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The KDE edition seems to have regressed in terms of stability, as I thought I'd never see a Plasma crash ever again but I did, while the GNOME edition is just plain annoying.

We're happy to report that libpoppler, the most common PDF library on GNU/Linux, has matured its support for these and other PDF features -- a move that means every free software user can have PDF software with capabilities that were until recently exclusive to proprietary software.

Not only for Windows, but also for Linux the hour of truth comes near. October-November are months with new releases and upgrades. Let's forget about Windows 8 for now; it's still an early Beta. However Ubuntu 11.10 and Linux Mint 12 will come out soon. So are updated desktops: Gnome and KDE to name but two. It's no secret that I am still not convinced that the Gnome based Gnome 3 shell and Ubuntu's Unity desktops are matured enough to compete with either Windows 8 Beta or Apple's OSX.

The Intel "i915" Gallium3D driver continues to advance thanks to love from Google. A new Intel employee is now even contributing to this unofficial driver too...

In the days after Steve Jobs' death, friends and colleagues have, in customary fashion, been sharing their fondest memories of the Apple co-founder. He's been hailed as "a genius" and "the greatest CEO of his generation" by pundits and tech journalists. But a great man's reputation can withstand a full accounting. And, truth be told, Jobs could be terrible to people, and his impact on the world was not uniformly positive.

This is, unfortunately, typical of Stallman – and exactly why the self-appointed leader of the free software movement is the last person who should be spokesperson for anything. He manages to offend common decency by celebrating the absence of a man who contributed enormously to the world of computing, and insult millions of Apple users simultaneously. But I see no argument whatsoever here to persuade Jobs' fans that they should be considering free software. Just a petty expression of relief that a rival is no longer available to compete with Stallman's cause.

As many of you know the most used packages on GNU/Linux are deb and rpm.

deb is the extension of the Debian software package format and the most often used name for such binary packages. Debian packages are standard Unix ar archives that include two gzipped, bzipped or lzmaed tar archives: one that holds the control information and another that contains the data.

RPM Package Manager (RPM) is a package management system. The name RPM variously refers to the .rpm file format, files in this format, software packaged in such files, and the package manager itself.

Use of the drives is now severely restricted throughout the military. But the base at Creech was one of the exceptions, until the virus hit. Predator and Reaper crews use removable hard drives to load map updates and transport mission videos from one computer to another. The virus is believed to have spread through these removable drives. Drone units at other Air Force bases worldwide have now been ordered to stop their use.

In the meantime, technicians at Creech are trying to get the virus off the GCS machines. It has not been easy. At first, they followed removal instructions posted on the website of the Kaspersky security firm. “But the virus kept coming back,” a source familiar with the infection says. Eventually, the technicians had to use a software tool called BCWipe to completely erase the GCS’ internal hard drives. “That meant rebuilding them from scratch” — a time-consuming effort.

It was already a slow week when the news came on Wednesday of Steve Jobs’ demise. Since then, most tech sites have been reporting on not much else. As always, however, there were a few things to note…Privacy Issues with Kindle Fire’s Silk Browser. Almost as soon as Amazon unveiled their new Kindle Fire tablet last Wednesday, Naked Security raised some privacy concerns about the device’s browser, called Silk. It seems the browser, in order to offer a quicker user experience, does most of it’s heavy lifting in the cloud:

SugarCRM is the world’s largest open source CRM (customer relationship management) software. Founded in 2004, over 7,000 customers and more than half a million users rely on SugarCRM to execute marketing programs, grow sales, retain customers, and create custom business applications. These custom business applications can be used in a multitude of ways, such as to power sales teams, run customer support organizations, and manage customer information databases.

The PCLinuxOS Magazine staff is pleased to announce the release of the October 2011 issue of the PCLinuxOS Magazine.

Indian Supreme Court has given a customized DVD of Ubuntu 10.04 LTS to more than 17,000 courts across the country. All the systems in these courts were running Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 for last 4-5 years and now it will be replaced by Ubuntu. Many helpful links and materials are being provided to these courts. An SMS channel has also been setup which will provide helpful Ubuntu tricks and information to these courts.

Charlies Games has released his shmup Scoregasm today. Scoregasm is available on Windows, Mac and Linux priced at a respectable $10

While I was away for three weeks, there was an update on LP bug #760131, the infamous bug report on the power consumption being raised significantly higher in Ubuntu Natty. This bug report of high importance now indicates a fix being committed to Natty and a fix being released for Oneiric, but what has changed? Here is an update.

So today I resigned my membership in the Free Software Foundation, so I am no longer Member No. 5030. I did so because Richard Stallman no longer speaks for me after making a completely ludicrous, tactless and heartless remark regarding the passing of Steve Jobs.

One thing that has been holding me back from switching from Firefox to Google Chrome has been the lack of an FTP client. I’ve been quite fond of FireFTP for a while now. Well, my wait seems to be over.

This week, we look at IT as Dante's Inferno, why innovation is wired in developer's brains and the most likely IT jobs to survive the next decade.

Welcome to the 168th issue of Softpedia Linux Weekly!

LibreOffice was a dive into the unknown, and an opportunity to prove what the community already knew: that a chance to swim free could only bring positive results

As a free software, open standards kind of guy, I believe in having the ability to choose what I want to run and how I want to run it. I believe in being able to select what to run on my computers. I believe in open standards and a level playing field for business large and small. I believe that vendor lock-in hurts consumers and stifles innovation.