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This week's entry looks at a unique new audio editor, some important updates, and a very cool programming environment for graphics (and much more). As always, some tasty treats are cooking in the Linux audio kitchen.

I didn't want to do it, but I had to move from the 2.6.33 kernel to 2.6.34 to make both sound and video behave properly in Fedora 13 on my Lenovo G555 laptop with ATI Mobility Radeon 4200 HD graphics and Conexant 5069 sound.

Over the last few years, it has become clear that one of the most pressing scalability problems faced by Linux is being driven by solid-state storage devices (SSDs). The rapid increase in performance offered by these devices cannot help but reveal any bottlenecks in the Linux filesystem and block layers. What has been less clear, at times, is what we are going to do about this problem. In his LinuxCon Japan talk, block maintainer Jens Axboe described some of the work that has been done to improve block layer scalability and offered a view of where things might go in the future.

With the arrival of Ubuntu 10.10, the list of reasons to try Linux for your business just got a little longer. The free and open source operating system is now more user-friendly than it's ever been before while still offering the many security and other advantages it has over its competitors. If you're among the legions of new Linux users out there, congratulations on making a smart move! Now that you're on your way to a lifetime of freedom from high costs, vendor lock-in, constant malware attacks, and the many other disadvantages associated with Windows and Mac OS X, you should be aware of some of the classic mistakes Linux newcomers sometimes make.

Palm’s WebOS (a Linux variant) based phones have been out for a while but I haven’t had the need to consider them until recently (in the form of my Treo 650 broken down).

The Australian Taxation Office (ATO) has confirmed Linux users will finally have access to its AUSkey authentication software within two months, following compatibility complaints in May when the service was launched for Windows and Mac OS X only.

Now if I recall not to long ago a Microsoft representative was quoted saying "We love open source". Apparently they realize that many other people love open source as well, so many in fact that it is cutting into their bottom line - thus the offensive attack video you can see above.

Ubuntu 10.10, also known as the Maverick Meerkat, arrived on October 10th, 2010 and is the twelfth release of the Ubuntu OS.

But, there is more to this story. Reputed information security investigative journalist Brian Krebs reports that one of the two Microsoft IP addresses was involved in a denial of service attack against his website on September 23. According to him, the owner of his Web hosting provider, who is also a co-founder of the SURBL (Spam URL Blocklist) project, notified Microsoft about the possible compromise of its systems, hours after the attack. It's not very clear why Microsoft failed to properly investigate the report at the time and allowed the abuse to continue on its network for another three weeks. The websites promoted a rogue online pharmacy known as "Canadian Health&Care Mall," which is believed to be associated with a spam affiliate program called Bulker.biz. One thing the Bulker.biz gang is known for, is compromising poorly configured Linux or UNIX-like systems and using in their operations. By routing traffic through these servers, which use the IP addresses of well known organizations and companies, the spammers can evade various blocklists. This connection points to a high likelihood that Microsoft's compromised network hardware devices were running some Linux flavor.

The official OpenSUSE 11.4 release is due out in March 2011 and there’s at least one very good reason to anticipate its arrival with excitement. Ken Hess explains all…

The new Kubuntu 10.10 (Maverick Meerkat) has just been released. This guide shows how you can upgrade your Kubuntu 10.04 desktop installation to Kubuntu 10.10.

So while I'm a big Linux fan and tell others about its benefits, if anyone ever comes to my house to watch something thats on-line they will see Windows computer on my TV. So what does this mean? Eventual doom through media? Not if the big names in open source do whats necessary to close this new digital media gap among computer users.

Hardening the server's kernel is one of the most important things we need to consider when speaking about OS hardening. This is mini-howto install and configure grsecurity on CentOS server.

For those of you that have been wondering about the state of hybrid graphics support for notebooks running Linux, sadly the situation has yet to improve, which still puts it in shambles.

Arch Linux is yet another Linux distribution. By the time of this writing Arch Linux is in the top ten list of Distro Watch. Computers are mostly used to perform certain task, and to do that task well, the user should not have to spend much time configuring the computer, or tweaking it to make it work, Arch Linux aims to keep computer working as simple as possible. In fact its philosophy is summarized in the acronym KISS Keep It Simply Stupid. But do not thing that because it is simple it is not powerful, Arch Linux can perform as Desktop, LAMP, firewall, router, cache server, or any other task you may want, while keeping it simple. Some time ago, I have already written a review about Arch Linux, in this one year and seven months of being using it almost exclusively I have learned a lot, and realized it is (at least for me) one of the best Linux Distributions I have tested. Anyway I think it is time to write another review.

Today’s announcement that IBM is going to join forces and work with Oracle on OpenJDK is good news for Java, and by extension for Eclipse. All of us who live within the Java ecosystem need to recognize that this fundamentally strengthens the platform, enhances the business value of Java and offers the hope of an increased pace of innovation.

IBM has announced its intention to join the OpenJDK project, the official open source Java runtime effort that is led by Oracle. IBM's move to take a more active role in OpenJDK could end the company's commitment to Apache's Harmony project, and it should dissolve a long-standing stalemate that has hindered collaboration in the Java ecosystem.

Android is behind the second-quarter successes of HTC, Motorola, Samsung and Sony Ericsson, reports iSuppli. Meanwhile, global smartphone sales during the quarter reached 60.4 million units, up from 55.8 million units during the first quarter, representing a growth of 8.2 percent, says the research firm.

Ubuntu Tweak is every newbie Ubuntu user's closest companion and we have already seen how Ubuntu Tweak is slowly evolving into one among the must have installation candidates for Ubuntu in our Ubuntu Tweak review. And with the new mockup UI, the next phase of development for Ubuntu Tweak has only started.

Ajaxterm is a web based terminal. It was totally inspired and works almost on all OS. Ajaxterm written in python (and some AJAX javascript for client side) and depends only on python2.3 or better. Ajaxterm is '''very simple to install''' on Linux, MacOS X, FreeBSD, Solaris, cygwin and any Unix that runs python2.3.