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The rolling-release Arch Linux distribution has just enabled floating point textures for Mesa. This was the hotly-debated feature for Mesa that provides OpenGL floating point textures and render targets, but is disabled by default since its protected by patents in the United States and elsewhere. Arch Linux users when building new versions of Mesa will receive this support irrespective of their physical location.

As I reported on May 31st, 2011, Oracle has, with IBM’s encouragement, given the open-source OpenOffice office suite to The Apache Software Foundation (ASF).

The free, open-source office suite OpenOffice has been dying by inches for quite some time. Now that Oracle has "given" the project -- sans support, it would seem -- to the Apache Foundation, I'd say it's time to close the lid on the box and drop it in the ground. It's not like Oracle didn't kill it first.

The bottom line is this: I'm a married man today. I really don't have time to struggle with poorly documented programs which don't give out helpful error messages and require source-level hacking to figure out what the !@#$ is going on.

I was baptized into the zero bugs religion about 20 years ago. This was before the web and time-based releases, but these only add complications, and are yet compatible with zero bugs all the time. As a beginner, you can cheat such as zero bugs older than 6 months / 2 releases, or give yourself 1,000.

There’s a fifth spot available on the Open Virtual Alliance’s governing members board. Who’ll take it is anyone’s guess but Microsoft and Apple are potential contenders.

The Bodhi team and I are proud to announce the availability of Bodhi Linux 1.1.0. This is the first of our quarterly scheduled update releases to keep the software on the Bodhi live CD current. The live CD includes a number of package updates including: Linux kernel 2.6.39, Enlightenment SVN build from 2011-05-23; Intel 2.15 drivers, Midori 0.3.6. The Bodhi repository also saw a number of recent package updates including Firefox 4.0.1, Chromium Browser 11 and NVIDIA driver 270.41. When booting the new live CD you will notice that the art has undergone some changes as well.

A month has been passed since the eventful release of Ubuntu 11.04 Natty Narwhal. Many loyal Ubuntu users turned hostile with this release and Canonical's new Unity interface is at the receiving end for what it does and what it doesn't. I actually liked the new Unity approach to desktop and I believe that it has got a great future, provided that Canonical is able to rectify the bugs and usability issues in time. This post is for those who would like to use Unity. A quick recap of Ubuntu 11.04 tips and tricks that we published during the month.

This month openSUSE community manager, Jos Poortvliet, discusses copyright assignment and the buzz surrounding ‘Project Harmony’.

Android represented 36 percent of U.S. smartphone share through April, 10 points higher than Apple iOS, but down a point from March, says Nielsen. The research firm also says Android users download more data than iPhone users, while Distimo reports that Android Market has significantly fewer paid apps than Apple's AppStore -- and that it's earning less money for developers....

Nokia appears to be stuck in cell phone Purgatory waiting for the Windows Phone 7 phones to hit the market later this year, while still trying to move phones running Symbian. The phones aren't selling and the second quarter earnings report is ugly.

Within such a short time there are many good themes developed and ready to use. Here you will find five unique gnome shell themes that you will surely want to try out if you want to make your desktop truly unique. Find below a screenshot tour and links to the download pages.

In what may not be the best-kept secret, Oracle has finally spilled the beans: It's proposing OpenOffice.org as an Apache Incubator project — and not handing it to The Document Foundation. Oracle had announced earlier this year that it would be passing the torch to the community, but failed to provide any specifics about the ultimate destination. The Document Foundation is the organization behind the OpenOffice fork, LibreOffice.

Sigil is an open source, multi platform WYSIWYG e-book editor designed for editing e-books in ePub format. The application has an impressive list of features that allows you to do basic as well advanced editing. Sigil also comes with easily accessible documentation. The project is gearing towards a version 4.0 release bringing new features, interface improvements and fixes over last the stable release. The current version is 4.0RC1 (released April 22) which is as good as stable. This is a must have application for users who work on editing/writing e-books.

Mandriva, through Eugeni Dodonov, announced today, June 1st, the immediate availability for testing of the third and last Beta version of the upcoming Mandriva 2011 Linux operating system. This unexpected release is here to make Mandriva 2011 a more stable OS.

This tutorial shows how you can set up a Linux Mint 11 (Katya) 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. Linux Mint 11 is a Linux distribution based on Ubuntu 11.04 that has lots of packages in its repositories (like multimedia codecs, Adobe Flash, Adobe Reader, Skype, Google Earth, etc.) that are relatively hard to install on other distributions; it therefore provides a user-friendly desktop experience even for Linux newbies.

Chrome Web Store is becoming more and more interesting everyday. The super addictive games from Chrome Web Store that we featured almost a week ago is a telling example. Chaufr Chrome Extension is another great find. This extension lets you navigate and search the web using voice commands. And it works pretty good too.

700MHz processor, 256MB of RAM. It doesn't seem that long ago since I was running a desktop PC like that. However, these are the specs of a new keyring-sized computer to be released by a UK not for profit company. They hope to be able to sell it for $25 dollars a pop, and best of all, it runs Linux.

Last week there was the news post about whether AMD is open-sourcing something next week (this week), which turns out to be based upon a Twitter comment I had made. A discussion about AMD possibly open-sourcing something had ensued, including comments by AMD's John Bridman, where he had said nothing was basically planned. Interestingly though, the initial open-source Llano APU support was just published.

Undeterred by slumping netbook sales, Asus announced three such devices, one of which -- the Eee PC X101 -- will be offered with the Linux-based MeeGo operating system for just $200. The EeePC X101 comes with a new 1.33GHz Atom N435 processor, while the Windows-only EeePC 1025C and 1025CE will include the "Cedar Trail" Atom N2600 and N2800, according to multiple reports.