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X-Server 1.12 will include proper support for touch screens with multitouch capabilities. All three major manufacturers of graphics hardware for PCs have released new drivers. Linux 3.0 is still being maintained even though Linux 3.1 has already been out for a few weeks.

Packet capture is one of the most fundamental and powerful ways to do network analysis. You can learn virtually anything about what is going on within a network by intercepting and examining the raw data that crosses it. Modern network analysis tools are able to capture, interpret and describe this network traffic in a human-friendly manner.

Using the new Intel Core i7 3960X Extreme Edition Sandy Bridge processor, Scientific Linux 6.1, Debian GNU/Linux, Debian GNU/kFreeBSD, and Solaris 11 11/11 were benchmarked when having a different number of CPU cores enabled to see how well each operating system scales up to six cores plus Hyper Threading.

For all of the progress Android has made in the last year in establishing itself as the leading smartphone operating system, commanding over a 46 percent market share according to comScore in its Q3 findings and sending RIM and its BlackBerry well on its way towards platform irrelevance, so many other distracting things went on that kept it from fully realizing its true potential.

LXer Feature: 19-Dec-2011

In the news this past week we had Dell pulling out of the Netbook market, CNet caught adding malware to Download.com, two articles on how 2011 was apparently not a good year for Linux and our own Emery Fletcher's rendition of 'The Day The Desktop Died'. Enjoy!

Dell has discontinued making consumer netbooks and appears to be ready to phase out its Latitude business netbooks in favor of larger ultrabooks, says an industry report. The netbook shutdown follows Dell's termination of sales of its Streak 7 Android tablet earlier this month.

Amazon may dominate public cloud computing, but not amongst the Microsoft groupies. Microsoft has managed to be an end-to-end cradle-to-grave supplier within the data centre, and is attempting to extend this motherly embrace to the cloud with its Azure platform. Cracks have recently begun to show in this strategy, however, as Microsoft increasingly turns to open-source technologies like Hadoop to spice up Azure. Is this a stopgap strategy or a sign of a more open Microsoft cloud?

The security-conscious will tell you that a multi-factor authentication scheme involves requiring items from two or more of the categories "things you know," "things you have," and "things you are." Passwords and passphrases both fall under the "things you know" umbrella, and while there are commercially viable options for the latter two categories — security dongles and biometric fingerprint scanners, for example — neither have taken off with the general public. Partly that is a cost issue, to be sure, but the complexity of public-key infrastructure (PKI) smart cards does not help, either.

Everyone likes personal cloud services, like Apple’s iCloud, Google Music, and Dropbox. But, many of aren’t crazy about the fact that our files, music, and whatever are sitting on someone else’s servers without our control. That’s where ownCloud comes in.

Proprietary social networking platforms have a few distinct issues for free software users, but one of the biggest is that it is often hard — if not impossible — to extract your information from them. With Twitter, for example, you can scroll down to the bottom of the page and wait for more tweets to load via JavaScript, but you can't sort and analyze them yourself. But that's exactly what the open source application ThinkUp does for you.

GIMP logo The GIMP development team has released version 2.7.4 of its open source GIMP (GNU Image Manipulation Program) image editing software. Aimed at developers, testers and early adopters, the fourth point update to the 2.7.x branch is an unstable development snapshot that fixes bugs found in the previous release and includes changes to the user interface.

There will continue to be discussions and debates about Linux on the desktop, including popularity, vitality, usability, commercial connections and more, which is good for users and vendors. However, based on trends in cloud, mobile and consumer computing, Linux should and will move to these areas, leaving its longstanding low use on the desktop as it is.

I somehow never discovered the existence of Scribes until recently. I thought I had tried every word processor and text editor that existed in Linux. But my experiences in using Scribes the last few weeks to enter research notes and create writing drafts has convinced me of its power and usefulness.

Standards icon IT authorities from Germany and Switzerland have announced that they are working together, under the auspices of the Open Source Business Alliance, to improve the way that LibreOffice and OpenOffice.org display and process OOXML-formatted documents. The authorities involved include the IT groups from the cities of Munich, Jena and Freiburg im Breisgau, the Swiss canton of Waadt, the Swiss Federal Court and the Schweizer Informatikstrategie Bund (Swiss IT Federation) whose representatives met at a workshop in Zurich in October to launch the "Precise reproduction of OOXML documents in Open Source Office applications" project. Slides for the workshop provide more details of what was discussed.

Changes to the memory subsystem promise improved response times and performance. From Linux 3.2, device-mapper supports thin provisioning and is able to use this ability for improved snapshot functionality.

LinuxSecurity.com: Using password guessing as an attack vector. Over the years we've been taught a strong password must be long and complex to be considered secure. Some of us have taken that notion to heart and always ensure our passwords are strong. But some don't give a second thought to the complexity or length of our password.

On August 15, LinuxCon celebrated the twentieth anniversary of the Linux kernel with a Roaring Twenties party, complete with swing bands and tuxedos and flapper costumes. The milestone was one that conference attendees were happy to celebrate, despite the obvious embarrassment of Linus Torvalds himself. Unfortunately, 2011 as a whole didn't measure up to those few hours of partying. In fact, whether you are looking at business, the community, or the technology, for free and open source software (FOSS), 2011 was in many ways a disappointing year

In the days of yore we had a System V (SysV) type init daemon to manage Linux system startup, and it was good. It was configured with simple text files easily understood by mortals, and it was a friendly constant amid the roiling seas of change. Then came systemd, and once again we Linux users were cast adrift in uncharted waters. Why all this change? Can't Linux hold still for just a minute?

Novell and SUSE Linux may technically be separate companies, but they are owned by the same Attachmate conglomerate and they still have to work together on specific products, such as Open Enterprise Server, which bolts NetWare print and file services to SUSE Linux Enterprise Server.

LXer Feature: 12-Dec-2011

In this week's Roundup we have another dagger in the heart of the desktop proclaimed, the Mozilla - Google deal still lives, a cool developerWorks article on shells in Linux, HP to contribute webOS to FOSS, Glyn moody and the Open Source TCO as well as the late addition of a LXer Feature entitled "Gnome 3, Try 3". Enjoy!