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Speaking at this week's AsiaD conference in Hong Kong, Andy Rubin, Google Senior VP of Mobile and the man in charge of Android development, confirmed that the source code for the next major update to Android, version 4.0, will be available as open source "a couple of weeks" after the recently announced Galaxy Nexus smartphone ships next month.

Being able to install GNOME Shell in Ubuntu Oneiric is exciting. And as we experienced in our earlier review of GNOME Shell in Ubuntu 11.10, GNOME Shell has came a long since its first release and now is a very stable, fast and usable shell for GNOME. To further improve the functionality, GNOME Shell has extensions support. Though these are very early stages, there are quite a number of really good GNOME Shell extensions already.

Linux is fundamentally a command line Operating System. Anything and everything can be done through the command line – system configuration, connecting to WiFi access points, even accessing new hardware devices before the Linux Kernel gets a driver for it (like USB Flash Drives before Linux Kernel 2.4 – pre 2001). A quick example is the iwconfig command. Here is a quick peek at my current WiFi connection as seen from the command line:

Qt logo The plan to give Qt more independence from Nokia took another step forward with the activation of the qt-project.org web site. In September, Nokia announced that it was creating a non-profit foundation which would host the infrastructure for the C++ based user interface framework. Nokia has announced that the infrastructure the foundation is managing has now gone live, a few days before the Qt Developer Days conference in Munich from 24-26 October.

Wine 1.3.31 weekly development release is now available to download. Latest development release comes with many improvements and various bug fixes.

In a statement issued this morning on the company's blog, Canonical revealed that Ubuntu 12.04 will be supported for five years on the desktop instead of the usual three years that a standard long-term support release gets. The company says that the longer duration of desktop support is intended to better serve corporate desktop rollouts.

These are ten things I have learned as a Linux blogger. I hope they help strengthen and encourage someone out there.

Nokia is re-spinning its Qt project as an independent open source project, promising that cross-platform development framework code will be simultaneously available to Nokia and to the open source community. More details on the new project will emerge at the Qt Developer Days events, scheduled for Oct. 24-26 in Munich and Nov. 29 to Dec. 1 in San Francisco.

Well ladies (any out there?) and gents Helena the Third is now available directly through indievania (another awesome indie game site!) for Windows and Linux

I don’t know exactly what happened with fellow ZDNet writer David Gewirtz’s Linux server, but I do know it was bad. Really bad. He’s been having constant trouble updating and managing his software. The final straw was when he tried to install some updates to his hosted CentOS, a Red Hat Enterprise Linux clone, and it blew up on him.

Another typical week in the FOSS world. Mainly, the proprietary guys have been busy bad-mouthing the competition, while the FOSS folks have been busy finding solutions. ESR Defends RMS on Jobs..

Don Parris, author of "Penguin in the Pew," outlines the challenges that today's free/libre software movement faces and contends that the core message of free/libre software should serve to build up, liberate and inspire people.

One of the strange things about Canonical's Long Term Support (LTS) releases has always been the disparity between the length of support on the desktop vs. the server. LTS releases today provide 5 yrs of support on the server and 3 on the desktop, but that's going to change with the 12.04 release.

With Sabayon 7, you not only have just about every desktop environments available and cutting edge features, but can also boot it into a top-notch media centre environment all off the Live CD…

What is my overall impression of Ubuntu 11.10? I'd say it is not bad in general. It definitely got better and more user-friendly than Ubuntu 11.04. Yes, there are some points I still can't get used to. But despite these facts I think I'll keep Ubuntu 11.10 on my hard drive for some time. Maybe I'll get used to new Unity interface and its features.

This week we look at 5 ways to keep geeks happy, signs you could be a bad programmer and why one writer will choose Android over iOS every time.

South African Vodafone affiliate, Vodacom, announced the immediate availability of a Webbook device powered by the newly released Ubuntu 11.10 (Oneiric Ocelot) operating system.

Today Nokia announced the start of the open governance model for Qt, known as the Qt Project. The Qt Project allows both companies and individuals to contribute to the development of Qt. KDE supports this move and is excited about the possibilities it brings. We have been waiting for opportunities to take a more active role in Qt's future for a long time and open governance will make this easier. read more

The first point release to the Oktoberfest-christened GNOME 3.2 was released today. Like usual, this GNOME update (v3.2.1) just brings translation updates and bug-fixes. There's also some "tiny improvements" but nothing major...

For those Linux gamers and other desktop users currently looking for a new mid-range (sub-$150 USD) graphics card, up for review today is a NVIDIA GeForce GTX 550 Ti. The GF116 Fermi graphics processor for the GTX 550 Ti has 192 CUDA cores, 900MHz core clock, 24 ROPs, 32 texture units, a 192-bit memory bus, and this EVGA-branded graphics card is paired with 1GB of GDDR5 video memory.