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openSUSE is defaulting to the KDE desktop, according to an announcement on the opensuse-project mailing list by Micahel Löffler. From openSUSE 11.2 onwards, the installation process from DVD will offer a choice between KDE and GNOME, with KDE pre-selected. Users accepting the default installation settings will therefore get a KDE desktop.

[It always defaulted to KDE up until Novell took it over. - Scott]

All in all, I think Free Software users know from practical experience how to question and why to question; we also have learned about freedom in a way that most people don't get to--as a practical reality, an experience, not just a slogan.

Suppose you have a directory full of files with filenames such as oldfile, my-new-file, some_document. Suppose you would like to rename these files to File1, File2, file3.

Remember the olden days of hertzes and bytes? Now it's giga-everything. Paul Ferrill takes advantage of low hardware prices to build a super-duper high-power Linux workstation for cheap. How cheap? $1000? $500?

Cybersecurity is an increasingly frequent topic in the news, and this week brought word of the indictment of some of the most notorious hackers in the world. With so many breaches in the news, you might understandably be wondering how safe your own financial information is, and whether anyone is doing anything to protect you.

At the turn of this decade Miguel de Icaza was the unblemished hero of the free software movement and chief architect and co-creator, with Federica Mena, of the GNOME project, which had come into being as the free software response to KDE. Now de Icaza is regarded with suspicion because of his support for Mono. What happened to bring about this change?

The PySide LPGL Python binding for Qt is new and the Python::OpenCL wrapper now runs with AMD's ATI Stream SDK.

Ubuntu stands out as the most popular Linux distribution but which other versions make up the top ten?

This post follows up Mark McLoughlin's ANNOUNCE: Rawhide virt repo for F11 users:- Another update available in http://markmc.fedorapeople.org/virt-preview It's targeting install the most recent version of Fedora's libvirt on F11 and testing virt-manager and virt-install to work properly with Xen 3.4.1 Hypervisor been installed on F11 via xen 3.4.1-1 src.rpm downloaded from http://kojipkgs.fedoraproject.org/packages/xen/3.4.1/1.fc12/ PVOPS kernel 2.6.31-rc6 has been installed via Jeremy Fitzhardinge Git Repository to support Xen 3.4.1 Dom0.

Eminent Java developers Richard Hall, BJ Hargrave and Peter Kriens have formulated a new proposal for a simple module system for Java, which could be developed as part of Java Specification Request (JSR) 294 'Improved Modularity Support in the Java Programming Language'. The authors hope their proposal will bring the different ideas on modularisation into some sort of harmony.

Market researcher IDC predicts that Linux will continue steady growth over the next five years, reaching into the billions of dollars in 2012.

What's the point of GPLv2 libraries? What's the purpose of libraries associated with licenses anyway? Do they provide useful guidance or impose annoying restrictions? Who wants to puzzle out the legalese of licenses and their appurtenances when working with code and systems that are supposed to be open?

Terracotta has acquired EHCache, making it in turn an attractive acquisition target for VMWare. In any case, the acquisition is good for customer awareness and adoption.

This tutorial explains how to install and use luckyBackup on an Ubuntu 9.04 desktop. luckyBackup is an application for data back-up and synchronization powered by the rsync tool. It is simple to use, fast (transfers over only changes made and not all data), safe (keeps your data safe by checking all declared directories before proceeding in any data manipulation ), reliable and fully customizable.

The Chromium team has released an alpha unstable version of the Google Chrome for Linux and Mac platform. Those who are keen to try out Google Chrome in their Ubuntu machine, but are not willing to run it under wine, you can now grab the deb file and install it in your system. One of the limitation of Google Chrome in Linux is that it does not support flash. If you intend to use it to watch your favorite YouTube channel, then you are out of luck. Luckily, there is a little trick that you can use to overcome this limitation. If you have installed the Adobe Flash player for your Firefox browser, you can now use the same player to run flash script in Google Chrome.

Blender third open movie project, code-named “Durian” is ramping up to production, and time is running out for the pre-sale campaign if you want to get your spot in the credits. This time the project is focusing on an adolescent audience with an epic-fantasy setting and a female protagonist (my son aptly dubbed this the “Chicks in Chainmail” genre). The only art yet available from Durian itself is the series of banner ads (by concept artist, David Revoy), but an impressive creative team has already been announced. Read the full story at Free Software Magazine.

The Free Software Foundation's Holmes Wilson is just back from Berlin, where he participated in the Ogg Theora book sprint put on by FLOSS Manuals. Here is a broad look at Ogg Theora and how it fits into the push for free formats: where we're winning, what works, and what could be improved.

This two-day introduction to Linux broadens attendees horizons with a detailed overview of the operating system. Attendees learn how to effectively use a Linux system as a valuable tool. They get familiar with the architecture and various components of the operating system, learn both graphical and command line tools, and learn to do basic networking. This class is scheduled for August 27th - August 28th, 2009.

Way back in April 2008, the Linux Foundation published a little report that upended a lot of perceptions about Linux development. Now, they've done it again. The report in question — Linux Kernel Development: How Fast it is Going, Who is Doing It, What They are Doing, and Who is Sponsoring It? — revealed a number of things about the Linux kernel. At a total line count of 8,859,683, the kernel was growing at roughly 10% per year, with an average of some 3,621 lines of code added every day, while 1,550 lines were removed and 1,425 lines were changed. Possibly the most interesting numbers, however, were those regarding the faces behind those changes.

Linux Newbies, you also have an ally: Me. Nothing gets people in the Linux World riled up like comparing distributions, desktops or editors. But for the new Linux user, the whole thing is a bit confusing. What do we tell them? Do we verbally slug it out in forums or do we offer gentle guidance to those entering the Linux jungle for the first time? It's hard not to offer an opinion in such emotional matters. One might believe that Linux, choice of desktop and editors are religious notions instead of technical ones. I offer the following gentle guidelines for the newbie who dares enter our sacred space.