LXer Weekly Roundup for 12-Dec-2010

LXer Feature: 12-Dec-2010 The big stories this past week include a Linux Mint 10 review, Matt Asay leaves Canonical, more information on Novell's patents, a nail in Flash's coffin, Chrome OS notebooks will be Windows proof and my interview of Ulf Sandberg of SkySQL. Enjoy!

The LXer Interview: Ulf Sandberg, CEO of SkySQL: Recently SkySQL announced itself to the world with its focus being on former Sun MySQL customers. This comes in the aftermath of Sun being bought by Oracle and the subsequent departures of former Sun executives and engineers before and after the purchase. I recently had a chance to talk with Ulf Sandberg the new CEO of SkySQL for a few minutes.

Linux Mint 10 review - the ultimate home desktop?: Hot on the heels of Ubuntu 10.10, the Linux Mint project announced the release of Mint 10 code-named Julia. Dmitri Popov takes a look at what the new version of this polished and user friendly Linux distro has to offer

Well-known, open-source advocate Matt Asay leaves Canonical/Ubuntu: In an unexpected move, Matt Asay, Chief Operating Officer (COO) for Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu Linux, will be leaving Ubuntu. In an e-mail to me, Asay, former VP of Business Development at Alfresco, the open-source enterprise Content Management System (CMS), told me that the news of his departure from Canonical would be be announced internally at Canonical today, December 8th.

Google Chrome OS: what you need to know: The long-awaited Chrome OS is finally here, and the first Chrome notebooks are winging their way to happy beta testers as you read this. So is it the operating system reinvented, or just a nifty way to squeeze more speed out of laptops? Here's what you need to know about Google's Chrome OS.

About Those 882 Novell Patents: This is Where OIN Comes In: I have some important news for you. It's about those 882 Novell patents that are being sold to a Microsoft-organized consortium in connection with the sale of Novell to Attachmate. I've been worrying about those patents, and I was wondering what happens to Novell's license to the Open Invention Network after the sale. So I took the time to find out. And it's very good news. Here's how it works. The patents of OIN members are licensed to each other royalty-free in perpetuity. Even on a sale, the license remains in force for all pre-existing members. If you are a member of OIN prior to the closing on the Novell deal, then, you are covered. The proposed closing date is January 23rd, so you still have time to join OIN and get the benefit of the license to those patents.

Keeping your computers in sync: If you are like me, you have several computers or devices that you use to access your data at different times during the day... Of course, the problem is that once you modify the data residing on any one of the machines, the other machines now need to get updated. But that is easier said than done.

40+ Best GIMP Tutorials of 2010: The Gimp is a fantastic and free piece of software that can run on all major operating systems and can do nearly any graphic related task! I have been using GIMP for over two years now and really appreciated the many tutorials I had at hand for when I was starting out. Since the early days I have produced my own tutorials in an effort to give back to the open source community and so the purpose of this post is to share and acknowledge the hard work that people have put in into making these great tutorials of 2010!

A nail in Flash's coffin: YouTube is running an HTML5 Beta: YouTube is running an HTML5 trial that will allow those with compatible browsers to enjoy the site's millions of videos without the Flash Player/plugin. The fact that maybe 99 percent (I don't know the exact figure, but it's huge) of web-delivered video comes wrapped in Flash, a protocol controlled by one company — and only available on platforms that company deems worthy — is a major disturbance in the Force.

Chrome OS Notebooks Will Be Windows-proof: So will Chrome OS notebooks also have the option to dual-boot another operating system like Windows? Google says no, as "certified" Chrome OS notebooks will only be able to run the single operating system. Part of that may be due to Chrome OS's use of protected flash memory, which is great for security, but isn't so great for custom installs and for spaciousness.

Apache quits Java governance group in protest of Oracle abuses : The Apache Software Foundation (ASF) announced today that it is resigning from the executive committee of the Java Community Process (JCP), the governance body responsible for managing standards related to the Java programming language. The move is a response to Oracle's ongoing failure to comply with the intellectual property policies established by the JCP.

Oracle Response to Apache Departure from JCP: Last month Oracle renominated Apache to the Java Executive Committee because we valued their active participation and perspective on Java. Earlier this week, by an overwhelming majority, the Java Executive Committee voted to move Java forward by formally initiating work on both Java SE 7 and SE 8 based on their technical merits. Apache voted against initiating technical committee work on both SE 7 and SE 8, effectively voting against moving Java forward. Now, despite supporting the technical direction, Apache have announced that they are quitting the Executive Committee. Oracle has a responsibility to move Java forward and to maintain the uniformity of the Java standard for the millions of Java developers and the majority of Executive Committee members agree. We encourage Apache to reconsider its position and remain a part of the process to move Java forward. ASF and many open source projects within it are an important part of the overall Java ecosystem.