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In the TLWIR series, I take a hard look at the 8 most compelling stories in the realms of Linux, GNU, free software, and open source in the past week. This week is no different. There were great stories abound demonstrating more than ever that Linux has truly arrived. From Meego to Mint to Miro to the U.S. DoD, Linux and free software are literally everywhere.

In 1996, Linus Torvalds released Linux 2.0, and we got symmetric multiprocessing (SMP) and we were on our way to Linux supercomputers. In 1999, Linux 2.2 appeared, and Linux made a major move off Intel chip architectures. In 2001, after some delays, Linux 2.4 turned up with great server improvements. And, in 2003, Linux 2.6 showed up, the prototype for modern Linux. So why haven’t we seen a Linux 2.8 or 3.0 in the last few years?

One of the things Bodhi does differently from other distributions is that we make offline application installation easy. With this in mind each of our Bodhi updates will be accompanied a few days later by a "Service Pack". The service pack is a single file that handles seamlessly updating an offline Bodhi Linux computer.

The team is proud to announce the release of Linux Mint 11 'Katya'. One of the biggest improvements made to the Update Manager is how it now handles dependencies. It only shows updates, not their dependencies. If the upgrade of a package requires additional changes to your system a dialog pops up with a summary to show you which packages will be installed or removed. This brings a permanent fix to the notorious 'Broken packages' message that used to appear before. Linux Mint 11 Screenshot Tour

The main toolbar in digiKam provides quick access to several tools and features, and you can tweak it to fit your particular photographic workflow.

Here is yet another instance where Linux systems are being used for producing complex graphical effects in entertainment industry. This time Rockstar games, who gave the world Grand Theft Auto series used Linux systems (OpenSUSE/SUSE Linux) in rendering real life facial expressions to the characters in their game L.A. Noire (released on May 17th). Again, KDE is used as the desktop environment.

GNOME Shell is now available in the official Ubuntu 11.10 Oneiric Ocelot repositories, along with most of the GNOME 3 applications (Gedit 3, Nautilus 3 Evolution and so on; some of them are available for quite some time - like Nautilus, while some were uploaded recently - like Gedit or Evolution).

Last week, my ZDNet Virtualization colleague, Dan Kusnetzky, gave you his take on the new Open Virtualization Alliance (OVA) as, Red Hat-IBM pact, OVA launch will drive more KVM use in enterprise. And, Dan is correct, the heavyweights (HP, IBM, Intel and Red Hat) behind KVM will drive its adoption in the enterprise. But, the key areas that will drive that adoption are virtualized desktops and cloud computing.

It was just about a year ago that IBM, Samsung, ARM and others formed Linaro, the not-for-profit organization that aims to make it easier for developers to use Linux on ARM-based devices, and over the past few weeks the group has made several announcements that reveal some of the fruits of its labors.

Given the lack of evidence, I feel many of the claims regarding the "learning" that takes place in a community (what does it mean for a collection of individuals who come-and-go to "learn?") are overstated. For example, to say that "The responsibility for your learning rests in your own hands; people can and often will help you, but they're not obligated to." says to me that you are as likely to be unsupported by a group of strangers as anything else---which does not, to me, define a learning community in any way, shape, or form. And, perhaps most disappointingly, there are no concrete strategies or solutions offered: we are left to believe that people who want to learn things can magically do so if they have (1) time (an incredibly valuable and hard-to-come-by resource), (2) the Internet, and (3) committed members of a magical FOSS community who will stand by the learner's side and mentor them as they decide they want to learn... something.

What is my overall impression about Fedora 15 KDE? It is very good. Slick system all around. Familiar polished interface, supported by company with big name.

After the world clock, its time for another feature that is added to the 3.2 arsenal of the ‘awesome’ desktop. This time its one of the most requested features of gnome 3.0 that people complained about again and again. Yes, the gnome shell gets a replacement for the weather applet that is missing from the new version our favourite desktop.

This howto will guide you to set up RADIUS authentication with the LinOTP 2 Community Edition. LinOTP is a one time password backend that enables you to do two factor authentication with a broad variety of different hardware devices, software tokens and SMS. While the Enterprise Edition comes with a C module for the FreeRADIUS Server, the Community Edition, that is licensed under the AGPLv3 does not. Nevertheless, LinOTP provides very simple WEB APIs that makes it easy to talk to LinOTP in many different ways.

So, moving on to the highlight of the talk: Actually using the command line. Not as a last resort because you can't find another way, but because it's a nice place to be and you like it.

The first thing to consider is, the command line is a very customiseable place, and it's not always going to be at its friendliest out-of-the-box. For instance, this is not an easy-to-interpret screen:

Marlin is a new file browser for GNOME developed by ammonkey (who's also behind Nautilus Elementary) for Elementary OS.

I managed a couple of months. There were niggles and issues, but I gritted my teeth and bore with it until one day, I snapped. It was a trivial issue, really: Gnome-screensaver was conflicting in an odd way with xscreensaver, and I wound up unable to change any of my screensaver settings. Which was annoying, because the screen kept locking me out. So in what might be considered a slight over-reaction to a malfunctioning screensaver, I sacrificed an hour of productivity and wrote my own GUI.

Hacktolive.org announced today, May 30th, the stable and final version of Super OS 11.04, their Ubuntu 11.04 based Linux distribution with "super powers."

LXer Feature: 30-May-2011

Was it just me or did yesterday not feel like a Sunday? In the Roundup for this week we have SJVN talking about Novell & SUSE's new structure under Attachmate, Linux Mint 11 ships with retro GNOME 2.32 desktop, Emery Fletcher pontificates on Linux World Domination, it is revealed that HTC pays Microsoft $5 for every Android phone they make and Microsoft is in decline? I thought we already knew that.. Enjoy!

When a Finnish computer student sat down and wrote a new kernel, his goal wasn't to make the best OS possible to run 3D-accelerated applications on. When RMS was inspired to begin the GNU project, it wasn't so that he could make a suite of applications that would make it trivially easy to integrate social networking sites into your desktop environment.

For anyone that was doubting Linus Torvalds would finally part ways with the Linux 2.6 kernel series, you lost your bets. On the eve of Memorial Day in the United States and his departure to Japan for LinuxCon, Linus Torvalds just tagged Linux 3.0-rc1 in Git.