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One of the remarkable features of KDE 4 is the extensibility. Developers or even regular users can contribute to the rich collection of artwork, software, widgets, and visual improvements. Ever so often, I look around for rather random add-ons that make my desktop experience more pleasant or occasionally even serve a meaningful purpose. They range from full applications to very basic widgets.

The sidux distribution is one which has been on my to-review list for a while. It's a small project which makes a bold effort to take Debian's Unstable repository and turn it into a functioning day-to-day operating system. Prior to trying out this ambitious distro, I had a chance to chat with two of the project's developers, Ferdinand Thommes and Chris Hildebrandt.

The annual DrupalCon conference is coming up, April 19th to 21st at San Francisco's Moscone Center. Drupal, of course, is the increasingly popular open source content management system founded by Dries Buytaert, and OStatic itself runs on the platform. There will be many movers and shakers from the Drupal world at the conference, and we've been running a series of Drupal-focused guest posts in advance of it. In this latest Q&A post, Zack Rosen, co-founder of Drupal-focused services company Chapter Three, discusses the company's new offering, dubbed Mercury.

It's been three weeks since Phoronix Test Suite 2.6 Alpha 2 was released (compared the usual two weeks, due to the tour of Chernobyl), but the third alpha release for this next release codenamed "Lyngen" is now available. Phoronix Test Suite 2.6 Alpha 3 is carrying mostly internal changes and improvements to pts-core, but there are some externally visible changes too. The start of the suite-to-pdf option has been introduced, various bug-fixes, text-based interface enhancements, tweaks to the generated graphs, and compatibility with older versions of PHP 5.1/5.2.

I would wager that you don't know where many of your most important files are. Can you access them with your file manager with little effort, print, copy, delete, duplicate, or otherwise work with these files? Probably not.

It was 8:00 AM and CIA agent Carl Cummings was already having a bad day.

I’m having an identity crisis. Regular readers of both this blog and my Education blog will know that I border on being a Google fanboi and Linux tends to work its way into my computer passions as well. I work almost constantly in the cloud and Linux obviously provides a cheap, stable platform for whatever I want to do online. My primary desktop and exclusive web and file server platforms? Ubuntu. Google Apps makes my life easy in my day job and manages virtually all of my communication needs in and out of work. However…

In the mood for a bit more color in your life? Check out Bashish to try out themes for your terminal. I installed from source due to problems with the Debian repository; if doing this, note that you'll need to install the dialog package manually via apt-get. Once you've run ./configure; make; sudo make install, run bashish to get things set up properly. Then restart a terminal to get the default theme. bashish list shows the theme list and bashish THEMENAME switches theme. Try elite for a multi-line prompt, moan for something more basic, or flowerpower for a floral look!

How does a distribution with 25 packagers maintain 8,600 packages in their repository and come back for more? Here's a look at the new Unity Linux Build Server (buildserv) which was recently designed to allow developers and packagers to point and click RPMs into a testing repository after building both x86 and x86_64 in a chroot...all done "automagically" in the background.

LXer Feature: 12-Apr-2010

This week we have Jim Zemlin and SJVN weighing in on IBM's supposed breaking of their own pledge to open source many of their patents. Are HP and Dell giving up on netbooks? What will come after Linux? Jack Wallen sees the future, a review of Tiny Me and much more in this week's LXWR.

Avant Window Navigator is a dock for the Free Desktop which shows your launchers and open applications. It also contains support for extensions, via plugins for third-party applications, which communicate with the dock with DBus, and via applets, which allows for workspace switchers, system trays, clocks, etc., to be embedded in the dock. These applets can be written in Vala, Python or C.

We are several days into Script Frenzy, a thirty day challenge to write a script, either a movie, play, television or graphic magazine. The challenge is similar to the fall exercise known as National Novel Writing Month where you have to write a novel. But where NaNo is about word count, Script Frenzy is about page count. But this is not the only difference.

Last week AMD launched the FirePro V8800, which is their first workstation graphics card derived from an ATI Evergreen graphics processor and designed to be a step-up from the previously reviewed FirePro V8700 and FirePro V8750. The AMD FirePro V8800 features 2GB of GDDR5 video memory with 147.2 GB/s of bandwidth, 1600 Stream processors, four DisplayPort outputs, ATI Eyefinity support, DirectX 11.0 / OpenGL 4.0 support, OpenCL 1.0 capable, a full 30-bit display pipeline, Multi-View display support, and much. We have now carried out our Linux testing of this new ultra high-end workstation graphics card and have the results to share this morning.

Father of Java, son of Canada Oracle's chief technology officer James Gosling, inherited from the take over of Sun, is leaving the company.…

This tutorial is being written to help you install Drop Bear to a chroot environment. Drop Bear is a relatively small SSH 2 server and client. It is an alternative lightweight program for openssh and it is designed for environments with low memory and processor resources, such as embedded systems.

In a move that will boost support for open video on the mobile Web, Google has provided funding to TheorARM—a project that produces an ARM-optimized implementation of the Ogg Theora video codec. Google's support for the project could be a signal that the search giant is significantly warming up to open video. Although HTML5 delivers open standards for Web video playback, browser vendors have not been able to reach a consensus on the codec. Some parties favor Ogg Theora, a royalty-free codec that can be freely redistributed because it is thought to be unencumbered by patents. Others favor H.264, a codec that offers technically superior compression but is burdened with costly licensing fees.

The screen is a high bright LCD 2 to 3 times brighter than a typical LCD screen and so it can be viewed in many lighting conditions without appearing dim. This system is also sealed and water proof.

Packt (pronounced Packed) Publishing is an online publisher of open source related books, but they are also dedicated to the "cause" of open source. So much so, that "...When we sell a book written on an Open Source project, we pay a royalty directly to that project. As a result of purchasing one of our Open Source books, Packt will have given some of the money received to the Open Source project." The folks at PacktPub.com periodically submit announcements of new book releases to the news pages of The Linux Tutorial site, so I'm quite aware of them. Recently, they emailed me and asked if I'd review MySQL Admin Cookbook. So here we are.

I knew in advance that venting my frustrations with Ubuntu in the form of an article yesterday would stir up a hornet's nest. [...] So far, with only a very few exceptions, the comments and discussion around my criticism of Ubuntu has been respectful and on topic, even when people strongly disagreed with me. This says something very positive about the Ubuntu community. Having read all the comments I'd like to clarify my thoughts on the subject. First and foremost, with all my criticism of Ubuntu, I am not questioning the competence or the expertise of the developers at Canonical. Far from it. As I pointed out in the article the folks behind Ubuntu have proven they are capable of delivering a quality product. That isn't at issue.

A month ago the Canonical crew working on Ubuntu 10.04 LTS received an unreleased Catalyst 10.4 driver from AMD for inclusion with the Lucid Lynx since the publicly available ATI Catalyst drivers had not -- and to this day still do not -- support the X.Org Server 1.7 used by this next Ubuntu release. Similar pre-releases for Ubuntu have happened in the past when AMD hasn't been quick to the game in supporting new Linux kernels and X Servers.