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Exaile 0.3.1 beta (a music manager and player for GTK+ written in Python) has been released today and it's a preview of the new 0.3.1 version but should still be pretty stable to use already! The new Exaile version finally adds a long awaited equalizer, but also includes a revamped and much more powerful tag editor (ExFaso) as well as some other new features.

As you may remember from my previous post, I simply wanted to import three spreadsheets into an MS-Access equivalent, use the "Query By Example" (QBE) mode to create a simple report and export the result to another spreadsheet. I did the whole thing in MS-Access as well and it took me about twenty minutes. This time I decided to give Kexi 1.1.3 and Knoda 0.8.3 a go. Not that I really needed to, but just to see if they were up to it if I needed to execute another odd job like this.

The openSUSE Project has reached its first milestone for the upcoming 11.3 release, due in July. Milestone 1 is the first of seven planned between now and late May. The development team said its primary goal is to test build interactions between newly-added features. The first milestone features version 2.6.32 of the Linux kernel, development version 2.29.5 of GNOME, and the first release candidate of KDE 4.4 desktop environment. The release also includes an openSUSE debut of a new desktop option: LXDE, short for Lightweight X11 Desktop Environment. LXDE is designed for computers with low hardware specifications like netbooks because it uses less CPU and RAM than other environments, the developers said.

Hats off to the Project Wonderland developers. Despite Oracle laying them off, the team will continue work on Project Wonderland. According to the project blog the core group behind the 3D virtual world toolkit believes in the open source project enough to keep working on it without backing from Oracle. Despite the layoffs, Nicole Yankelovich, who was the project team lead before being cut by Oracle, says that the project has "great momentum."

Using Linux in the public on a daily basis has made me realize that there is a right way and a wrong way to promote Linux to those who are unfamiliar with it. What is the right way to promote Linux you ask? Simple: You don't.

In the field of mathematical software packages, applications such as Wolfram Research's Mathematica, and Maplesoft's Maple system instantly spring to mind. These are both highly popular, proprietary, commercial, integrated mathematical software environments. Other types of mathematical software packages generally receive much less publicity.

Canonical announced a few hours ago the immediate availability of a new Linux kernel security update for the following Ubuntu distributions: 6.06 LTS (Dapper Drake), 8.04 LTS (Hardy Heron), 8.10 (Intrepid Ibex), 9.04 (Jaunty Jackalope) and 9.10 (Karmic Koala). The update also applies to Kubuntu, Edubuntu and Xubuntu and it patches 10 important security issues (see below for details) discovered in the Linux kernel packages by various hackers. Therefore, it is strongly recommended to update your system as soon as possible!

Bradley Kuhn, the technology director of the Software Freedom Law Center (SFLC) expressed dismay this week after learning that Black Duck Software was granted a patent that covers software methods for detecting and resolving open source software licensing conflicts. Kuhn, who plays a major role in the SFLC's GPL enforcement efforts, contends that Black Duck's patent is far from novel and describes techniques that he has been using for licensing compliance analysis for over a decade.

The hiring of Linux-savvy and revenue-minded exec-slash-blogger Matt Asay as the new chief operating officer of Canonical looks like a very good — and telling — move for the Isle of Man- (really London-but-don't-tell-anyone) based company that oversees the growing-by-leaps-bounds-and-all-other-ways Ubuntu Linux distribution and surrounding universe.

An open source app store from a Linux vendor is a good idea, right? As it turns out, Linux vendors selling their open source partners solutions directly isn't always a recipe for success. Just ask Red Hat, or its rival Novell. In 2007, Red Hat launched an effort called the Red Hat Exchange (RHX), a marketplace for selling open source solutions from Red Hat's partners. RHX was in part Red Hat's response to competitive pressure from the Novell Market Start program. Now in 2010, neither of those sales programs is still operational.

Inside Contactless, a manufacturer of near field communications (NFC) chips, is releasing "Open NFC," an open source version of its NFC protocol stack for mobile platforms including Linux and Android. Meanwhile, Juniper projects that NFC will play a growing role in a mobile-ticketing market that will reach 15 billion tickets by 2014.

