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Desktop developers are starting to understand that netbooks need different interfaces than workstations -- or even notebooks. The smaller screens on netbooks are a usability challenge, comparable to designing a business card when you're used to creating full-page ads. A case in point is KDE's Plasma Netbook interface, now available in a preview in Kubuntu 9.10. Scheduled for official release in January 2010 with KDE 4.4, the interface is still in development. But it's advanced enough to show the developers struggling with the screen size limitation, sometimes overlooking it but at other times showing enough promise that the main KDE desktop could learn a thing or two from it.

The idea of Microsoft releasing Visual Studio for Unix and Linux was once - quite literally - a joke. Not only was Visual Studio only built for Windows, but Microsoft's licensing had prevented people using its premier development environment with non-Windows platforms. Now, there's a little less to laugh about. Microsoft partner Novell has delivered a plug-in designed to help Visual Studio developers easily build, debug, test, and port applications built using C# in Visual Studio 2005 to Linux, Unix, and OS X. The plug-in has Microsoft's full blessing.

Linux lies at the heart of yet another big takeover deal in silicon valley. Chip makers love Linux. That was why, in part, Intel bought Wind River. And it is very definitely the main reason behind Cavium Networks acquisition of MontaVista Software. A truism of today's processor industry is that embedded Linux is the operating system of choice for developers.

The MythTV hard disk recorder software is available in a new version that is based on Qt4 and supports new hardware and the VDPAU decoder.

In past articles we have delivered plenty of file-system benchmarks from testing out EXT4 to Btrfs to NILFS2. We have also delivered benchmarks from traditional hard drives to solid-state drives. One area though where we have not published any file-system benchmarks is for USB flash drives. Most users end up staying with the default FAT32 file-system for flash drives, but are there any performance advantages to using EXT3, EXT4, XFS, Btrfs, or ReiserFS? We have the benchmarks today to share atop the latest Linux 2.6.32 kernel build.

Remote Linux PC access over the Internet requires extra security precautions. Today we lock down the OpenSSH server more tightly, get through a firewall without opening the LAN to the world, and decide if we want password authentication or certificate authentication.

Lordy, lordy, lordy. They have no shame. It appears that Microsoft has just patented sudo, a personalized version of it. Here it is, patent number7617530. Thanks, USPTO, for giving Microsoft, which is already a monopoly, a monopoly on something that's been in use since 1980 and wasn't invented by Microsoft. Here's Wikipedia's description of sudo, which you can meaningfully compare to Microsoft's description of its "invention". This is why what the US Supreme Court does about software patents means so much. Hopefully they will address the topic in their decision on Bilski. Sudo is an integral part of the functioning of GNU/Linux systems, and you use it in Mac OSX also. Maybe the Supreme Court doesn't know that, and maybe the USPTO didn't realize it. But do you believe Microsoft knows it?

SAP's CTO has recently called for Java to be run by "an authentically open body". But that's a deeply hypocritical position to take for a company that has written what amounts to a love-letter to software patents, submitted as an amicus curiae brief to the European Patent Office. Software patents and "authentic" openness just don't mix: SAP needs to choose which side it is on.

Google has launched Go, a new systems programming language born with concurrency, simplicity, and performance in mind. Go is open source and its syntax is similar to C, C++ and Python. It uses an expressive language with pointer but no pointer arithmetic. It is type safe and memory safe.

Amarok is a great music player for linux. In the current release of Kubuntu 9.10 Karmic also the current stable version of Amarok was introduced into the repositories. However Amarok is under heavy development and updates won't be included in the official repos. If you want to be up-to-date and have the latest Amarok version available, you'll need to compile it yourself. Compiling Amarok isn't really hard but there are a few dependencies that it needs and a few things to look out for.

There are many secrets about Nautilus normal users might not familiar with them; therefore, in this article, I will try to shed light on some of them. Although I am using Nautilus on Ubuntu 9.10 in this tutorial, everything mentioned will be valid also on most of other distributions like Fedora, Mandriva or OpenSUSE.

In my last article, Teaching with Tux, I wrote about teaching children with the Tux Educational programs. Today, I'm going to discuss the Gcompris education suite. Gcompris is meant for younger children from 2 to 10 years old, though it seems to focus on the younger part of this range.

Jono Bacon goes on at length at his blog on the contrast between the euphoria over the release of Ubuntu 9.10 (Karmic Koala) and the reports of problems by users. Read the 10 or so entries below this one and you can see the problems I've had. It's time to put this in perspective. I've had plenty of problems with all manner of Linux and other Unix-like operating systems over the past few years. Given all the hardware that a modern OS must contend with (and I'll include Windows in that number since it runs – or is supposed to, anyway – on a wide variety of hardware), there's bound to be breakage.

It was over a year ago that I wrote about the “Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement” (ACTA), a new global standard for the enforcement of intellectual monopolies currently being discussed by representatives of the United States, the European Commission, Japan, Switzerland, Canada, Australia, Korea, Mexico and New Zealand. Since then, the secret negotiations have been continuing, and the threats it poses to the Internet as we know it grow ever larger.

The purpose of this document is to help a reader to get started with Computer Vision library OpenCV on Linux system. OpencCV is a multi-platform library, but this article will be focused only on OpenCV using Linux operating system. ( although, just the installation of the OpenCV library and video camera is platform-specific, all examples in this article should compile on any platform where OpenCV is properly installed such as Mac OS, MS Windows and etc.) Reader will be guided through a step-by-step guide on how to install and use some of the basic functions of OpenCV library such as displaying images, playing a video or using a video camera to process a video input stream.

The Moblin project released the first beta of Moblin 2.1, fixing numerous bugs while adding support for a 3G modem. Other touted improvements to the netbook-focused Moblin 2.1 include a faster browser with plugin support, Bluetooth discovery support, higher screen resolution support, and an enhanced ConnMan.

ESP has published an analysis of what the Justices said at the Bilski hearing that could impact software patentability

An interface and language for dynamic kernel analysis

The Free Software Foundation is having a video contest on the subject "Why is free software important to you?" It's a timely topic, with Windows 7 just out and with the free software community's bickering so bitter as of late that common goals sometimes seem in danger of being forgotten. I lack any talent for making videos, but the contest has me thinking: Why is free software important to me? And why isn't it important to most people around me? The two questions are more closely connected than you might at first think.

Canonical has been touting its Ubuntu One cloud-storage solution, which allows you to mirror up to 2 GB of files for free and up to 50 GB for $10/month. The service also allows you to sync Tomboy Notes and Evolution contacts across multiple Ubuntu installations. I gave Ubuntu One a try on my recently upgraded Ubuntu 9.10 system, and it appears that Ubuntu One just doesn't do very much that I need. And whether it's the service's simplicity or lack of decent documentation, it took me awhile to figure out just how you get stuff synced with Ubuntu One.