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With the release of the KDE 4.3 beta, the project is returning to incremental releases, and concentrating on customization and ease of use on the desktop, the panel, and system settings. Bruce Byfield takes an in-depth look.

Novell is managing to grow its Linux business despite a difficult economy, but is it profitable? The answer, according to both Novell's CEO and its CFO, is not yet. "We have invested heavily in our Linux business to gain market share and acquire new customers," Novell CFO Dana Russell said on the company's quarterly conference call last night. "While the business is not yet profitable, we are making steady progress and plan for it to be break-even no later than 12 to 18 months from today."

Web, scripting, and open-source have been boosted in the next version of the ever-popular IntelliJ IDAE, released this week in early access. Codenamed Maia, and due this fall, IDEA 9 wraps in features designed to keep the charged-for Java development environment in the running against free tools based on Eclipse.

Plymouth, a project spawned by Red Hat to replace RHGB in Fedora with a much cleaner boot splash program that leverages newer technologies like kernel mode-setting, will not be finding its way into Ubuntu. Originally, it was considered that Plymouth could replace USplash in Ubuntu 9.04, but then Canonical and other developers decided to push that transition off to Ubuntu 9.10. They planned to integrate Plymouth in Ubuntu 9.10 (and offered up a PPA) to provide a clean, professional boot experience. However, this week at the Ubuntu Developer Summit in Barcelona that decision has been reversed. Plymouth will not be finding its way into Ubuntu.

Reports of the Linux netbook's death at the hands of Microsoft have been greatly exaggerated. A flood of Linux netbook news will be made next week at the Computex trade show in Taiwan, but, after Intel announced the beta of Moblin 2, HP has decided not to wait and made an important Linux netbook announcement this week. HP announced that it was releasing a new netbook, the HP Mini 110, that runs Ubuntu Linux 8.04 with HP's easy to use Mi (Mobile internet) desktop interface. It will also be available with XP Home, but, for once, the Linux powered model looks to be the more compelling buy even if you don't care for Linux.

The Linux Chromium alpha is shaping up nicely. Despite the missing features and rendering glitches, it is relatively usable and maturing at a reasonable pace. The developers still have a lot of work to do, but the portability challenges no longer seem insurmountable. Users who want to test the latest version of Chromium on Ubuntu can take advantage of Fabien Tassin's daily build package archive.

I was hugely entertained by the latest piece of Microsoft spin: apparently the recession is putting a dampener on migrations to open source. Of course, Conservative MEP Daniel Hannan put it: "The government has run out of our money." Nevertheless, I agree with Brown that this is an international crisis and one that demands an international response, even though not all countries are in the same dilapidated condition as the United Kingdom.

I've written hundreds of posts about Debian — and maybe just as many about trouble I've had with my Intel-graphics-using laptops and screen artifacts in the X Window System graphical environment for Unix/Linux operating systems. Now I've got a fresh, working Debian Lenny installation on a test machine and have solved the artifacts-in-X problem that has plagued me in Slackware and Debian (and a few other distros that escape me) for probably a year or more.

What would e-mail look like if it were invented today, rather than several years ago? Meet Google Wave, a preview application shown off Thursday at the Google I/O conference. The Google Wave site is now up and running, although access to the application will be restricted. Google Wave was developed by the Google Maps team, led by Lars Rasmussen and his brother Jens. "One of the best times of my life was in 2005, just after the launch of Google Maps, when developers started doing crazy things with the APIs," Rasmussen said, adding that he hopes developers will do the same with Wave.

Ext3, the default Linux file system for many years, is definitely starting to show its age. Modern mass storage devices are approaching its limits and block-based data management is no longer adequate for modern file sizes. High time for an update!

Big week for Google and Microsoft as Google announced its new unified communications platform dubbed Wave and Microsoft announced the Zune HD and a new search engine they're calling Bing. Wave looks the most interesting as it will be open source and Google is encouraging developers to create extensions.

The openSUSE Project is happy to announce the second milestone release for openSUSE 11.2 is ready for download. This release includes Firefox 3.5 beta 4, KDE 4.3 beta 1, GNOME 2.26, and hundreds of other updates from Milestone 1. This is a Milestone Release, which means that it may not be suitable for production systems. This is one in a series of releases leading to the official openSUSE 11.2 release, scheduled for November 2009.

Canonical's popular Ubuntu operating system continues to win followers around the world, and Ubuntu User is the first print magazine specifically for this rapidly growing audience. "Ubuntu is popular with software developers and IT professionals, but it is also a hit with hobbyists and other desktop users who are looking for an alternative to Microsoft Windows and don't want the restrictive hardware policies of Apple," says Joe Casad, Editor in Chief of Ubuntu User.

At its I/O conference yesterday (27th of May) Google gave developers a preview of a new communication and collaboration product called Google Wave. Google will invite selected programmers to contribute to this project even before the software is released and plans to make Wave freely available as open source software in a few months.

Linux on MIPS based systems isn't new. Red Hat Linux 7.1 ran on MIPS based servers back in 2002. Nowadays Debian has well established and stable MIPS ports. GnewSense has a MIPS64 big-endian port in development. Though still not finalized it is functional and available now and designed specifically for MIPS64 netbooks and notebooks currently being produced in China.

This tutorial explains the installation of a Samba fileserver on Fedora 10 and how to configure it to share files over the SMB protocol as well as how to add users. Samba is configured as a standalone server, not as a domain controller. In the resulting setup, every user has his own home directory accessible via the SMB protocol and all users have a shared directory with read-/write access.

Q. My netbook came with SUSE Linux, but I want to use Ubuntu Linux. What’s the easiest way to change?

A. Swapping in Ubuntu Linux is not that difficult, and there is even a version called Ubuntu Netbook Remix that is optimized just for smaller hardware like a mini-notebook PC.

I don't believe that the desktop Linux market share is barely 1%. I think it is a lot higher. I have no good data to share; I base my assessment on experience and knowing the industry. There is something else that is even more persuasive, and that is how Microsoft behaves. If Linux is so insignificant, why do they pay so much attention to it?

This anniversary version of Calculate Linux Desktop, the first version of which was exactly 2 years ago. released May 29, 2009

When the cheap laptops known as netbooks first came out over a year ago, computer makers were able to offer them at low prices in part by shipping them with the free Linux open-source operating system, rather than Microsoft's Windows. Since then, Windows netbooks have taken over most of the market after Microsoft began pushing Windows XP aggressively to netbook makers and consumers realized Linux netbooks didn't work well with some popular applications and devices.