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In a not unexpected announcement Google has said that it has stopped active development on Google Gears and is moving its efforts to the HTML5 database API to provide local database storage for web browsers. The H reported in December that Google was planning to retire Gears, but the official confirmation from Iain Fette of the Gears Team will allow developers who use the technology to plan ahead. The move comes after Google's Chrome browser was updated to support the emerging HTML5 Database API.

One of the more interesting people I've talked with in the last two years is a figment of his own imagination. "Craig Barth," the chief technology officer of Florida-based Devil Mountain Software, a company that makes and markets Windows performance metrics software, is, I have discovered, nobody. He doesn't exist. Barth is, in fact, a nom de plume, which is a fancy, French way of saying "alias." The real man behind the curtain is Randall C. Kennedy, a popular, sometimes outrageous blogger for and frequent contributor to Infoworld, a publication that like Computerworld is part of IDG. Kennedy's connection to InfoWorld was severed on Friday.

Medfoss.apfelkraut.org should provide a comprehensive and structured overview of Free/Libre and Open Source Software (FOSS) projects for the health care domain. Moreover it should offer a platform to foster the exchange of ideas, knowledge and experiences about these projects.

Open-Xchange, an open source alternative to Microsoft Exchange, continues to gain momentum in Europe and North America. The latest example: Bull, a massive consulting firm in Paris, is offering SaaS and on-premises Open-Xchange to its end customers in Germany. Here are the details.

This weekend at the Southern California Linux Expo in Los Angeles, Matthew Tippett and I presented a talk entitled Five Stages of Benchmark Loss: PTS and You. In this hour-long talk, we covered Linux benchmarking, what has been learned over the years of benchmarking at Phoronix, the Phoronix Test Suite, and the five stages that users and developers generally go through when they lose out on benchmarking results. For those that were unable to attend this event, here are the slides and recordings.

Due to set of CSs for GRUB 2 Support written by Ian Campbell usual sharing image devices between Ubuntu Karmic Koala Server HVM and PV Guests appears available at Xen-4.0 Linux Dom0. Fedora 12 has been selected due to presence of Libvirt 0.7.1 providing virt-install and virt-manager utilities.

After almost two years or work and 994 commits later made by only 14 contributors, I'm proud to announce that the Linux Terminal Server Project released LTSP 5.2 on Wednesday the 17th of February. Here is a link to the main page

BleachBit quickly frees disk space, removes hidden junk, and easily guards your privacy. Erase cache, delete cookies, clear Internet history, remove unused localizations, shred logs, and delete temporary files. Also it wipes clean 70 applications including Firefox, Internet Explorer, Flash, Google Chrome, Opera, Safari, Adobe Reader, APT, and more.

Hi, my name is Jim and I’m a recovering Ubuntu fanboy. The Urban Dictionary defines a fanboy as “a person who is completely loyal to a game or company regardless of if they suck or not.” In the past, I’ve been exactly that, and I think that a lot of other people in the Ubuntu community have been too. We’ve been loyal fans of Ubuntu, telling all our friends, blogging the praises of Ubuntu and Open Source Software, being quick to point out the faults of the evil Microsoft, and all this time overlooking whenever there’s a problem with our favorite operating system. Let me be clear, I’m still a huge fan of Ubuntu. I still think Linux is the best operating system on the market today, and that Ubuntu is a great choice for most people’s desktop computers. What I’m saying today is that I no longer want to be a fanboy!

LXer Feature: 21-Feb-2010

The big stories this past week included Intel and Nokia announcing that they are going to merge their mobile Linux efforts and call it MeeGo , the top 25 programming errors list gets updated, Eric Van Haesendonck says what he thinks is wrong with Android and Miguel de Icaza gives an update on what his team at Novell has been up too. Also, a list of 20 computers you will probably use in the near future, five great Netbook operating systems, Twitter shares their open source with the world and a whole lot more in This week's LXWR.

Canonical is developing a new 2D ARM interface based on Enlightenment Foundation Libraries for the upcoming Ubuntu 10.04 ("Lucid Lynx") version of Ubuntu Netbook Remix. In other Ubuntu news, Ubuntu Live CDs in Lucid Lynx will boot 33 percent faster, and The Linux Box will market Ubuntu in the U.S.

Sometimes it's easy to forget that we all had to start somewhere with Linux. When you're not used to the way it works, or the kind of concepts involved, Linux can seem like a foreign language. If you're struggling with free software, or if you know someone who needs help making the switch to Linux, we hope this feature will help.

This document lists 10 enhancements you should make to every new Windows PC, no matter whether it is a workstation or the family media computer.

[Really there's only 1 thing you need do.. - Tracyanne]

In Mac, the QuickLook feature allows you to preview your files without opening them. For Linux users, particularly for those with Gnome desktop, you can also get a similar QuickLook functionality in your desktop with Gloobus-Preview. Gloobus-Preview is an extension for the Gnome desktop designed to enable a full screen preview of any kind of file. You can use it to preview your presentation slides, pdf files or even to listen to a mp3 track, all without having to open their default applications.

A Newcastle-based company has launched a Linux-based laptop and support package designed to encourage technophobes online. Built by the Broadband Computer Company, the Alex laptop runs an operating system based on Ubuntu Linux and a set of applications that have been written in-house. The laptop's features have been vastly simplified, and updates are applied automatically without prompting the user, according to company co-founder Andy Hudson.

The long running case of Jacobsen v. Katzer has been settled on terms favourable to Jacobsen, a developer of the Java Model Railroad Interface project. The case came about when Katzer incorporated Jacobsen's code into it's proprietary model trail software, after deleting the copyright notices that existed in the code.

Oracle Corp. has rekindled its Solaris love. Sun's Solaris operating system will underlie new high-end data center appliances running the Oracle software stack. And Oracle EnterpriseLinux now becomes the preferred OS for lower-end commodity hardware. By making the Sparc/Solaris tandem the foundation of big-iron SMP appliances, the company is going back to its roots when Oracle and Sun were joined at the hip. Pre-Linux, Solaris was the de facto development platform for new Oracle software. New Oracle databases came out first on Solaris and later on everything else.

Somewhere along the way, Microsoft lost ground and became the underdog to Google and Apple, but with issues of their own, can Microsoft find its way back?

Inexplicably Zattoo for Linux disappeared. Inexplicably Zatoo for Linux has come back! Zattoo has developed a software program that allows you to watch TV on your computer. All you need is a broadband connection and a current operating system (Windows XP or Vista, Mac OS X, or Linux). The service is legal and free of charge.

In my recent article on QDVDAuthor, I skipped over the task of making a videoloop for the main DVD menu. Here I’m going to show you how I did it. The goal is a short loop of video that smoothly transitions through five different video segments and back to the beginning again. The audio is shaped and lowered to make it more or less even and not so distracting (loud menus can be obnoxious if they are left running). Read the full howto at Freesoftware Magazine.