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At the Gran Canaria Desktop Summit much cross-desktop work has been done. The days we have are being used for the Cross Desktop Tracks and during the talks there are KDE and Gnome developers mingling everywhere. Cross desktop sessions included bug triage, metadata sharing, instant messaging and sharing personal data cross-desktop with CouchDB. Read more about the results!

Ubuntu's maker, Canonical Ltd., is defiant that it can maintain its edge in the desktop Linux space despite Google Inc.'s upcoming Chrome operating system. Google may possess brand recognition and engineering resources that dwarf the 200-employee, reported $30-million-yearly-revenue Canonical, but Chrome OS's ascent "is no slam dunk just because you make an announcement," says Gerry Carr, marketing manager for Canonical. Carr told Computerworld today that building a user-friendly operating system is "harder than putting a new feature on a search engine."

I'm sure most of (if not all) KDE users are familiar with Gwenview, especially since it became the default image viewer in KDE4. Gwenview is not only a powerful viewer for images, but also a basic image manipulation application, and with version 2.3 it allows even video previews. Although video support was available in 1.4 (which was for KDE3), it was missing in the KDE4 port of Gwenview, but with this new release shipping with the upcoming KDE 4.3, video support is back.

Over the past few years, Ubuntu has emerged as the champion among Linux distros. However, its standing is now under attack on multiple fronts. Windows 7 is attacking from the right, Android is attacking from the left and now Google has sent another attack right up the center: Chrome-OS.

LinuxCertified Inc, a leading provider of Linux training and services, announced its next Embedded and Real-Time Linux Development class to be held in San Francisco Bay Area from July 15th - 17th, 2009.

"All Things have an End," said Jonathan Swift, "and a Pudden has two." Such is the case for Ubuntu as well, and later this month the first of the ends will come due for its longstanding legacy, the Dapper Drake. The Ubuntu release cycle is relatively unique among Linux distributions in that it occurs exactly every six months, without exception — almost. The odd duck amongst the Ubuntu releases is Ubuntu 6.06, Dapper Drake — its version numbering reveals it was released in June, while all other releases have arrived in April or October (X.04 or X.10). Nonetheless, the release was groundbreaking, including for the first time a number of features now taken for granted, among them graphical installation from the LiveCD, an improved — and now much bemoaned — Human theme, and a number of next-generation software packages, including MySQL 5.0, Firefox 1.5, and OpenOffice 2.0 among others.

Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols wonders: is the Mono programming environment really a Microsoft threat to Linux, or is this just a tempest in a tea-cup? It depends on who you ask.

The KnowARC1 project brings Globus2 packages to Debian Linux, paving the way for many Grid projects to be included in the popular distribution.

Makers of instant-on Linux environments say Google's Linux-based Chrome operating system won't interfere with growth in their markets and may help accelerate interest in quick-boot Linux platforms.

As Devin Coldewey pointed out on a recent CrunchGear post, many people seems to be getting over-exited about the new Google ChromeOS. I think that many bloggers are making more of ChromeOS than what it actually is. Maybe it is time to sum up what Google's new OS is and what it is not!

Ace coder Akkana Peck didn't want to keep a tab open in a browser all day every day just to keep an eye on Twitter, and none of the available Linux clients had what she was looking for. Either they required installing something like Mono or Adobe Air, or they had nasty bugs. And then she found out about Python-Twitter and how to write her own. (Beginners can do this too!)

Argh, there have been about a zillion articles and blog posting declaring the future of computing and a coming "OS War" between Microsoft and Google. Paaalease. Although I myself am writing yet another piece of content related to Google Chrome OS, I feel compelled to do so because the vast majority of everything I've seen so far is simply rubbish... and I don't often call things rubbish.

Imagine the following scenario: You’re Microsoft — the world’s largest, most profitable software company. Several thousand of your partners are about to meet you in New Orleans for a massive conference. Everyone is wondering if you can (A) retain your established software franchises while (B) pushing deeper into cloud and software as a service (SaaS). Then, an unexpected hurricane blows into town. It’s called Google Chrome OS. Now what?

Mozilla Labs has set up the Open Web Tools Directory, a bid to build a comprehensive list of the open-source developer tools available. On Monday, the open source browser project issued a call to the programmer community to help with the construction of the new central database.

A long time has passed since I have left KDE and GNOM world. I am living with icewm and desktop independent tools. But my memory was continuously knocking me about konsole; a multi tab, transparent terminal emulator for X Window. It is really great but as usually being a member of KDE family, it is bloated. Linux is great because it never lets it users unhappy. My happiness has come back with mrxvt.

Open up GMPlayer (or another MPlayer GUI) right-click on it, go to Preferences, click on the Font tab and from the Encoding list chose Slavic/Central European Languages (ISO-8859-2) for Romanian subtitles. Use Modern Greek (ISO-8859-7) for Greek subtitles. Be sure to also pick a font that contains the specific diacritic character sets (Verdana and Arial can be found in the msttfcorefonts package in most Linux distributions and proved to be almost perfect for this task). Even better, be sure you installed the mplayer-fonts package and leave the font field empty for the application to chose it’s own system font.

This tutorial shows how you can install Sun VirtualBox 3.0 (released on June 30, 2009) on an Ubuntu 9.04 desktop. With VirtualBox you can create and run guest operating systems ("virtual machines") such as Linux and Windows under a host operating system. There are two ways of installing VirtualBox: from precompiled binaries that are available for some distributions and come under the PUEL license, and from the sources that are released under the GPL. This article will show how to set up VirtualBox 3.0 from the precompiled binaries.

The Chrome OS story is truly frightening, far more terrifying than Mono gaining a solid foothold in Linux distributions--- because the news is simply an announcement that the Chrome OS project has been officially launched. There is no OS yet. What levels of hysteria are going to be reached when the actual code is released? Rioting? Suicides? Looting?

TV-Browser – Online Digital TV Guide in Ubuntu. TV-Browser is a simple Digital TV Guide that supports more than 500 TV channels and 80 Radio stations. TV-Browser collects TV program information from different sources on the internet and presents it neatly as a Digital TV Guide with pictures where there possible (if there are no copyright issues).TV-Browser is a free opensource software licensed under GPL that can run on multiple platforms like Windows, Linux, MacOS & OS/2 as it is Java based and requires only the SUN Java runtime environment to work properly.

Google has revealed at least some of the hardware manufacturers it's working with to design and build devices that run the much-discussed Google Chrome Operating System. With a post to the official Chrome blog Wednesday afternoon, the Mountain View Chocolate Factory said its hardware partners include Acer, ASUS, Freescale, Hewlett-Packard, Lenovo, Qualcomm, Texas Instruments, and Toshiba.