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The new European e-reader was just released and while it features a webbrowser, audio player, web store next to the book reading and everything with a touch screen, everything is also slightly buggy:

Oracle has updated its patent infringement suit against Google. Now the enterprise software corporation has point-blank accused the ad broker of directly copying its Java code, according to reports. According to InfoWorld, the originally vague suit now includes specific examples of code that Oracle claims Google had filched to use in Android, with examples thoughtfully attached. These include class libraries and documentation.

You've been using GIMP for cleaning up your photos -- but now you have a picture of a kitten or a bird or your new smartphone that you want to paste into another picture. It's one of the most common questions the GIMP community fields -- how do you take one part of a photo and make it ready to paste somewhere else? The answer is, "It depends." There are lots of different methods. Here are four of the most useful I've found.

Nautilus Elementary simplified Nautilus extensively. If you are wondering how Nautilus can be improved any further, DanRabbit has an answer every single time. Following mockups deals with integrating paths with search/edit entries in the Nautilus location bar.

Installing Webmin on CentOS 5.5. Webmin is a web-based interface for system administration for Unix. Using any modern web browser, you can setup user accounts, Apache, DNS, file sharing and much more. Webmin removes the need to manually edit Unix configuration files like /etc/passwd, and lets you manage a system from the console or remotely.

(Sacramento, CA, USA: October 28, 2010) - The Linux Professional Institute (LPI), the world's premier Linux certification organization (http://www.lpi.org), announced promotional exam labs for their Linux Professional Institute Certification (LPIC) with the Free and Open Source Software Foundation for Africa (FOSSFA: http://www.fossfa.net/) on November 13, 2010 (Strathmore University, Nairobi, Kenya) and February 12, 2010 in South Africa (location to be announced). These exam labs are part of a larger "train-the-trainers" program jointly sponsored by FOSSFA and InWEnt Capacity Building International of Germany (InWEnt: http://www.inwent.org/).

On October 10, Canonical released its latest installment of Ubuntu, codenamed “Maverick Meerkat”. Like previous iterations, Maverick also includes variations from the standard Ubuntu Gnome interface. Kubuntu is the KDE variation of Ubuntu, and last week, I decided to upgrade from 10.04 and give 10.10 a try.

A quick search of the CVE database turns up 80 CVE numbers related to kernel vulnerabilities so far this year. At one recent conference or another, while talking with a prominent kernel developer, your editor confessed that he found that number to be discouragingly high. In an era where there is clearly an increasing level of commercial, criminal, and governmental interest in exploiting security holes, it would be hard to be doing enough to avoid the creation of vulnerabilities. But, your editor wondered, could we be doing more than we are? The response your editor got was, in essence, that the bulk of the holes being disclosed were ancient vulnerabilities which were being discovered by new static analysis tools. In other words, we are fixing security problems faster than we are creating them.

Firefox 4 is all over over the news and the funny thing is, Firefox 4 final release has not even happened yet. Firefox 4 beta 6 was released recently and it boasts of key performance improvements and a number of new and useful features like Tab Candy. Let's do a quick look at the latest Firefox 4 in Ubuntu 10.10 Maverick Meerkat.

This tutorial explains how you can integrate ClamAV into ProFTPd for virus scanning on an Ubuntu 10.04 system. This is achieved through mod_clamav. In the end, whenever a file gets uploaded through ProFTPd, ClamAV will check the file and delete it if it is malware.

Performance of your database server is directly tied to how well the underlying operating system is working, and there the performance is driven by the hardware you're using. To fit all of these pieces together—hardware performance, operating system performance, and database performance—you need a good monitoring system.

The simple performance tools on a UNIX-derived system are straightforward to use, and it's easy to show examples of good and bad behavior, the best way to teach how those tools are useful for monitoring. In this article by Gregory Smith, author of PostgreSQL 9.0 High Performance, we will cover iostat; Unix's monitoring tool.

Our last review of the Jolicloud 1.0 operating system was very appreciated, and we thought that it will be a very good idea to give you guys a glimpse into the next release, Jolicloud 1.1, which will be available for download/upgrade in November 2010.

While announcing its merger with the Consumer Electronics Linux Forum (CELF) today, the Linux Foundation launched an open source build system project called the Yocto Project. Based on the Poky Linux build system, the CELF- and Intel-driven Yocto Project aims to provide open source tools to help companies make custom, Linux-based embedded systems for ARM, MIPS, PowerPC, and x86 architectures.

Earlier this week I wrote a quick look over on EOL about Super OS 10.10. Super OS…well…it didn’t exactly live up to its name, though it does have its place among the many Ubuntu remasters out there. I ran into another distro though that does a more credible job of living up to its name. Ultimate Edition 2.8 is the latest release of yet another Ubuntu-based distro.

Last week I was on the road and out of my home office. Even with my little Eee netbook and plenty of spotty wireless access I still managed to get behind in just about everything. My trip was non-technical in nature so a few days away from the high-tech hub-bub was useful. I was not on vacation either. My trip was to attend meetings as part of my work with a local non-profit organization. It turns out that having geek mojo helps outside of HPC as well. I managed to set up a Wiki and an on-line survey that has been received quite well. (As a side note, I used LimeSurvey. It made the job so easy and made me look like and an uber geek. Nice work Lime team.)

After several missteps, MS is dying as a consumer brand. Consumers have turned their backs on Microsoft. A company that once symbolized the future is now living in the past. Microsoft has been late to the game in crucial modern technologies like mobile, search, media, gaming and tablets. It has even fallen behind in Web browsing, a market it once ruled with an iron fist.

The hype is all about cloud and the end of the desktop as we know it. The recent move from a "pure" gnome desktop to Unity by Ubuntu/Canonical is clearly a sign that of a fast-track type of (r)evolution. Why is it good for the key-players (Ubuntu/Debian, Canonical, Gnome and ... the User), what are the risk associated with this somehow bold move ?

Having trouble figuring out why Apache isn't starting, or another program is crashing and burning, and the logfiles are giving no clue? Time to reach for strace. What's strace? The strace utility is used to run a command and display its system calls, so you can see exactly what the program is doing until it exits. Experienced users can work with strace to do performance testing and so on, but even beginners can use strace as a diagnostic tool to see why a program is crashing.

The Microsoft strategy against Android owes less to Ray Ozzie than it does to John Roberts. As I noted at the time, the non-decision in Bilski vs. Kappos gave companies a green light to try and sue innovation out of existence. This nightmare has now come to pass. The problem with software patents, as opposed to those for drugs or medical devices, is that they don’t cover the way you do something, but the idea of doing something.

When I first started to read the title of the motion, I thought with joy that Oracle was dismissing its complaint. But of course, no. That's in my perfect alternate universe, where Oracle comes to its senses and the parties work it all out, in the FOSS community way. Instead, it is asking the court to dismiss parts of Google's Answer -- some of its counterclaims, particularly the ones claiming that Oracle's patents are invalid -- some of Google's affirmative defenses -- which Oracle calls improbable and too vaguely pleaded -- and believe it or not it would like to censor some of the factual background material in Google's Answer. It says paragraphs 7 through 22 of Google's Answer are merely "a long list of self-congratulatory remarks and polemics that have nothing to do with Google’s counterclaims for non-infringement and invalidity." Oracle says they are immaterial and impertinent. It is to laugh, as they say. Silly stuff already, and we're just clearing the runway.