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In a posting on his FSF blog, Richard Stallman has apologised for "repeating a criticism of Mac OS which I cannot substantiate and must presume is false". The claim, that Mac OS X has a backdoor which could install changes without the user's permission, is one that Stallman has repeated, but he now says there "is no basis to claim there is one".

Bletchley Park, the top secret code breaking hub that played a pivotal role in the outcome of World War Two, has finally been awarded development funding of some £460,500 ($735,500) from the Heritage Lottery Fund.

I loved Amarok 1.4 and even used it in Gnome. Then, I really hated all the 2.x series until this 2.2 RC1. It's kind of slow, but it finally looks like a real music player and reminds me why I liked Amarok so much. I'm currently using it in Ubuntu Jaunty and since there are only .deb files for Ubuntu Karmic posted on the announcement download link (actually those are for version 2.2 beta), I thought I'd let you know how to install it in Ubuntu Jaunty (and Fedora, thanks to Fedora-ES).

Google Summer of Code has again been a huge success for KDE this year. 37 out of 38 projects were finished successfully. Much of the work done during these projects is already merged into trunk and will be available for the users with the KDE 4.4 release in January 2010. Thanks to all students and mentors for their great work! Below you will find a short interview with each of the students, asking them about the cool things they have been working on for the past few months.

"With the up coming release of GIMP 3.0, I think that GIMP should be renamed to simply “Wilber.” Though it would no longer be an acronym for “GNU Image Manipulation Program”, but it would totally eliminate any possibly offensive terminology in exchange for a name everyone can love, especially the young, and it would give GIMP a chance at the big times."

Exaile is a music manager and player for GTK+ written in Python. It incorporates automatic fetching of album art, lyrics fetching, artist/album information via Wikipedia, Last.fm scrobbling, support for many portable media players including iPods, internet radio such as shoutcast, and tabbed playlists.

Once upon a time HP and DEC computers were made by engineers for engineers. The biggest difference between them was that some HP customers wore ties. Having just taken delivery of a HP Mini 5101 pre-loaded with Suse Linux Enterprise Edition 11, it appears that HP still has some engineers left, hiding deep within, perhaps only coming out at night. Certainly the suits running HP don’t seem to want customers to know that Suse is an option. And Novell doesn’t seem all that keen on its adopted child, either.

In an interview with TechCrunch this week, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer goes out of his way to avoid naming Google instead calling them "the incumbent."

When I first began using Linux back in 2001, the themes I saw were beautiful but they don't compare to some of the themes I'm seeing lately. I'd like to show you some themes which will, in my opinion, spark more interest in GNOME themes.

Ubuntu's keyserver, keyserver.ubuntu.com, has a lot of problems lately. I was trying to add the Pidgin repository to work around bug #389322 but kept getting timeout errors from the server. One of my systems did successfully get the key so all I had to do was transfer it to the others. These are the commands you can use to do the same.

Only days after Google took action against the CyanogenMod project for offering customised Android firmware (which copied portions of proprietary code), a group of Android developers formed the Open Android Alliance. According to the project's site, the group is "pro-Android" rather than "anti-Google". Their aim is to replace all of the closed source, proprietary applications included in OEM Android installations with open source alternatives that can be freely distributed.

OLF 2009 was another great success this year as we celebrated 40 years of UNIX. Kudos to the all the organizers and volunteers who made the event happen!

Today, the KDE Community Forums, in collaboration with "People Behind KDE", have launched a new initiative to give the community an opportunity to get to know each other a bit closer: KDialogue.

But it has a number of fatal flaws. Mr. Shuttleworth didn't make just a couple of careless comments; the recurring theme all through his talk was "Guys are the cool techies, girls are not." He drew a clear line between 'us' and 'them', with 'us' being men and 'them' being women. It was like being served delicious soup, beautiful savory soup with mouth-watering aroma, and just as I am about to take a bite I see a fly doing a lazy backstroke. The closer I look the more flies I see. I call over my waiter and I tell him "Hey! There are flies in my soup!" And he says "Oh, don't worry about those, just eat around them."

With regular expressions you can perform some mighty fine-tuned search-and-replace in text files, such as changing all the US-style date references (09/22/09) to UK style,(22.09.2009). Juliet Kemp open her vast tips and tricks toolbag to share a number of useful and excellent examples.

Lighttpd is a secure, fast, standards-compliant web server designed for speed-critical environments. This tutorial shows how you can install Lighttpd on a Mandriva 2009.1 server with PHP5 support (through FastCGI) and MySQL support.

Two traditionally proprietary companies made open source releases recently: Facebook released a Python-based web server and application framework called Tornado, and Apple released a thread-pool management system called Grand Central Dispatch. It is not the first open source code release for either company, but both projects are worth examining. Tornado is designed to suit specific types of web applications and is reportedly very fast, while Grand Central Dispatch may cause some developers to re-think task-parallelism.

This is a plea to all hardware manufacturers: Please create Linux drivers for your hardware. OK, so Linux isn't the Stormin' Norman of the Desktop arena but that doesn't mean its users don't want or need drivers for hardware. I don't blame the kind volunteers that donate their time to program bits and pieces of the Linux kernel and associated programs but I do blame the hardware manufacturers for not supporting a huge user base of Linux users. I'm tired of it and it's time for action.

It's been no secret that NVIDIA has been working on an OpenCL Linux driver for their graphics processors just as AMD has been doing, but up until now their beta drivers were only available to registered NVIDIA developers. Today though -- on the same day as NVIDIA's OpenCL driver launch for Windows -- they have made their OpenCL support publicly available.

Here's a a list of the 10 most important developments for Linux. The Linux technology, development model, and community have all been game-changing influences on the IT industry, and all we can really do is stand back and look at it all, happy to have been along for the ride for developerWorks' first 10 years. The Linux zone team has put together this greatly abbreviated collection of things that stand out in our minds as having rocked the world of Linux in a significant way.