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In some ways, all the uproar about Apple saving location data on its iOS device users is old news. Guess what? Big Brother, or Big Google, also collects geo-location information from its mobile, Android-powered devices. It’s like anything else in computing: geo-location can provide great services and resources, but it can also be abused.

The latest and greatest release of Ubuntu — 11.04, or “Natty Narwhal” — is nearly upon us. To get a sense of how the new version situates Ubuntu and the rest of the open source community going forward, I spoke with Canonical VP Steve George. Here’s the update.

Barnes Noble announced an automatic update this week for its Nook Color e-reader that turns the device into more of a low-cost Android tablet. New features offered by the 1.2.0 update include 125 apps, an email application, and support for Adobe Flash, says the online retailer.

Biff Baxter, real name Ronald Ropp, is a technology consultant based in Portland, Oregon. He's also the developer behind wattOS, an Ubuntu derived Linux distribution (see our overview). We were quite impressed with wattOS, so we got in contact with him for some Q+A.

In the latest GNOME 3, changing the theme isn't as easy as you're used to. Using Gnome Tweak Tool you can change the GTK theme but how about the titlebar (Mutter/Metacity theme)? Read on!

It's just a few days to go until the next major release of Ubuntu and the developers have issued a final testing version. Released late last week the second Ubuntu Natty Narwhal Beta will be the final pre-release ahead of a planned 28 April final release.

If you're like me, you've got music playing all day. When you have tapped out your personal collection, want to troll for new music, or just let someone else handle the playlist — you'll find plenty of Internet radio stations and streaming services. Thankfully, Linux offers plenty of ways to tune into Internet radio stations. From Banshee to Pithos, you have a bevy of options at your fingertips.

Aside from political issues surrounding open vs. closed-source (graphics) drivers on Linux, the proprietary NVIDIA Linux driver is widely liked. The proprietary NVIDIA Linux driver is relatively bug/trouble-free, has a performance parity to the Windows driver, supports new hardware right away, and has a near feature parity to the Windows driver. There's not much more you could ask for from a closed-source driver, aside from a few missing features. One of the missing features that's been widely talked about as of late has been Optimus.

OIN has continued to grow over the years, and for the first quarter of 2011, the group grew by over 70 new licensees including HP, Facebook and Juniper Networks. Though OIN aims to reduce patent risk, that doesn't mean that it eliminates all patent risk, just look at Oracle and Google. Oracle and Google are OIN members, yet they are both involved in a legal battle with each other over patents.

KDE has courted controversy in recent releases. It's improved now, but it's far from being perfect. We straps on our goggles, dive into the Plasmoidal soup and dredge up some suggestions for change.

[Here is an article that should perk the interest of my good friend Tony. - Scott]

nkscape is an open source vector graphics editor. Inkscape is cross-platform and runs on Unix based OS, Windows and Mac (typically under X11). In this post we have attempted to gather some best tutorials around the web, categorizing them into various groups, organized from novice users to advance level. If you have not installed inkscape then you can follow the following tutorial.

Cloud haters had a field day last week when Amazon EC2 went down and took down a bunch of popular Internet services with it, but while haters love to hate, the Cloud will survive and thrive in spite of it.

A Texas jury has ruled against Google in a suit that alleged some of its use of open source Linux code amounted to patent infringement, something that could have big implications for other companies using Linux technology and other open source systems. In the verdict, delivered last week, the jury decided that Google should pay US$5 million for the infringement.

LXer Feature: 24-Apr-2011

For your reading pleasure this week we have the Linux vs. Microsoft War is over..again, Oracle unchains OpenOffice, a review of Linux Mint XFCE, sticking a fork in Flock, and Google's Linux servers are hit with a patent suit. Enjoy!

Canonical has taken the wraps off a morale-boosting deal that has seen German insurance giant LVM Versicherungen convert 10,000 PCs to use Ubuntu Linux across the company's operations. The project included the conversion of 3,000 desktop and laptop computers in LVM's Muenster HQ with a further 7,000 in the company's agencies around Germany. The core software used by the company is LAS, a Java-based claims-processing application of its own design, backed by Lotus Notes, Adobe's Reader and the OpenOffice suite.

This week’s blog post relates to an area we often dismiss with open source software, money. In fact, the most common thought on money and open source is “hey, it’s free and works.” The reality is of course more complicated and I argue that open source is very expensive for the organizations running a project and sometimes they might not even consider all the costs when considering a new open source project. For this discussion, I am not referring to open source projects run by individuals, but large-scale solutions run by public companies or foundations.

I draw inspiration from the request of a dear member of this little web space, which has given to me the input for this article, to make a bit of clarity about a subject that,for what I’ve saw around during my research on the Internet, seems to have created some difficulties for many people.

The argument i’m talking about is the OCR technology (Optical Character Recognition), that is a “technology ” that can recognize text characters from an image of paper documents previously digitized through the scanner and then transform this into an editable text.

It's been about a month since our Bodhi Linux 1.0.0 (stable) release and I would like to say thank you to everyone that has helped make it a success! I'd just like to take a moment today to share our plans for the future with everyone.

Vertigo is a new fun arcade game for Linux which is based on Ogre3D and BulletPhysics Engine. The game is completely free, open source and cross platform. You are a probe and your mission is to maneuver your way to the other end of the warp tunnel. Your probe is set with 2 shields to protect from fire and ice drones, but only 1 shield is active at a time. You have to flip shields in time to protect yourself, and you can possibly move left and right to avoid some obstacles. It's a pure reflex game, so be quick. Coupled with awesome music score, you will quickly get lost into and want more of it. There is nothing too serious about this game. Just pure fun for quick time pass.

So, let me stress this one more time: if you have two GUI applications, e.g. an OpenOffice Word Processor, and a stupid Tetris game, both of which granted access to your screen (your X server), then there is no isolation between those two apps. Even if they run as different user accounts! Even if they are somehow sandboxed by SELinux or whatever! None, zero, null, nil!