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Google has defended its decision to allow unfettered Android tweaking, saying that although this may fragment the Googlephone market, it's what's best for developers. "Everybody talks about fragmentation as a bad thing, but I think you need to look at it from the perspective of the developer," Eric Chu, Google's group manager for Android mobile platforms, told the wireless-happy OpenMobileSummit in downtown San Francisco this afternoon. "How much work does the developer have to do to address the fragmentation? If there are a million devices and they're in three fragments, they don't care."

Zend Technologies has announced that it is working with Oracle to deliver an integrated and optimized enterprise-class Linux and PHP solution for deploying and managing business-critical Web applications. Zend's Web application server is now available through the Oracle Unbreakable Linux Network (ULN). Zend Server also includes out-of-the-box enterprise-grade connectivity to Oracle Database.

Mandriva is proud to introduce its brand new release: Mandriva Linux 2010, code name 'Adelie'. Included in this new release, 'Smart desktop' technology, coming from a European research project. Your desktop is tasks oriented. Organize your personal data (mails, documents, images, videos). Notate it, add your comments and tags. Now your data is easy to find through your projects. Screen shots at SEO Expert Consultants

Widelands is an open source (works on Windows, Linux and Mac OSX) real-time strategy game, built upon the SDL and other open source libraries. If you knew Settlers I & II (Bluebyte), then you already have a rough idea what Widelands is all about because Widelands is heavily inspired by those two games. It has single-player, network, internet multiplayer modes and single player campaign missions. Players may select one of three different tribes. Widelands provides two tutorial missions. Advanced players can create their own maps with the included map editor and it is also possible to import and play original Settlers II maps.

It isn't very difficult to crimp your own CAT5 cabling. You can repair and re-use old cable, cut cable to exact lengths, and save money. Aaron Weiss shows how, with lots of good pictures.

Mandriva Linux 2010 is a smart, innovative and open desktop. Use the best of open source software with even more new functionnalities.

According to the device matrix in the open source HPLIP project this machine is completely supported in Linux. However, I have a different definition of "support" than HP-- theirs seems to be "A determined and stubborn Linux guru can make the darned thing work if they try really hard."

I haven't loaded up an IM client since I upgraded from Ubuntu 9.04 (Jaunty) to Ubuntu 9.10 (Karmic). But I did today, and neither Pidgin nor the new GNOMEish Empathy would run. (Whether this matters or not, I upgraded from Ubuntu 9.04 to 9.10, as opposed to doing a reinstall.) I started both IM clients in the terminal to see if I could determine what the problem might be.

Reports that the Linux netbook is dead or dying are incorrect, at least globally, according to an analyst firm. Nearly one-third of the 35 million netbooks on track to ship this year will come with some variant of the free, open-source operating system, ABI Research said. The exact split is 32% Linux versus 68% Windows, said Jeff Orr, an analyst at ABI, which works out to about 11 million Linux netbooks this year. That number contradicts third-party market figures, trumpeted by Microsoft, that showed Linux shipping on as few as 4% of U.S. netbooks.

There's something both exciting and frightening about the announcement of a new Linux file system. It's exciting because file systems represent new territory for interesting advances. It's frightening because a file system in the early stages tends to be experimental and not quite ready for prime time. But sometimes these announcements are about investments in the future of Linux, and a recent announcement for 2.6.30-rc1 indicates a very interesting future, indeed. In the past few quarters, Linux has had three major file system announcements. Late 2008 brought in the B-Tree File System (Btrfs), and more recently, two other unique file systems were introduced: NiLFS(2) and exofs.

Running Phoronix.com and developing the Phoronix Test Suite software consumes much time and is an enormous undertaking. You can support our Linux efforts already by joining Phoronix Premium, supporting our advertisers, making a donation, or using our Amazon.com affiliate link when shopping...

Skype announced that it is working on an open source UI layer for its Linux VoIP client. Although apparently not fully open source, the upcoming version of the Skype client for Linux could enable more open development of client front ends, including mobile devices.

This year's Kernel Summit saw Linux developers, led by Linus Torvalds, discussing the development process and gaining an insight into how Google uses the Linux kernel in-house. Ulrich Drepper and Alan Cox think universal binaries in Linux are a step in the wrong direction. Various graphics drivers have recently been updated to add new functionality.

This tutorial shows how to prepare a CentOS 5.4 x86_64 server for the installation of ISPConfig 3, and how to install ISPConfig 3. ISPConfig 3 is a webhosting control panel that allows you to configure the following services through a web browser: Apache web server, Postfix mail server, MySQL, MyDNS nameserver, PureFTPd, SpamAssassin, ClamAV, and many more.

There's the Phoronix Test Suite, Phoronix Global, and PTS Desktop Live as our family of free software products to provide extensive benchmarking and automated testing capabilities atop Linux, OpenSolaris, BSD, and Mac OS X operating systems. The Phoronix Test Suite has more than 120 test profiles and 50 test suites with new suites and tests continuing to come in through its extensible architecture, but for organizations with multiple test systems or entire testing farm(s) devoted to performance monitoring and regression tracking, they have had to strap the Phoronix Test Suite atop their own management systems or hack away at simple scripts to deploy our testing software across an array of systems. Today though we are announcing the public beta launch of Phoromatic. Phoromatic is a remote test management system that allows controlling any number of PTS-powered systems through a single web-based interface, which also allows all of the test results to be viewed from a central source.

The open source industry needs profitable champions to demonstrate success, and attract funding and participation in open source, according to Red Hat CEO. In an interview with ZDNet Asia Wednesday, Jim Whitehurst said revenue models of open source proponents such as Red Hat itself and Google, have brought success to the respective companies and allowed them to contribute back to the open source community. Google relies on ad-based revenue, while Red Hat's revenue runs on a subscription model.

The Dutch government program "Netherlands in Open Connection" and OpenDoc Society have announced the public availability of a beta version of Officeshots.org. Officeshots is an online webservice that makes it possible to compare the output quality of various office suites as well as web-based productivity applications. The project is financially supported by a grant from the Netherlands based not-for-profit investor NLNet Foundation. The announcement took place during the second ODF plugfest, which brought together vendors and open source projects like IBM, Google, KOffice, Microsoft, Novell and OpenOffice.org.

[Disclosure: I'm the lead developer. - Sander]

Many Linux enthusiast are despairing of the low uptake of desktop Linux and its poor availability in high street shops. This is especially frustrating because most of the people using desktop Linux would consider it to be a superior solution to the Windows based machines on offer (and it probably is). I think I have fingered one of the causes for this problem though: desktop Linux needs salesmen!

A good portion of the boot time on current Linux systems is spent on system initialisation and starting dozens of daemons sequentially. The Ubuntu 9.10 development team have started to parallelise and accelerate the boot process through the large scale use of Upstart.

Back in July of 2008 we learned of GNOME 3.0 as plans were laid out during the GUADEC '08 conference to make the GNOME 2.30 release their "3.0" version. A art and user-interface followed months later and then this April the GNOME 3.0 road-map was laid out that put this release, which will overhaul the GNOME desktop in comparison to the usual incremental releases, to come in March of 2010. The March target is just six months after the release of GNOME 2.28 and consistent with their bi-monthly release cycle they have been following for years. However, it looks like GNOME 3.0 may not hit in H1'2010 but rather September of next year.