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Hello again for another interview with KDE people. Last time we had Aleix Pol with us. Now it is time for Thiago Macieira. One of the first KDE developers, he is still working towards world domination at Qt Software as he will explain to us in the interview. For the Italian readers here is the original interview.

We know that the jury in SCO v. Novell decided that SCO didn't get the copyrights in 1995 under the APA or by Amendment 2 or any fusion thereof. That killed SCO's slander of title claim as well. But that isn't the end. There were some issues the parties agreed before the trial which would be decided by Judge Ted Stewart. That has yet to happen.

LXer Feature: 19-Apr-2010

This week its all about choosing, switching, installing and migrating to Linux along with the question; Can I be a Windows, Apple, Linux, and Google guy all at once? Also, Microsoft wants to play the Open Source game, why iPhone/iPod Touch/iPad Owners should use Linux and why I Want My Daughter to be a Hacker. Enjoy!

Eric Geier introduces us to to seven powerful commands for troubleshooting and configuring Linux networking, both wired and wireless.

Recently, we have seen two projects come under considerable criticism for the development directions that they have taken. Clearly, the development space that a project chooses to explore says a lot about what its developers' interests are and where they see their opportunities in the future. These decisions also have considerable impact on users. But, your editor would contend, it's time to give these projects a break. There is both room and need for different approaches to free software development.

Ms. Z. Arsenault is an IT consultant working in the depths of a large North American energy company. She's one of those brave souls who works away in the background, keeping the servers running, making sure all the pieces fall properly into place so when the employees wander in each morning their applications run as expected. It's often a busy job just keeping things on a steady path. But Ms. Arsenault and her team aren't just maintaining the status quo, they're also trying to improve performance and cut costs while maintaining a stable environment for the end user. This week I had the opportunity to talk with Ms. Arsenault about what's she's been up to in the depths of corporate IT.

Moving all of your apps and information in the cloud has been adopted by a great number of people. However, there are also a large number who still prefer having a desktop application. Pretty much everyone like free. I am typically use Google Docs for my word processing and spreadsheets, but do on occasion tinker with OpenOffice. I tend to use OpenOffice if I am on my netbook and not connected to the internet. I can use the word processor to write and not be tempted to go on Twitter or use Stumbleupon to find random sites. At first, I didn’t realize you could use extensions; once I found that out, I was hooked. One of my favorites was covered in a previous post about OpenOffice extensions. It allows you to import, export and update documents you create in OpenOffice with Google Docs and other cloud office apps.

he Debian developers have announced that Stefano Zacchiroli achieved victory in the Debian Project Leader (DPL) elections held between the 2nd and the 15th of April. Zacchiroli succeeds Steve McIntyre who held the position the two previous years. There were three other candidates apart from Zacchiroli. Before the election, the Debian community had the opportunity to ask questions of the candidates and follow the discussions on the Debian Vote mailing list. 886 Debian developers were eligible to vote, and the election turnout was more than 50 per-cent.

Nothing brings Linux gotchas into sharp focus like coaching a non-geeky computer user. My wonderful significantotherperson, Terry, has done more to teach me about usability than the smartest Linux gurus. Terry is smart and willing to dig in and learn. She uses her PC for complex tasks like college coursework, audio recording and production, and digital photography. Like a lot of computer users, she learns better from a live teacher and visual aids than from text howtos.

What do you get when you mix Python and C? According to Google, it’s Go – a new programming language developed in-house and later open sourced. Go was created by a small team inside Google, including the well known Ken Thompson, co-inventor of Unix and major influence on C. It was created out of a lack of satisfaction with existing languages, mainly the excessively (in the minds of Go’s developers) long compile times needed for other languages. With Go, even a very large and complex application can compile in a few seconds, often less. Additionally, Go has built in concurrency support, so you can code for multiple CPUs without resorting to outside libraries of unknown quality. While we don’t usually cover much programming here at MakeTechEasier, Go is such an interesting language that we just had to dip in a bit, and where better to start than by covering the system setup needed to get Go up and running on your Linux box.

After its recent acquisition of Sun, enterprise software vendor Oracle began making some significant changes to Solaris licensing policies. Solaris 10, the latest stable version of Sun's UNIX operating system, was previously available for free without official support. Oracle changed the license last month, however, limiting it to a 90-day trial. The new license is relatively clear, but left a number of questions unanswered.

The developers behind Google Chrome OS, the forthcoming cloud-enabled operating system from the internet giant, have explained how they are dealing with a key need for any computer - how well it plays with the printer. With Chrome OS on course for arrival at the end of 2010, the details of how the operating system, which is all about cloud computing, will do familiar computing tasks are an increasingly important factor. The Chrome OS developers are mindful of the interest and the latest blog post from Mike Jazayeri, group product manager for Chrome OS, explains the detail.

Part of my job is finding and testing open sourced solutions for already prominent commercially available software. The concept is simple: If it's open sourced, it can be customized, be platform independent, and it can be free. In the business world, this poses two key benefits. Having software that can be customized means fewer problems and more functionality. Getting it for free means lower cost for the services we provide to our customers, and having more money to spend on employees and infrastructure. As simple as this sounds, finding the right fit can be a laborious task of trial and error. Part of my job is minimizing the trial and error.

Linux distributions don't simply appear on mirrors and BitTorrent networks fully formed. A great deal of work goes on behind the scenes before a release sees the light of day. Linux users who aren't involved in the production of a Linux distribution may not fully appreciate all of that work. Take, for example, the work done by Debian's ftpmasters team.

There will always be people who can't help but engender dissent, and there will always be those who betray their allies. This sad reality is on display in the Open Source world this week as another of the community's foremost commercial supporters is merrily thrown under the bus. Of the more recent examples, two come to mind. First was Cisco, which was burned at the stake last year as an Open Source archenemy over its Linksys product line. Cisco, as we said at the time, is a gold member of the Linux Foundation (at $100,000 a year), and counts on its rather long list of Open Source activities some 0.5% of contributions to the Linux kernel. Truly the heartless beast.

Let's face it. Most people don't back up their important computer files with any regularity. The time you do think about doing a backup is typically right after you discover your hard drive has crashed. At that point it's too late. The only real way to consistently backup your files is to have it done automatically for you.

Android's deviant Linux could be re-admitted to the main kernel following talks at the Linux Collaboration Summit in San Francisco today and Friday. Developers from Google's Android team are due to meet the Linux kernel devs in the hope of working out their differences and closing an awkward chapter in the history of Linux.

Frustrated by Oracle's delay in releasing the latest version of OpenSolaris, the OpenSolaris Governing Board (OGB) is growing uneasy over Oracle's lack of communication regarding the future of the Unix OS code.

ZaReason is shipping a Linux-ready, 10-inch netbook that uses the Intel Atom N450 processor and is claimed to offer eight hours of battery life. The ZaReason Teo Netbook offers 2GB of DDR2 RAM, a 160GB hard disk drive, a WVGA display, and 802.11n WiFi, says ZaReason.

Where is Linux headed? That's a question the Jim Zemlin, executive director of the Linux Foundation, is focused on as his organization gears up for the Linux Collaboration Summit this week. In Zemlin's view, Linux is strategically placed at the intersection of a number of major IT trends that will serve to bolster adoption of the open source operating system. With the increasing growth of the mobile web and cloud services, Zemlin thinks Linux will end up the big winner.