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Toward the end of December, LWN looked at the new push to move various subsystems specific to Android kernels into the mainline. There seems to be broad agreement that merging this code makes sense, but that agreement becomes rather less clear once the discussion moves to the merging of specific subsystems. Tim Bird's request for comments on the Android "logger" mechanism shows that, even with a relatively simple piece of code, there is still a lot of room for disagreement and problems can turn out to be larger than expected.

I hope all my readers have enjoyed the best of the holiday season. I've been busy with the predictable confusions and minor crises that attend this time of year, but I managed to find time to jot down some recommendations for my readers. Go on, you've been good, give yourself a few extra belated gifts and don't worry if your budget's busted - it's all free software, you can't beat these deals.

LXer Feature: 08-Jan-2012

In the Roundup this week we have 13 niche Linux distros, an OpenDNS freeze on Google, Linux on the Windows Cloud, Data predictions for 2012, some confusion about Gnome 3 and last but not least..could RMS have been right all along? Enjoy!

There's just four weeks to go until FOSDEM 2012 takes place in Brussels, Belgium. The initial schedule for this leading open-source European event is set, there's lots of interesting discussions to be had, and at least one surprise. The FOSDEM 2012 schedule is now available from this area of the FOSDEM.org web-site.

Innocent websites were blocked and labelled phishers on Wednesday following an apparent conflict between OpenDNS and Google's Content Delivery Network (CDN). OpenDNS - a popular domain name lookup service* - sparked the outage by blocking access to googleapis.com, Google's treasure trove of useful scripts and apps for web developers. According to reports, a flood of errors hit pages that used Google-hosted jQuery and hundreds of thousands of sites fell over.

As SCALE 10X rolls toward its Jan. 20 opening, sessions, speakers and events are starting to become finalized. Here’s a look at some of the things you don’t want to miss at SCALE 10X.

I used to have a paperweight sitting on my desk that read something like “Robert H. Lane, appointed President of Commodore Computers....” It was the sort of thing that they gave to executives. A brass plaque of their appointment as it appeared in the Wall Street Journal or the Globe and Mail.

Call it “Chromegate.” Just a few weeks after Google Chrome was reported to have overtaken Mozilla Firefox to become the second most popular Web browser in the world, Google’s glory has been tarnished by a “jaw-dropping,” massive online Chrome advertising campaign that would seem to violate Google’s own guidelines, uncovered by SEO Book blogger Aaron Wall. Essentially, Google was caught paying at least one PR company to spam the Web with hundreds of crudely written “sponsored posts” from bloggers promoting Google Chrome — posts comprised of what would seem to be just placeholder text and unsubstantiated pro-Google Chrome statements.

The autonomous region of Extremadura in western Spain, which has pioneered the use of open source solutions in public administrations since 2005, has abandoned the development of its custom LinEx distribution. The Spanish newspaper Público reports that the project was abandoned after control of the Centro de Excelencia de Software José de Espronceda, which was responsible for the development of LinEx and other projects, was handed over to the central Spanish government in Madrid. In May 2011, the Extremadura branch of the Spanish Partido Popular (PP) party won the government elections in the autonomous region.

Looking ahead to this new year, "I wish and expect that the world will discover FLOSS, particularly Debian GNU/Linux, to be the rich and efficient software system I have been using for years," said blogger Robert Pogson. "It is as different as night and day from that other OS, with all its restrictions and fragility."

Ace Microsoft reporter Mary Jo Foley swears she’s not drinking. Microsoft really is getting ready to enable customers to make Linux and Windows virtual machines (VMs) persistent on Windows Azure, its public platform-as-a-service (PaaS) cloud service. That Microsoft was going to enable users to set up persistent VMs on Azure came as no surprise. While Azure has persistent storage, its inability to keep a VM persistent has annoyed many people, and not just Linux server managers. I know several SharePoint and SQL Server administrators who’ve avoided Azure because of this lack. There are ways to hack your way around the lack of a persistent Azure VM, but they’re not easy.

At the end of 2010, I asked some of my friends and Linux Pro Magazine readers to make predictions for 2011. Now as we look back on the year, we get to decide whether our predictions were on target. Year of Linux on the desktop? Well, once again, Linux on the desktop wasn't really the sexy tech news of the year, which turned out to be the year of cloud, mobile, and tablet headlines. Carla Schroder was more on target with her predictions, such as "world governments will try to fence off and control the Internet" while "Linux and Free/Open Source software, and organizations like Wikileaks and the Electronic Frontier Foundation will continue to toil valiantly to protect our dwindling freedoms.”

Over the holidays, noted blogger Cory Doctorow delivered a keynote at the 28th Chaos Communication Congress in which he warned that one of the biggest problems on the technology scene is that control over our computing devices is about to be taken from us. There is a video of the address, called The Coming War on General Computing, available on YouTube. Doctorow warns that the copyright wars are only the beginning of a much bigger set of issues having to do with how much we control our own devices. The address has already drawn much reaction from the open source community, and is, in some ways, a defense of open source principles.

After 20 years, Linux continues to move forward. 2011 was another strong year for Linux as new kernels and distributions continued to advance the state of Linux. It was also a year of challenges as the kernel development community grappled with a security breach at kernel.org, and desktop users cringed as the GNOME Shell and Unity interfaces challenged normal usage paradigms.

Late last year, president Obama signed a law that makes it possible to indefinitely detain terrorist suspects without any form of trial or due process. Peaceful protesters in Occupy movements all over the world have been labelled as terrorists by the authorities. Initiatives like SOPA promote diligent monitoring of communication channels. Thirty years ago, when Richard Stallman launched the GNU project, and during the three decades that followed, his sometimes extreme views and peculiar antics were ridiculed and disregarded as paranoia - but here we are, 2012, and his once paranoid what-ifs have become reality.

The TouchPad tablet from Hewlett-Packard was one of the most closely watched new gadgets of 2011 — and quickly turned out to be the year’s biggest flop. The TouchPad, which was supposed to be a rival to Apple’s iPad, lasted just seven weeks on the market before H.P. killed it, citing weak sales. Analysts point to a long list of factors behind the tablet’s quick demise. But some of the people involved in creating the tablet’s core software now say the product barely had a fighting chance. That software is called WebOS, an operating system built on the same technology used by many Web browsers. It promised to be more flexible and open than Apple’s tightly controlled iOS software, and more beautiful than Google’s sometimes wonky Android system.

LXer Feature: 02-Jan-2012

You have my apologies for the lateness of my first Weekly Roundup of 2012 but I have been as sick as its gets over the weekend and have only just now come to realize what year it is. Enjoy!

LiMux, a project to convert local government institutions to Linux and open source software in Munich, has exceeded initial expectations. The project has done slightly better than projections of 8,500 and now boasts 9,000 Linux migrated workstations. The progress and evolution of this project that began in 2003 is well worth examination.

Weekends are for relaxing, spending time with friends… and tackling those tech projects that you never have time to get to during the week. The weekend project is one of the most popular features here on Linux.com, and we had a bumper crop of excellent projects in 2011. Here’s 10 of the best from 2011, which include everything from better ways to upgrade your system, to getting a leg up on Web projects.

As we bid goodbye to 2011, there are lots of stories appearing on what a game-changing year this was for Linux, but my choice for open source story of the year is Android.