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Jolicloud is a Cloud-Based Linux distribution with the brand new HTML 5 desktop, it lets you interact with friends and share and discover applications, enables you to easily access cloud-based services at the speed of light.

Becoming PCI complaint can be a daunting task, and its certainly not something that can happen overnight. We figure the time line for this will generally be about 10 days at the fastest. We will be going over a road map of how you can accomplish this, and what you can expect along the way. Covering everything from getting your server PCI compliant, some of the software and open source Linux tools you can use to help with this. As well as getting scanned by a PCI approved scanning vendor.

You might know this situation: you want to generate a GPG or SSL key, and during that operation, your system tells you that no more random bytes are available and that it needs to collect more entropy, and you are stuck. This short guide tells you how to solve this problem with the package rng-tools on Debian Lenny.

LXer Feature: 12-Dec-2010

The big stories this past week include a Linux Mint 10 review, Matt Asay leaves Canonical, more information on Novell's patents, a nail in Flash's coffin, Chrome OS notebooks will be Windows proof and my interview of Ulf Sandberg of SkySQL. Enjoy!

The Wine development release 1.3.9 is now available. The source is available now, Binary packages are in the process of being built, and will appear soon at their respective download locations.

The kernel has historically been developed independently of anything that runs in user space. The well-defined kernel ABI, built around the POSIX standard, has allowed for a nearly absolute separation between the kernel and the rest of the system. Linux is nearly unique, however, in its division of kernel and user-space development. Proprietary operating systems have always been managed as a single project encompassing both user and kernel space; other free systems (the BSDs, for example) are run that way as well. Might Linux ever take a more integrated approach?

Lighttpd is a secure, fast, standards-compliant web server designed for speed-critical environments. This tutorial shows how you can install Lighttpd on a Fedora 14 server with PHP5 support (through FastCGI) and MySQL support.

Earlier this year Google announced they would be switching to the EXT4 file-system on their Linux servers (previously they were still using the mature EXT2) and at the same time it was made available they had hired Ted Ts'o, the lead developer of this file-system currently in use by a majority of the new Linux desktop distributions. Google's continuing to love the EXT4 file-system and now with their new Android 2.3 "Gingerbread" operating system for smart-phones and other mobile devices, they are switching to EXT4 there too.

"So we have a few great Free Software gaming engines now, like DarkPlaces used in Nexuiz, Cube 2 used in Sauerbraten, Qfusion used in Warsow, soon id Tech 4 which is used in id Software's Quake 4, Doom 3, Enemy Territory: Quake Wars along with many others, and the HPL1 engine used in Frictional Games' "Penumbra: Overture". All of these engines have some combination of normal mapping, bump mapping, and/or parallax mapping..."

Fuduntu, a Fedora 14 Remix optimized for netbooks and laptops (but works on desktops too) has reached version 14.7, getting some further improvements which make it stand out, like Firefox cache moved to /tmp to improve flash performance out of the box (Fuduntu already had /tmp and /var/log moved to RAM disk). The new version also comes with Adobe Flash, ntfs support and Fluendo MP3 codec installed by default along with other tweaks.

This looks at the 5 most popular (give-or-take) Mono applications for Linux. Not a single one of which doesn’t have a significant amount of references to non-ECMA namespaces. As the Microsoft Community Promise covering any implementation is limited to the “extent it conforms to one of the Covered Specifications”, we can reject the claim that “All of the pieces of Mono that are used in Linux apps are covered by the MCP.

Ubuntu Brainstorm is a wiki-like interface that allows the Ubuntu community to input ideas that might make Ubuntu more usable, friendly, or fun. Almost 20,000 ideas have been entered and have received 2.5 million votes in the two years since its introduction. Entries can be sorted by all ideas, popular ideas, ideas in development, or implemented ideas. Matt Zimmerman, Debian developer and Canonical employee, thinks it might be a good idea to periodically collect and discuss the current status and future possibilities of the most popular ideas.

Earlier this week on Phoronix were new benchmarks of Ubuntu Linux vs. Mac OS X using a new Apple Mac Book Pro with an Intel Core i5 CPU and a NVIDIA GeForce GT 330M graphics processor. When looking at the tests results overall it ended up being a competitive race between these two Microsoft Windows competitors. In some areas, like the OpenCL computational performance, Apple's operating system commanded a sizable lead. In other areas, like the OpenGL graphics performance, Ubuntu Linux backed by NVIDIA's official but proprietary driver was in control. Here's an additional set of tests showing the measurable leads of NVIDIA Linux over Mac OS X with Apple's NVIDIA driver.

It's been all over the news that Google is starting a pilot program for it's Chrome OS, which I expect to be out within a few months. The pilot program is probably meant to get the last polish for the system. As my readers will know I'm always excited about new technology, especially dealing with Linux. But here's why I ended up not even trying to get into the program:

In one of my article i made a roundup of 3 tools to organize your time: Getting things Gnome, Tasque and Basket note pads. These are 3 good programs that can help you in task management, and i was surprised when in the comments someone told he’s using a tool from the command line to accomplish this: Task warrior. And so i tested it.

I believe it is high-time that Apache and Google created a new, Java-like programming language, platform and VM which can easily accomodate the ports of the Java base libraries, all of the Apache developed Java libraries/applications and the typical, popular open-source libraries like Hibernate.

Here are a bunch of interesting video demos showcasing native multitouch support in Linux. I especially liked the one which demoed a good looking Dell touch pad running Ubuntu Unity.

We have always been strong advocates of computer games. Rather than rotting the brain, computer games are interactive, teach essential life skills, and can stimulate learning. They also have been proven to enhance skills such as creativity, cooperation, teamplay, as well as encouraging innovative and strategic thinking and improving hand-eye coordination.

The holiday season is upon us, and you know what that means: relatives coming over wanting to use your WiFi. If you'd like to find a solution somewhere between "run an open, unsecured AP" and "hand out your WPA2 password to people who write things like that down on sticky notes" then setting up a captive portal is a convenient option.

Many mobile application developers are frustrated by the complexity involved in creating apps that work across all platforms. What works on an iPhone won’t necessarily cut it on a BlackBerry and apps that sing on an iPad need to be completely overhauled for an Android-based tablet. An open development ecosystem would go a long way toward getting apps to market faster, and potentially mean less wear-and-tear on developers trying to keep up with evolving technology. Kurt Daniel, COO of mobile application development platform Workllight, makes a great case for the necessity of open mobile app development and has some tips on what developers should consider before writing their first line of code.