5 kernel up to the early Mesa 9.1-devel state with the Linux 3.7 Git kernel, here are some benchmarks...

At the Ubuntu Developer Summit later this month in Copenhagen, a number of gaming-related development sessions are scheduled as Ubuntu developers try to push their Linux distribution as a first-rate gaming platform...

So for those not keeping up to date with Steam's CDR the list of games that will be available is growing!

Following its acquisition of Clutch.io in August, Twitter has made the Clutch A/B testing service and Clutch framework for writing native mobile apps available as open source.

The Bank of New Zealand was founded in 1861 and, on the verge of bankruptcy, purchased by the National Australia Bank Group in 1992. The acquisition was completed in 2003. It was rebranded BNZ, with a new logo and colors in 2008, to better align with its parent company, now known as NAB. BNZ promised its individual, agricultural and business customers positive, flexible and efficient service; access to a network of specialist expertise; and ongoing innovation.

Privileged control of your smartphone is one of the killer features of the Android operating system. This control, known as "root access," allows users to remove manufacturer and mobile operator hardware and software limits to takeover the device. I've written about competitor ClockworkMod's ROM Manager Premium app that you can use to automate and streamline maintenance and other tasks.

After having their project rejected by Kickstarter, the designers of the wireless lock system Lockitron went away and wrote their own crowdfunding platform, which they have now open sourced. Apigy Inc's Selfstarter enables companies to set up their own crowdfunding site, similar to Kickstarter, to host financing campaigns for their products. The very successful funding drive for Lockitron is already being run using the software.

The case was extraordinary in part because DDR was suing Digital River, an e-commerce company whose business not only pre-dated its patent by more than two years, but thrived in the marketplace; last year Digital River made almost $300 million in revenue. (That includes lines of business that weren't accused in this lawsuit.) By contrast, the dot-com started by the Rosses, Nexchange, was never profitable and went bust in 2000, as soon as it couldn't access more venture capital. Whatever the legal merits of its technology, Digital River had 1,000 clients by the end of 1997; that's more than 20 times the number of merchants Nexchange was working with when it went out of business in 2000.

A simple truth. A consumer-demand driven system like Kickstarter using Linux as a lure for crowd funding of games, means there must be consumer demand for Linux games.