The Linux kernel supports a variety of virtualization schemes, and that's likely to grow as virtualization advances and new schemes are discovered (for example, lguest). But with all these virtualization schemes running on top of Linux, how do they exploit the underlying kernel for I/O virtualization? The answer is virtio, which provides an efficient abstraction for hypervisors and a common set of I/O virtualization drivers. Discover virtio, and learn why Linux will soon be the hypervisor of choice.

Presenting New Community Distributions at FOSDEM’10, 6-7 February, Brussels, The final version of ZCP 6.40.0 release, scheduled to be launched in March 2010, will be available through the Canonical Partner repository for the popular Ubuntu distribution.

Gnome 3.0 promises to give Linux the desktop polish it needs. It's been a long time in the coming but this year Linux will get a makeover, thanks to the Gnome project. In September the Gnome team, makers of one of the most popular desktop interfaces for Linux, will release version 3.0 of their desktop environment and they are promising "big user-visible changes".

Building on the success of its first contest, the Linux Foundation has announced the launch of a second "We're Linux" video contest. The non-profit organisation dedicated to promoting Linux says that videos entered into the contest should demonstrate what Linux means to its users and should inspire others to try it. Amanda McPherson, vice president, marketing and developer programs, said that “We have been inspired by the creativity and level of participation we have seen for the ‘We’re Linux’ video contest and want to provide a forum again this year for people to share".

Asay's job will be make sure operational activities match up to the company's strategic goals and make sure that day-to-day operations go smoothly. He will also head up Canonical's marketing. Asay is extremely well known and respected in open-source business and technology circles.

[However, Pamela Jones takes exception to Asay's defense of Microsoft in her NewsPicks comment on this story. - gus3]

Is Canonical serious about pushing Ubuntu into businesses? The company’s latest corporate move provides a clear answer. Indeed, Canonical has hired Matt Asay — one of the open source industry’s best-known names — as its new chief operating officer. The move comes amid a CEO shift and several major product initiatives at Canonical. Here are some perspectives.

Oracle has announced the latest release of Oracle Enterprise Pack for Eclipse 11g, a component of Oracle Fusion Middleware. Oracle Enterprise Pack for Eclipse is a free set of certified plug-ins that enable developers to build Java EE and Web Services applications for the Oracle Fusion Middleware platform where Eclipse is the preferred Integrated Development Environment (IDE). This release delivers an extension to Eclipse with unique Oracle WebLogic Server features, WYSIWYG Web page editing, SCA support, JAX-WS Web Service validation, an integrated tag and data palette, and smart editors. Also new with this release is Oracle's AppXRay feature, a design time dependency analysis and visualization tool that makes it easy for Java developers to work in a team setting, greatly reduce runtime debugging, and improve code quality.

It seems as if most people are for OpenSource but against any other form of distribution/development. For example, Microsoft maintains ownership of the software that they sell on store shelves. No one owns a copy of Windows except for Microsoft. Well, good for them, but when Microsoft's products became dominant due to market demand people starting making noise because Microsoft wanted to put their own software on their own software (Internet Explorer on Windows)... so even though it's Microsoft's property on both accounts, they apparently did wrong by bundling the two together? Now, in the realm of current events we are seeing something similar with Google.

This posting is actually responding recent entry in Martin's Blog OpenSolaris 2009.06 domU on opensuse 11.2 dom0 Martin states:- Then I tried out a number of current linux distributions, but except for openSuSE none had a dom0 kernel out of the box which really is a shame. Seems I need to look more closely into KVM with virtio support. Via article bellow i try to explain that due to efforts of Jan Beulich and Andy Lyon xenified aka Suse Kernel 2.6.31.8(9) may be built on any Linux and along with the most recent stable Xen Hypervisor (3.4.2 and higher) port provide Xen Environment supporting OpenSolaris PV Guests , including the most recent unstable builds like 129,130,131 ( i mean vncserver behavior on OSOL PV DomU and GDM/VNC setup ).