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While the Ubuntu Developer Summit is happening right now in the United States, over in India there is FUDCon, the Fedora conference. Kicking off today and running through the start of next week (6 November) is FUDCon India 2011. This conference for users and developers of Fedora is happening in Pune, India. Details on this year's Fedora India conference can be found on the Fedora Project Wiki.

The more the Linux Foundation broadens its mandate beyond its core mission of "fostering the growth of Linux", the more it risks stepping on the toes of its most ardent supporters. This tension was on full display earlier this week when The Register reported an apparent conflict between the Linux Foundation's support for OpenMAMA, an API used in financial messaging systems, and AMQP, a financial messaging system wire protocol.

Sam Ramji insisted that he wasn’t joking, that he wasn’t crazy, and that he hadn’t joined some sort of dark Microsoft conspiracy. The year was 2006, and Ramji had just been named Microsoft’s head of open source software strategy. Up to then, Redmond’s most famous contribution to the open source community was CEO Steve Ballmer comparing Linux to a malignant cancer. Even Ramji was skeptical — and a little afraid — of his new job.

LOS ANGELES – The SCALE 10X team announces that registration has opened for the first-of-the-year Linux expo in North America To register for SCALE 10X, visit http://www.socallinuxexpo.org and click on the Registration tab. Admission for SCALE 10X ranges from $10 for an Expo Only Ticket to $60 for a Full Access Pass. The Linux Beginner’s Training Class, a separate admission, is $25.

The 2011 Kernel Summit was held in Prague on October 23-25. The organization of the event was changed somewhat this year; the first day was dedicated to a small number of minisummits. We do not currently have coverage from those events - that is a gap we hope to fill in the near future.

Linux is 20 years old this year, and for most of those years I’ve been hearing about how the ‘Year of the Linux desktop’ is coming. It’s not coming. Linux it’s stuck permanently at a 1% market share. And that’s where it’ll be ten years from now. But that doesn’t mean that there’s no hope for the OS.

Canonical and Red Hat have issued a joint statement regarding Microsoft’s plan to make UEFI Secure Boot a requirement of Windows 8. Simultaneously, The Linux Foundation has issued a similar statement.

While KDE 4.0 has been around for nearly four years (and most complaints regarding the initial KDE4 fallout have been addressed) and the last KDE 3.5 stable snapshot (v3.5.10) came three years ago, the Trinity Desktop Environment has issued an official release today to keep the KDE 3.5 desktop living.

Sierra Wireless and the Eclipse Foundation announced an Eclipse working group to define an open development standard for machine-to-machine (M2M) communications. Together with founding members IBM and Eurotech, the M2M Industry Working Group will establish an integrated development environment for M2M networks, as well as a Linux-based, lightweight communications protocol, based in part on Sierra Wireless' Koneki project and the Lua scripting language.

Canonical certainly delivered some exciting news this week when it announced that its Ubuntu Linux distribution is on the way to tablets, smartphones, and TVs. There's no denying that this is big news for Linux in particular and for mobile users in general, but it's not exactly surprising. After all, much as Canonical founder Mark Shuttleworth might have appeared indifferent to the mobile space in recent months, Ubuntu's new, touch-enabled Unity interface was nothing if not writing on the proverbial wall.

While Skype has now expanded their Linux API support to allow other applications to take advantage of Skype video calls and other features, a few months ago the Skype protocol began to be reverse-engineered by an independent researcher. Skype took action several times against this work.

Security researchers at ESET and Sophos have discovered that hackers have gone out of their way to port an old Linux backdoor Trojan to the Apple Mac OS X platform, extending their reach of computers that they can use as part of their botnets.

LXer Feature: 24-Oct-2011

Welcome to this week's collection of big stories from the LXer Newswire. Enjoy!

Qt logo The plan to give Qt more independence from Nokia took another step forward with the activation of the qt-project.org web site. In September, Nokia announced that it was creating a non-profit foundation which would host the infrastructure for the C++ based user interface framework. Nokia has announced that the infrastructure the foundation is managing has now gone live, a few days before the Qt Developer Days conference in Munich from 24-26 October.

In a statement issued this morning on the company's blog, Canonical revealed that Ubuntu 12.04 will be supported for five years on the desktop instead of the usual three years that a standard long-term support release gets. The company says that the longer duration of desktop support is intended to better serve corporate desktop rollouts.

I don’t know exactly what happened with fellow ZDNet writer David Gewirtz’s Linux server, but I do know it was bad. Really bad. He’s been having constant trouble updating and managing his software. The final straw was when he tried to install some updates to his hosted CentOS, a Red Hat Enterprise Linux clone, and it blew up on him.

Vodacom announced an Ubuntu Linux-based netbook for the developing world, to be initially be launched in South Africa for $188. The Vodafone Webbook offers a 10-inch screen, 512MB of RAM and 4GB of storage, a Vodacom SIM card slot, and a weight less than 2.2 pounds, says the mobile provider....

My studio computer collection includes two custom-built desktop machines and a Hewlett-Packard G60 laptop. As described in my previous article, the primary desktop box has been running an old but rock-steady 64 Studio 2.1 that has recently been replaced by a shiny new 64-bit Arch system. The secondary desktop machine and the laptop are both running the 32-bit version of Ubuntu 10.04. However, while I like and enjoy using Ubuntu I hardly require two identical installations of the same Linux distribution, so I decided to replace one of them with AV Linux.

PC makers are being lobbied to install Windows 8 on machines in a way that will afford users the freedom to boot Linux or any other operating system. The Free Software Foundation (FSF) is urging PC users to sign a statement demanding that OEMs which implement Windows 8's UEFI Secure Boot do so in a way that allows individuals to disable it, or that the PC makers provide a "sure-fire way" to install and run an operating system of the user's choice.

The big news in openSUSE 12.1, whose first beta has recently dropped, is the arrival of GNOME 3 – in this case GNOME 3.2. Unlike Fedora, which is already into its second GNOME 3-based release, openSUSE had – thanks to its release schedule – stuck with GNOME 2 for its last release earlier this year. OpenSUSE 12.1 embraces GNOME 3.2 and, like Fedora 16, drops support for the GNOME 2.x line.