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O'Reilly Media announced a new Android Open Conference Oct. 9-11, in San Francisco, designed for anyone who creates, sells, or markets Android-related products. In other open source conference news, the Linux Foundation last week announced keynote speakers, including Linus Torvalds, for LinuxCon Japan, June 1-3, and Linux Expo of Southern California announced events for Software Freedom Day 2011 on Sept. 17.

It's 2011. Do you know where your Semantic Web is? Hmm. Good question. After so many years, one might wonder whether you should still care whether the Semantic Web ever makes it. Well, you should. Why? Because the more the Web is capable of doing, the more we can get out of it. And given how much we now rely on the Internet and the Web, we can't afford to allow either to be less than they are capable of being.

From free, open-source software user, to blogger, then Linux distro developer -- that's the path of 20-year-old Jeff Hoogland, who in 2010 started Bodhi Linux, a distribution based on Ubuntu that features the latest version of the Enlightenment window manager and key newer applications in a stripped-down base that lets users set things up the way they like them.

The Ubuntu system requires you to login as an administrative user to be able to execute commands that only root can execute. However, you can alter the system to allow root to login to perform hours of administration as root. This eliminates the requirement of typing the full path for commands.

You may recall the saga of patent troll Bedrock, which claims that it has patents over Linux and successfully sued Google over Google's Linux use. Well, the verdict from Bedrock's suit against Yahoo on similar grounds has come in — and Yahoo is victorious, not least because Yahoo went second and got to see how the arguments in the Google case went.

When gnome 3.0 was released and its new shell became the point of attraction, many users were disappointed. They did want their old Gnome 2.32 panels and nothing else. A set of Gnome shell extensions are available now that make the shell look and act more like the old panel.

What do you get when you combine something old, something new, something borrowed and something blue? You get IBM and Red Hat: A new private cloud market contender.

GroundWork Inc., (www.groundworkopensource.com) the leading open platform for network, application and cloud monitoring, announced today that it has released GroundWork Cloud Connector for GroundWork Monitor Enterprise 6.4. An automatic, monitoring provisioning system, GroundWork Cloud Connector gives users the ability to monitor Amazon EC2 and Eucalyptus cloud instances right along side traditional data center infrastructures.

This week's 5 links include Vint Cerf on cloud standards, if process is killing developer passion and a cartoon on mobile development run amok.

Common wisdom has held for years that Linux is superior to Windows when it comes to security issues. But now that open source is growing in popularity both on the consumer side (think Android phones) and the enterprise side (Linux runs the 10 fastest supercomputers in the world, for example, according to Wikipedia), it's time to push past the adage and look again at the whole "which is safer" issue.

[Common wisdom..if users have any know Linux is by its design and not just its licensing and user-base is more secure, period. - Scott]

Even though in the beginning of the default email client session at the Ubuntu Developer Summit in Budapest, it looked like it's certain that Evolution will stay as default in Ubuntu 11.10, towards the end of the session things changed and it was decided to stay with Evolution for now BUT switch to Thunderbird as the default email client in Ubuntu 11.10 Oneiric Ocelot as long as it integrates with the desktop.

LinuxCertified, Inc. announced its next two day, hands-on course that provides substantial practice with key tools and capabilities available to developers of Linux based applications and system software. The course shows attendees how to use development and debugging tools and how to make use of many Linux system calls and library routines.

Google just launched an encrypted search portal which is a Godsend for people on public networks since there is a lot that can be gleaned from your search queries. For doing your protected searches, however, you have to go to a different portal which I linked to above. Now, the omnibar (the address bar in Google Chrome) also serves as a search box but searches on the normal google portal by default. Here is a simple, few seconds process to switch it over to encrypted search.

On June 15, Samsung and Acer will release the first consumer-oriented Chrome OS laptops, or Chromebooks as Google likes to call them. Both hardware- and software-wise, these netbooks are nothing special: You can download Chrome OS's open source brother, Chromium OS, for free -- and at around $400 for a Chromebook, you would certainly expect some better hardware than what Samsung and Acer are offering.

Released in March 2009, Linux-Libre is in a sense a grandchild of the already established distributions gNewSense and BLAG. Though, UTUTO-e , a Gentoo based Linux distro, is credited to have removed licensed linux source code for the first time, Linux-Libre improves considerably on the entire process and is more pro-active in its features.

The Samsung Series 5 Chromebook. Vergrößern Google has announced that Samsung and Acer will be making the first Chromebooks; instant-on, always-connected laptops that run the company's open sourced and Linux-based Chrome OS. As well as being available for purchase, Google is offering companies a subscription plan at $28 a month per user, which includes a Chromebook and online services, and a $20 a month subscription offering for educational users. UK pricing for subscriptions will be announced closer to the 15 June launch. The machines are enhanced production versions of the CR-48 notebook which Google gave away to interested parties late last year.

"NSA recommending Vista for home security is merely a reflection of the reality of monopoly in the retail space," said blogger Robert Pogson. "In the USA probably as few as 2 to 3 percent of users use GNU/Linux, so a recommendation is almost useless." Those who are serious about security "are already aware of SELinux, a product of the NSA. The NSA is merely recommending that folks move on from XP, a poor OS poorly supported by M$."

A full review of Lubuntu 11.04, including a gallery of images.

Creating special tables in Scribus is not a straightforward task. The controls are scattered, and few users are likely to decipher the necessary steps or their necessary order without help. However, each step in creating a table of contents (TOC), index, or frame is simple in itself, and, once one is added, you can edit the result exactly as you would the contents of any text frame.

In case you haven’t heard about it yet, the Internet Society (ISOC) is planning an IPv6 “test flight” with some large organizations, on June 8th, 2011. The event will last for 24 hours and is intended to raise awareness about the impending migration to IPv6.