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What do IBM, VMware, SAP and Dell have in common? They're all using Novell to build Linux appliances. Dell officially announced this week that it is joining the SUSE Appliance Program, financial terms of the partnership are not being publicly disclosed. The SUSE Linux Appliance Program is an extension of the SUSE Studio appliance technology and enables vendors to build and manage their own Linux software appliances.

IBM on Jan. 24 launched a Virtual Desktop for Smart Business push -- which allows Windows or Linux desktops to be hosted and managed centrally. I'm intrigued. But the Big Blue effort sounds suspiciously like a previous initiative called the IBM Client for Smart Work package, launched in 2009 with Virtual Bridges and Canonical's Ubuntu. So how does IBM's latest virtual desktop push differ from earlier efforts? Here's the update.

The Fedora Project is getting ready to break a lot of networking scripts that depend on the ethX naming convention — by being the first major distro to ship Consistent Network Device Naming.

Filmaster.com, an open source film community website that serves only Creative Commons content, unveiled their movie recommendations & reviews API enabling external programmers to create independent services that harness its power as explained in this bog entry. Sounds like a great opportunity for open source media centers (Boxee, XBMC or even MythTV or VLC?) to integrate social features into the apps!

Linux and open source verteran, Richard Hillesley, wonders if the much-used aphorism that ‘information wants to be free’ is still prescient in the light of of current events…

In Canada, powerful actors want to make the Net more expensive, less open. [Canadians, let's start rock and rolling on this issue -- see http://openmedia.ca/ for additional info. - Barbara]

The first stable release of the free office suite is available for download. The Internet, January 25, 2011 - The Document Foundation launches LibreOffice 3.3, the first stable release of the free office suite developed by the community. In less than four months, the number of developers hacking LibreOffice has grown from less than twenty in late September 2010, to well over one hundred today. This has allowed us to release ahead of the aggressive schedule set by the project. Not only does it ship a number of new and original features, LibreOffice 3.3 is also a significant achievement for a number of reasons:

VLC 1.1.6 is released, this new released comes with small features and fixing important bugs and a security issues.

I don’t know if we’ll ever see the year of the Linux Desktop or not, but it looks like 2011 is going to be the year of the Linux Tablet. The future success of Linux as a tablet and phone platform might not look as open and utopian as many supporters of free software would like, but it seems that it’s inevitable none the less.

Never let it be said that the Debian project does not listen. For some time there has been growing dissent about the presence of non-free binary blobs in the Debian GNU/Linux kernel. Identi.ca and other public arenas became almost hunting grounds for some of the more fanatical freedom advocates within the community. Recommendations for using gNewSense and other 100% free distributions became more prevalent as the concerns over the non-free Debian kernels grew. The Debian project has now announced that from the release of Squeeze (Debian 6.0) their GNU/Linux kernels will be available without the non-free blobs.

Read the article at Free Software Magazine.

The 3D powerhouse Blender is arguably the most complicated piece of desktop software in the open source world. It handles every part of the workflow used to create a CGI film or a 3D game: creating objects, rigging them to move, animating them, controlling lighting, rendering scenes, and even editing the resulting video. Each release packs in more new features than most people can understand without consulting a textbook (or two). One of the down sides, though, is that over the years Blender has developed the reputation of being difficult to learn. Fortunately, the latest release takes on that challenge head-first, and makes some major improvements.

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VLC is among the most popular open source video players. According to the VideoLAN project, the 1.1.5 release has had 58 million downloads. Now it's time for those 58 million downloaders to update to VLC 1.1.6, for some security, bug and stability fixes.

Fuduntu 14.8-3 update is now available as an update for existing Fuduntu users, and as downloadable media for new users interested in installing from scratch. This update brings the following changes to the Fuduntu Linux distribution.

A few times each month, I tire of the complexities of GNOME and KDE. Then I turn to a simpler, faster desktop for a couple of days or a week -- and that desktop, more often than not, is Xfce. No other desktop I’m aware of balances convenience and speed half so well.

Applications for Ubuntu/Linux are not at all in short supply. But picking the best from the rest is not an easy thing to do. There are a number of really good bit torrent clients for Ubuntu out there. Here we intend feature a collection of 5 really good bit torrent clients for Ubuntu which we think are among the best.

The Firefox 4 browser is edging closer to final release but still faces hurdles. Once the darling of the Internet digerati, the Firefox browser is still battling problems to issue a new release. Version 4 of the browser has suffered multiple setbacks and although it now looks likely to be released in February, the delays have caused Firefox to lose some of its shine.

Three well-known BSD clones are in their latest developmental cycles and have recently released test versions. FreeBSD is closing in on version 7.4 with a RC2, GhostBSD just released their 2.0 Beta 2, and PC-BSD 8.2 has seen its second release candidate as well.

LXer Feature: 23-Jan-2011

In this week's Roundup we have Glyn Moody in defense of hackers, LibreOffice keeps making waves, Xfce 4.8 is released, our own Paul Ferris explains how to be a catalyst for FOSS and just what is this 'Steve Jobs' dilemma Linux is supposed to have? Enjoy!

Amarok 2.4 codenamed "Slipstream" was released some days ago. Amarok has evolved a lot over the year and we had followed the Amarok evolution in its each and every step. Now with the release of Amarok 2.4 final, a lot has changed. Here is a quick preview.