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When users complain about GNOME 3, inevitably they compare its release to KDE 4.0's. One KDE developer has told me that he dislikes the comparison, but, in the absence of other parallels, it continues to be made.

However, one part of the analogy that hasn't been explored is KDE's recovery from its user revolt, and whether GNOME is in any position to emulate that as well.

LXer Feature: 22-Aug-2011

Is the tech press too focused on negativity, to the detriment of the FOSS community? I don't know how he does it, but Bruce Byfield writes calm, thoughtful, lengthy articles that somehow ignite mad passions and flamefests. In his latest piece he discusses some of KDE4 developer Aaron Seigo's thoughts that the tech press presents an unbalanced, negative perspective, and sparks yet another round of heated discussions. So what's going on here?

KDE Italia, the Italian community backing the KDE Italia website and the KDE Italia forum, is pleased to invite you to CoNAsSL 2011, an end-summer event aimed at gathering all the Italian associations involved in Free Software. The event will take place on 9, 10 and 11 of September, in a beautiful location: the Tuscan seaside!

If you were hoping that the Linux 3.1 kernel would fix the big power regression problem that's caused by PCI Express Active State Power Management (ASPM) being disabled on more systems since the release of the Linux 2.6.38 kernel, you're not in luck. There has not been any active work in this area. Making things worse though for mobile Linux users interested in a long lasting battery is another new regression in the Linux 3.1 kernel. Affected systems can easily see a 30% increase in power consumption simply when comparing the Linux 3.0 kernel to the current code being assembled for Linux 3.1. For an Intel Sandy Bridge notebook, the power consumption is up by 76% just over the course of this year from Linux kernel regressions.

Recently, I wrote an article about the lack of acceptance of GNOME 3. I received a private email from Aaron Seigo of KDE in which he took me to task, politely, thoughtfully, and with his usual thoroughness, for focusing on negative news. Since I often debate this issue with myself, with Seigo's permission, I'm summarizing the discussion here.

Seigo begins by asking, "Is it useful to spend time concentrating on the negatives in FOSS when we have not only a tremendous number of positive events occurring but many detractors who are willing to do the negativity thing for us?

Where is the Linux desktop going, and where should it go? This is a hot topic, and an important one. Unfortunately the discussion usually starts from the wrong premise, that the Linux desktop has only recently achieved parity with its Mac OS X and Windows cousins. Not so! The Linux desktop has been superior since its early days, and would have to go backwards to achieve parity.

You can be the coolest and best-equipped network administrator on the block with Ubuntu Natty Narwhal Linux on a netbook. Netbooks are lightweight and portable, have long battery life, and bright sharp screens -- and, thanks to Linux and open source, you can outfit your netbook with all the software network troubleshooting and fixit utilities you'll ever need.

Grab Tux Paint, make a cool drawing, win one of 3 OLPC laptops, one of 10 Sugar-on-a-stick and other awesome prizes! For kids age 3-12, contest ends Sept. 12. Judges are Linda Goin, Dmitri Popov, and Marguarita Sut. Turn your little penguins loose!

In the first part of this series I introduced SuperCollider3 and its most basic operations. Now let's make things a little more interesting by adding a little randomization, a neat GUI, and some MIDI control. Creating A GUI more>>

Windows 7 will become the world's most-installed PC operating system by the end of this year, according to a Gartner forecast that sees Linux rising to just 2 percent of desktop share in five years. Meanwhile, Windows is also popular as a development environment, a field in which Linux has slipped to third place behind Mac OS, says Evans Data....

The popularity of smartphones and media tablets will mean worldwide mobile connections will reach 5.6 billion by the end of this year, up 11 percent from 2010, according to Gartner. While related revenue will be up a higher 22 percent, providers will still struggle to recoup their costs, the research firm adds....

The good news: Khronos has published version 4.2 of the OpenGL specification in conjunction with the GL Shading Language version 4.20 specification. The bad news? The open-source Linux graphics drivers are falling hopelessly behind in keeping up-to-date with the latest upstream OpenGL releases and what is supported by the proprietary drivers and those for other operating systems...

One question we get a lot: What are the best community server distributions? That question isn't as simple as it sounds. What makes a distro "the best"? Why community distributions, specifically? It's not a simple question — but read on and we'll point you to six distros that will help you reach a satisfying answer.

Yet we are doing everything in our power to create silly artificial walls between developers and users. I wish there was a Wikipedia-alike way to develop (or at least quality check) an OSS desktop. Lets face it, there's a lot of people out there who cannot code but who have much better UI taste than the average OSS GUI developer. We are just not making use of that potential and that's a big lost opportunity no matter how you look at it.

The SSL system helps to protect secure communications across the Internet. It's also a technology that relies on trust; specifically, the trust of the SSL Certificate Authority (CA), which may not always be trustworthy, according to security researcher Moxie Marlinspike.

Speaking at the Black Hat security conference, Marlinspike detailed issues with the current CA system and proposed a new system to replace it.

The need to replace the CA system according to Marlinspike was highlighted by the recent attack on CA provider Comodo in March. Marlinspike noted that Comodo is the second largest CA in the world and the attack was able to do a lot of damage. Comodo officially blamed Iran for the attack.

We at VisionMobile have been researching, investigating and helping to educate the industry about open source for the past five years. In this time open source software has been transformed from geekware to business as usual. Much has been written and debated regarding open source licenses – from the early days of the GPL license to the modern days of the Android platform.

Despite the widespread use of open source, from Android to WebKit, there is one very important aspect that has been neglected: openness and how to measure it.

Before I open palm — make that palms — and insert face, let me say that the Ubuntu community’s general mantra of “haters gonna hate” never really works as a valid argument when someone disagrees with what the self-appointed Ubuntu/Canonical leader/founder/Grand Poobah, or any other Ubuntu/Canonical leader, says. It’s a profoundly weak argument that first and foremost makes you sound shallow and stupid. It also makes you sound like you don’t have a reasonable response, as well as sounding like you’re incapable of responding.

There is a new Linux on the block and its name is Jeoss. What's Jeoss? It's a compact, install-everywhere Ubuntu-based server distribution. Does the world need yet another Ubuntu derivative? Sure, why not? Let's install Jeoss and kick its tires.

Bringing up arguments like "it provides more clarity to contributors, a 'check point' to look at the legal situation and reassurance of legal status to users" or the already-debunked "but it is helps protect the copyrights and handling of disappearing contributors" doesn't convince me that contributors should sign away their code while running the risk TO GET SUED BY THE COMPANY THEY JUST GAVE THEIR CODE TO FOR WRITING IT IN THE FIRST PLACE.

If you've ever needed to edit one or more files to make quick changes, you've no doubt found that doing it using a text editor can be a slow slogging process. Linux, thankfully, has a number of tools that make it easy to do this non-interactively. One of the best is sed, a "stream editor" that can help you make quick work of filtering and transforming text. This weekend, take a few minutes to introduce yourself to sed.