LXer Weekly Roundup for 14-Feb-2010

LXer Feature: 14-Feb-2010 In honor of Valentine's Day we have Ken Starks take on nerd mating rituals, Carla Schroder actually gets emotional about Ubuntu, Juliet Kemp espouses the goodness of Xfce and Computer Bob continues his Debian adventure along with Google Buzz, Scientists releasing code and more in the LXer Weekly Roundup.

When Linux Nerds Choose Mates from the Linux Herd...: Look...let's face this together. Dating can suck. Now when you are young, it's an adventure. One has relatively little "baggage", the emotional scars are few and the dating world is your oyster...so to speak. And you haven't even begun to think about their therapeutic value yet. Ah, youth... But then you find yourself at midlife, choosing from a large pool of potential crisis'. So many to choose from. Maybe there is a divorce or two under your belt, some strong political or religious beliefs that are deeply ingrained, and oh yeah, there's that messy incident with the hacking conviction... Those tend to narrow down the potential list of candidates for life-long bliss. Throw your use/obsession of Linux into the mix and what do you get? More than likely a room at your mom's house and a NASA-level computer bank in her basement.

Ubuntu 9.10 and GNOME 2.28: Advancing Past Meh: Many eons ago, GNOME 1.4 still lived, and it was good. It was extremely configurable and hackable. You could use either Enlightenment or Sawfish as the window manager, and could customize it to your heart's content. It was even friendly to homegrown GTK+ hacks. And then tragedy struck: the GNOME maintainers decided that 1.4 needed a ground-up rewrite, and thus GNOME 2.0 was born.

Xfce Desktop: Less Lard, Less Bling, More Usability: KDE and GNOME pile on the eye candy and grow ever-larger and hungrier of system resources. Thankfully, Linux users who prefer a lightweight desktop environment have a number of great choices. Today Juliet Kemp takes us on a tour of the attractive, nimble, and functional Xfce desktop.

My Debian Adventure 3: Squeeze & KDE4: Two days ago, I installed Debian Squeeze onto my new 64-bit PC, using ext4 partitions, KDE4 and grub2. Two nights ago, I was up until 3:00 AM, thanks to Debian Squeeze’s version of KDE4. My experience may surprise you. It certainly surprised me.

If you're going to do good science, release the computer code too: One of the spinoffs from the emails and documents that were leaked from the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia is the light that was shone on the role of program code in climate research. There is a particularly revealing set of "README" documents that were produced by a programmer at UEA apparently known as "Harry". The documents indicate someone struggling with undocumented, baroque code and missing data – this, in something which forms part of one of the three major climate databases used by researchers throughout the world. Many climate scientists have refused to publish their computer programs. I suggest is that this is both unscientific behaviour and, equally importantly, ignores a major problem: that scientific software has got a poor reputation for error.

Google takes on Facebook and Twitter with network site: Google has taken the wraps off its latest social network known as Buzz. The service - integrated directly with its e-mail service Gmail - allows users to post status updates, share content and read and comment on friends' posts. The site pitches Google directly against rival networks such as Facebook, which has amassed nearly 400 million users since its launch in 2004. Buzz will try to capitalise on the number of regular Gmail users, which is currently around 170 million people.

Intel taps student's robot for processor demo: Cuteness aside, the hexapod bot has gotten some attention from high places. Two days after Bunting, a University of Arizona electrical-engineering senior, posted a YouTube video of his bot, Intel ordered two of them to promote its Atom processors at trade shows and engineering meetings. The robot uses Intel's 1.60GHz Atom Z530 and US15W chipset. It runs on the Ubuntu open-source operating system.

Upgrade your Kernel the easy way in Ubuntu | LinuxMint: Few days ago Ubuntu announced that there is a serious security issue in the kernel from version 6.06, 8.04, 8.10, 9.04 and 9.10 . 7.xx versions are not affected. Canonical has been recommended as a solution to update the kernel of its various versions.Today i show you how to upgrade the kernel the safe way in Ubuntu and LinuxMint. I tested this tutorial on Ubuntu 9.10 karmic koala and LinuxMint 8 helena .

Google Buzz: First Impressions: I've been hearing a lot about Google Buzz lately and lo and behold, it shows up in Gmail this morning. Initially, I ignored it, but I visit my Gmail account quite often and so figured, "what the heck". As I was going through the set up process (which isn't really involved), I was inspired to open up Google Wave for the first time in more than a month. I saw a few new Waves, but nothing like the flood of unread messages I'd expect if I just ignored Gmail for about six weeks. I've written a couple of blogs on Wave, including an an initial review and an update called Why Hasn't Google Wave Gone Viral? My interest in Wave has waxed and waned and now that Google has thrown Buzz into the mix, was I supposed to get excited?

7 of the Best Free Linux Document Processors: A document processor is a document preparation system. Unlike a word processor, this type of application leads the author to concentrate on the structure of the document rather than its appearance. The author therefore focuses on what he/she wants to say, instead of fretting over page borders, font attributes, or formatting. Moreover, the author will be guided in the organisation, structure, and flow within the document.