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Your editor has just returned from the Linux Foundation's annual Collaboration Summit, held in San Francisco. LFCS is a unique event; despite becoming more developer-heavy over the years, it still pulls together an interesting combination of people from the wider Linux ecosystem. The following article is not intended to be a comprehensive report from the summit; it is, instead, a look at a few of the more interesting thoughts that came from there.

Less than two weeks ago we reported on the Mac OS X Steam client confirming the existence of a Linux client and then found more Linux references too. We then found the unreleased Steam Linux binaries that were under active development. Some still didn't believe the existence of a Steam client for Linux with Source Engine support, but it's something we have said for nearly two years based upon our sources and then the emergence of these binaries.

Is Steve Jobs at it again? Just days after reaffirming Apple's decision to ban Adobe's Flash from the iPhone, the company's CEO is reportedly pointing the finger at another multimedia technology he sees struggling with major shortcomings -- echoing similar comments, as it turns out, from Apple's longtime archrival, Microsoft.

Driven by smartphone sales, the mobile phone market rebounded with 21.7 percent year-to-year growth in the first quarter of 2010, IDC says. Meanwhile, as of April 1 Android was available on 34 different devices from 12 manufacturers, with Android ad-view traffic growing at a 32 percent rate over the last year, says AdMob.

Greg Kroah-Hartman delivered some "tough love" to Android in his keynote at this year's Embedded Linux Conference (ELC). He is very clearly excited about Android and what it can do—uses it daily as his regular phone—but is unhappy with Google's lack of community engagement. There is hope that things will change, he said; there has been a fair amount of "introspection" at Google that he hopes will lead it in a more community-oriented direction.

The KDevelop Hackers are proud and happy to announce that KDevelop 4.0 is finally available as a stable release. Released together is the first version of KDevelop PHP plugins, which make KDevelop a very interesting option for PHP developers.

On Phoronix Global we have more than 25,000 benchmark result submissions from independent users around the world since launching the public version of the Phoronix Test Suite back in early 2008. As I have been hinting at for several months, with the launch of Phoronix Test Suite 3.0 by the end of this year, Phoronix Global will be getting its long overdue overhaul and there are some revolutionary features being worked on as it concerns benchmarking and collaborative testing. This evening, however, there are some hardware statistics to share for the more than 25,000 existing result uploads.

Watching two proprietary software companies deeply opposed to computer user freedom lob accusations back and forth about who is more opposed to freedom has been surreal, to say the least. But what's been crystal clear is that the freedom these companies are arguing about is their own, not that of their users. And what they are calling freedom isn't freedom at all—it is the ability to control those users. Adobe is mad at Apple for not letting Adobe control iPhone, iPad, and iPod Touch users via Flash, and Apple is mad at Adobe for suggesting that Apple is arbitrarily abusing its control over Application Store users.

The guys who run Hulu, on the other hand, are smart. You'll see why in a bit. I don't even watch network TV, as it turns out. Nor cable. Canceled my DISH subscription a year ago. I get all of my content off of the intertubes. But regardless, let's start with American network television to spotlight some foolishness there. Let's begin with NBC.com.

If user and group management has you in a quandary, it's time to take the advanced filesystem security class at the ACLU. A couple of weeks ago you learned some user and group management basics with “User and Group Management 101.” This week you’re entering the Access Control List University (ACLU) for an overview of advanced user and group management through the use of access control lists (ACLs).

Whatever your desktop environment of choice, it likely came with its own file manager. Some have one pane, some have two panes, some work in Gnome, others in KDE, and they all have different options. If the default doesn’t work for you, how do you find the best replacement? How do you know if it will work in your favorite desktop environment? In this guide we’ll cover many of the most popular file managers for Linux and include the details to help you decide which one is right for you.

Sony has been hit with a lawsuit over its recent decision to block the installation of Linux on its Playstation 3 console. The suit, filed in a San Francisco district court, accused the company of breaching its sales contract with users of older Playstation 3 systems when, in a recent firmware update, it disabled the ability to run a Linux partition on the console.

SCO Group wants a judge to overrule a jury that found it doesn’t own Unix. Or it wants a fresh trial. Either, really, as long as SCO gets the result it wants. The company’s filed papers with a US court saying the jury hearing its case over whether SCO owned the Unix copyright, and that found for Novell last month, was either too stupid, too confused or too distracted to grasp the compelling power of its evidence.

Our monthly Q&A series offers advice to those seeking help with home or small business WLANs. This month our guru looks into his crystal ball and considers the future of Wi-Fi in the 4G era before helping a reader work out some problems with a wireless printer and DD-WRT.

There are several resources out there to assist you in being a Linux gamer. The WINE project (www.winehq.org) is a great, free example of this as it allows you to run Windows programs (and games) on Linux. Transgaming's Cedega (cedega.com) software also allows you to do the same but the difference is that there's a cost associated with this software. Today, though, we're going to introduce you to another option for being a Linux gamer-- the Linux-Gamers project (live.linux-gamers.net).

Stick a fork in the desktop, it's done! Recently Google demoed a port of Quake II to WebGL and HTML5, showing that even first person shooters are suitable applications to run in the browser. While the tide isn't going to turn all at once, it seems more likely than ever that a browser-based desktop is a viable option and ultimately the way many users will experience all applications.

During the stabilization phase of the kernel development cycle, the -rc releases typically happen about once every week. 2.6.34-rc4 is a clear exception to that rule, coming nearly two weeks after the preceding -rc3 release. The holdup in this case was a nasty regression which occupied a number of kernel developers nearly full time for days. The hunt for this bug is a classic story of what can happen when the code gets too complex.

Microsoft has now joined Apple in a guerrilla war against Google's Android, and Google's next steps are far from certain. The smartphone industry is still in its infancy, but its strategic importance to computer companies big and small can't be overstated. Recent moves from Apple and Microsoft show that the big guys are not going to be shy about deploying their array of patents as competition increases.

Hewlett-Packard Co. agreed to buy Palm Inc., the money-losing handset maker that was once a Silicon Valley icon, for $1.2 billion to challenge Apple Inc. in the smartphone market. Palm’s common shareholders will receive $5.70 a share in cash, a 23 percent premium over the closing price, Hewlett- Packard said in a statement today. Elevation Partners LP, Palm’s biggest investor, gets $485 million for its preferred shares and warrants.

It’s official: Ubuntu 10.04 Long Term Support arrives April 29, and this particular blogger was privy to the press conference about it. Canonical Chairman Mark Shuttleworth and CEO Jane Silber discussed the plans and progress of new operating system, and then fielded some Q and A. The key news: More than 80 ISVs are supporting Ubuntu. But here’s what it means for the desktop users and Canonical as a whole...