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The Fedora 11 preview release announcement went out on April 28. Around the world, Fedora users responded by downloading, testing, pondering the ext4 filesystem, and generally feeling a little "jaunty" themselves. One Fedora developer, though, had a moderately strange response which might be a little hard to understand out of its full context:

I'm sorry, I can't hear you. Can you turn it up a bit? What do you mean, it won't go any louder? The _last_ release used to go louder."

Anybody who has been sufficiently distant from the disturbance on the fedora-devel mailing list can be forgiven for wondering what is going on here. In short: changes to the PulseAudio volume control widget shipped in Fedora 11 have made it hard for some users to get sound out of their systems in the manner to which they have become accustomed, and they're not happy about it.

LXer Feature: 14-May-2009

People always tout this year or that as THE year of desktop Linux. It won't happen. Rather, it'll take time to evolve.

Earlier this week we delivered benchmarks of Ubuntu 9.04 versus Mac OS X 10.5.6 and found that the Leopard operating system had performed better than the Jaunty Jackalope in a majority of the tests, at least when it came to Ubuntu 32-bit. We are back with more operating system benchmarks today, but this time we are comparing the performance of the Linux and Sun OpenSolaris kernels. We had used the Nexenta Core Platform 2 operating system that combines the OpenSolaris kernel with a GNU/Ubuntu user-land to that of the same Ubuntu package set but with the Linux kernel. Testing was done with both 32-bit and 64-bit Ubuntu server installations.

The Android smartphone platform is poised to grow nine times over by year's end, if new predictions from Strategy Analytics are correct. While that growth rate may dwarf those of heavies like Apple and RIM, Android's base is presently much smaller. Even with dramatic growth, will Android sales ever approach BlackBerry or iPhone numbers?

Sun Microsystems has released the OpenSolaris programme for CommunityOne West. The event, which aims to bring together students, developers and decision-makers to talk about open source issues, will take place in San Francisco from the 1st to the 3rd of June. Begining with the presentation of the latest version 2009.06 of OpenSolaris, the event will have over 70 sessions.

It has been two or three weeks since we were last presented with a new display driver from NVIDIA for Linux, whether it be in their 180.xx or 185.xx series, a stable release, a beta release, or any of their legacy driver updates. This timespan is quite long compared to the past few months where they have released as many as five Linux drivers per month.

In one of RIAA’s high profile cases the Free Software Foundation backed defendant Joel Tenenbaum, much to the dislike of the music industry lobby. John Sullivan, Operations Manager at the FSF explains in a guest post why they think these cases impact not just music, but also free software and its technology.

The SystemRescueCD developers have announced the release of version 1.2.0 of their Linux distribution. The latest release of this lean system, mainly intended for administrative tasks, such as recovering data after a system crash, includes a wide range of software updates.

Swiftfox is yet another free browser which is an optimized build of the Mozilla Firefox web browser. The browser is fully compatible with any existing themes, extensions for Firefox.

The short 3D animation movie will be produced by a team of approx 6 people, working at it for at least 6 months.

The first beta version of the new and shiny KDE 4.3 has been released. The list of new features and improvements is long and impressive as ever. There is a new tree view mode in System Settings, many cool new features, the desktop search becomes more visible to the user, and yet more polishing in user interfaces all over the place make using KDE more fun.

In these days of bandwidth caps and pay-per-kilobyte rates, keeping an eye on your bandwidth usage makes a lot of sense.

In the last article in this series Juliet Kemp looked at how init (the system we've all been using for years to start up our services) works, and how upstart, the new replacement for init, works instead. This article looks at upstart and its scripts in more detail.

E-commerce teams within IT departments must do more with less, so they need to maximize their resources through shrewd and clever management, according to Gartner. Although IT budgets are shrinking anywhere between 5 to 25 percent, IT e-commerce organisations are expected to sharpen the online shopping experiences of their companies' customers. A big reason for the heightened expectations is that sites like YouTube, Amazon, eBay, Flickr and Facebook continue to push the envelope in terms of new features and the online experience in general, said Gene Alvarez, Gartner's vice president of e-commerce and CRM research.

As has been well publicized by now, the Linux kernel lacks the sort of tracing features which can be found in certain other Unix-like kernels. That gap is not the result of a want of trying. In the past, developers trying to put tracing infrastructure into the kernel have often run into a number of challenges, including opposition from their colleagues who do not see the value of that infrastructure and resent its perceived overhead. More recently, it would seem that the increased interest in tracing has helped developers to overcome some of those objections; an ongoing discussion shows, though, that concerns about tracing are still alive and have the potential to derail the addition of tracing facilities to the kernel.

Ubuntu's commercial backer won't fluff its own cloud, but Canonical isn't eschewing online services in the battle against Microsoft. Canonical has begun beta tests of a web-based service that'll let you store and synchronize files on your Jaunty Jackalope PC with other Jackalope-powered machines. Called Ubuntu One, it's designed to provide you with access to your files using a web interface when you're away from your main machine. The service also promises to let you share documents with others.

Gyachi is a Yahoo! client for Linux operating system that supports almost all of the features you would expect to find on the official Windows Yahoo! client: Voice chat, webcams, faders, 'nicknames', audibles, avatars, display images, and more.

Is a certification required to get a job?

Linux has gained in popularity among server and device vendors as being a good general purpose operating system. When it comes to device vendors which often have different chip architectures and needs than a general purpose operating system provides, there is a need for customization which adds time and expense to a project. Embedded Linux vendor MontaVista is now taking aim at that issue by splitting apart its Linux distribution into what it refers to as Market Specific Distributions (MSDs).

This is a very interesting read, but you may not know why you're reading it at first, or even exactly what you're reading. The title suggests that you'll learn the "Google way" of doing things and this is largely true. It also suggests that the "Google way" is a unique set of operations, philosophies, and processes that have resulted in Google's incredible success and that perhaps, by learning "the way", you may be able to replicate that success in your own efforts. Is that true? Probably not.