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LMMS is music creation software similar to programs such as GarageBand for OSX and FL Studio for Windows. Those programs are designed to streamline the process of making music with a computer in order to get new users into music composition as quickly and painlessly as possible. Their feature sets include preset audio loops, MIDI tracks, and other ready-made musical materials available for immediate use in a piece. Their GUIs invite involvement in the process of making music and it's clear that the designers want the user to have fun with the program and the process. In this mini-review we'll see if LMMS lives up to the precedents set by those programs.

Two weeks before the VMworld and Red Hat Summit conferences, Red Hat is bolstering its virtualization strategy. The latest move involves a new partner program that emphasizes virtualization training. Here's the scoop.

Free online encyclopaedia Wikipedia is celebrating a new milestone – an article on Norwegian actress Beate Eriksen added on Monday took the English-language version of Wikipedia over the three million article mark. The encyclopaedia, which first went online in January 2001, now contains a total of more than 13 million articles in more than 200 languages. The English-language Wikipedia, as the oldest version, remains the leading version. The German version is second with more than 940,000 articles, and the French version is third with 840,000 articles.

It was about 16 years ago that Ian Murdock came upon the idea to design a new Linux distro. He named it Debian after Debra and Ian.

Last week, Linux was tagged with a local NULL pointer flaw that could have led to a privilege escalation issue. Linux founder Linus Torvalds pushed a patch upstream quickly and now that patch is in the Linux 2.6.31 -rc6 milestone. Torvalds notes in the 2.6.31 rc6 releases notes that the issue wasn't as bad as it could have been, and that he would have likely delayed the fix were it not for the fact that a private list, apparently wasn't private after all.

Linux comes with various GUI based email client to stay in touch with your friends and family, and share information in newsgroups with other users. The following software is similar to Outlook Express or Windows Live Mail and is used by both home and office user.

MultiTail lets you view one or multiple files like the original tail program. The difference is that it creates multiple windows on your console (with ncurses). It can also monitor wildcards: if another file matching the wildcard has a more recent modification date, it will automatically switch to that file. That way you can, for example, monitor a complete directory of files. Merging of two or even more log files is possible.

I’ve been reading a lot of articles this weekend. I stumbled upon one called “Do Open Source Licenses Have a Purpose?” which is to be honest a rhetorical question. Ken Hess on Daniweb actually suggests we should throw away our 64 different license CHOICES and just give away our code public domain. I’ve read a similar opinion from other authors and they never suggested getting rid of open source licenses, they suggest trimming them down to a few licenses. While Ken Hess just thinks we shouldn’t keep ownership of anything.

LXer Feature: 17-Aug-2009

The Register's latest video webcast, an expert look at open source and traditional proprietary software models, is now available on-demand from the Reg archives. This broadcast explores the relative merits of open source and traditional proprietary software, and discusses how they can best be made to co-exist happily. El Reg event moderator Tim Phillips welcomed Steve Harris of Novell and Freeform Dynamics' Tony Lock into our swanky London studio. Joining the chaps over the wire from across the pond were Frank Rego of Novell and Jose Thomas of Microsoft.

I use gnome as my default desktop at home and at office. However, my machines have alternate desktop enlivenment such as kde or xfce installed. I use it to test out features of these environment. The normal way to switch to a different desktop is to log out from the current desktop , select a new session form the gdm login window and login again. However, it is possible to open a new desktop environment in a virtual console using xnest nested xserver.

The cpio command is one of the most commonly used Linux back up tools. The cpio command has two unusual features. Unlike tar , in which the files to back up are typed in as part of the command, cpio reads the files to work with from the standard input (in other words, the screen). This feature means that cpio must be used as part of a multiple command or with a redirection pipe.

The Gnome team has released a Beta version of the Gnome Desktop Environment, version 2.28.0 beta1.

This week at Phoronix we published two articles that had benchmarks that generated quite a bit of interest and feedback: The Cost of SELinux, Audit, and Kernel Debugging and Arch Linux 2009.8 Benchmarks. The test results in these two articles were, of course, powered by the Phoronix Test Suite, for which we had additional news about this week. We had published an open letter to tech review web-sites challenging them to embrace Linux-based benchmarking.

In the last HowTo, I showed you how to setup GFS2 file system with Red Hat Clustering. I will now show you how to optimize the performance of your GFS2 mounts. The gfs_controld daemon manages the mounting, unmounting, and the recovery of the GFS2 mounts. gfs_controld also manages the posix lock. By default the plock_rate_limit option is set to 100. This will allow a maximum of 100 locks per second, which will decrease your GFS2 performance.

Sixteen years ago today, Ian Murdock announced the "imminent completion of a brand-new Linux release". The release was to be called the Debian Linux Release and was the start of one of the most popular community based distributions of Linux. It also became the basis for the Ubuntu Linux distribution. Debian GNU/Linux is renowned for its community's commitment to a free software philosophy.

What do all these licenses do for you? That's the 64 license question. Today I'm pondering if the current open source model is still valid or if it's outdated. Do we need licensing for open source software? Do we need the GPL, LGPL, APL and all the other licenses that plague...er, grace us? If your software is free and open source, why bother with a license at all? The software writer owns the copyright so why put users or potential users through the paces of licensing? What exactly is to be gained by creating and enforcing a license for this kind of software?

CentOS must seem like a dream distribution to many. Its users get the benefit of the massive team of developers that Red Hat has working on the Red Hat Enterprise Linux product without having to pay for any of it. CentOS offers a level of stability that cannot be found in any of the more community-oriented distributions; even Debian Stable requires its users to upgrade more often than CentOS does. Hosting providers have a solid, supported platform to sell to many thousands of customers, and it does not cost them even a single devalued US dollar. Many, many sites depend on CentOS, so anything which threatens the stability of that foundation is certain to raise a number of eyebrows. Unfortunately, that is exactly what happened at the end of July.

How would you like to be able to customize the layout of the Google homepage? How about add better video controls and a download button to YouTube? Or set a profanity filter that works across all websites? Maybe remove all the “What type of leafy vegetable are you?” quizzes from Facebook? These are very few of the things that can be done with Greasemonkey. By itself, Greasemonkey does essentially nothing. At least, nothing that you as a user would notice. To really use it, you download Greasemonkey scripts which all have some special purpose. For example, right now I’m writing this from a browser with Greasemonkey installed, and I’m using scripts to enhance YouTube, Facebook, and Google Images.

This tutorial shows how you can set up a Kubuntu 9.04 desktop that is a full-fledged replacement for a Windows desktop, i.e. that has all the software that people need to do the things they do on their Windows desktops. The advantages are clear: you get a secure system without DRM restrictions that works even on old hardware, and the best thing is: all software comes free of charge. Kubuntu 9.04 is derived from Ubuntu 9.04 and uses the KDE desktop instead of the GNOME desktop.