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With the first release candidate of Linux 2.6.32, last night, Linus Torvalds completed the main development phase of the next version of Linux on the main development branch. As the kernel hackers already integrate most of a new kernel version's major changes into the source code management system during this phase, called the merge window, 2.6.32-rc1 is already a good indicator of the most important new features due for release with Linux 2.6.32 in early December.

The code analysis specialists Coverity attest to a quality improvement in the open source software they tested. Coverity investigates code from diverse open source applications in conjunction with the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. The agency sees the investigation and the resulting improvement in quality as important because more and more state agencies are relying on free and open software.

Today, the KDE Community Forums, in collaboration with "People Behind KDE", have launched a new initiative to give the community an opportunity to get to know each other a bit closer: KDialogue.

LXer Feature: 28-Sept-2009

The long-running data storage technology could be headed for trouble. We look at the problem -- and potential solutions.

Paint.NET is one of the best image editing applications for Windows and it has a version for Linux too, called Paint.Mono (or Mono Paint). According to Miguel de Icaza, most of the features in Paint.NET have been ported over to Paint-Mono, with more to come.

I'm a big fan of Matt Asay's writings about free software. He combines a keen analytical intelligence with that rare thing: long-term hands-on experience in the world of open source business. But even though I generally look forward to reading his posts, I have been rather dreading the appearance of one that I knew, one day, he would write...because it would be wrong. And now he has written it, with the self-explanatory headline: “Free software is dead. Long live open source.”

If you want iphone/ipod touch in ubuntu easy way is using iFuse program.iFuse allows you to mount an iPhone or iPod Touch under Linux using the USB cable. You can view and edit the files similar to a normal USB disk drive. iFuse does not require “jailbreaking” or voiding your warranty and works without needing extra software installed on the phone (such as `ssh`).

Novell is shaking up its business and partner strategy in Europe. The VAR Guy reached out to Novell Chief Marketing Officer (and Channel Chief) John Dragoon for his thoughts. Here's the scoop.

There have been quite a few Moblin related announcements these last weeks: The release of the final version of Moblin 2.0, the Moblin Garage and the preview release of Moblin 2.1. More interesting is the news released by Microsoft's Silverlight team that they will develop Silverlight 3 for Moblin. Unlike Moonlight that is a Novel sponsored open source rewrite of Silverlight available for all Linux distribution, this looks like a binary only package that will be developed directly by Microsoft...

Last week Eric Geier introduced us to the open source Web OS project, eyeOS. We installed eyeOS, and today we'll continue by configuring our network and setting up the office file support. Plus we'll learn how to get our files onto eyeOS, create users, and configure other system settings.

Installing NVIDIA drivers on Debian Lenny requires a little extra work compared to doing so in other distributions like Ubuntu, due to the lack of some required packages in the default installation.

This is my first release of ldNetDeviceManager.py. The ldNetManager.py tool gives you the ability to manage your network devices with out having to purchase a product like Cisco's LMS or go through the planning phase of deploying a product like func. Each of the tools I mentioned before, only have the ability to manage devices in their realm. Func supports Linux devices and Cisco LMS supports only Cisco devices. This tool has one goal. And that is to update your devices with out deploying any software to your remote devices. All you need is either telnet or ssh access to your devices and Python2.4 or better with Pexpect installed. Once you have those 2 requirements fullfilled, then you are pretty much ready to go.

As computing and the internet become ever more a part of everyday life, reliable and strong security becomes increasingly necessary. Security is critical in the areas of business communications, online banking and online shopping, but until quite recently security has not been an integral part of the core computing hardware. Hardware manufacturers have been taking steps to rectify that by introducing the idea of trusted computing based on devices such as the Trusted Platform Module (TPM). Many of these ideas, and the methods to implement them, have come from what the open source community see as the proprietary commercial establishment and so are greeted with some suspicion. Nevertheless, in order to continue to flourish, open source will have to somehow accommodate them and provide support for secure functions such as TPM.

Canonical will be releasing Ubuntu 9.10 at the end of next month while the final release of FreeBSD 8.0 is also expected within the next few weeks. With these two popular free software operating systems both having major updates coming out at around the same time, we decided it warranted some early benchmarking as we see how the FreeBSD 8.0 and Ubuntu 9.10 performance compares. For looking more at the FreeBSD performance we also have included test results from FreeBSD 7.2, the current stable release. In this article are mostly the server and workstation oriented benchmarks with the testing being carried out on a dual AMD Opteron quad-core workstation.

Once, the Netcraft Web Server Survey was boring: Apache was always streaks ahead of the competition. Then Microsoft decided to fight back - and started winning significant market share. Now things are more complicated, with major Web servers from Google, qq.com and Russia. Apache is holding up...but Microsoft's IIS is on the way down again.

LXer Feature: 28-Sept-2009

I just got back from OhioLinuxFest "Forty Years of Unix," and I want to report on what I heard, who I saw, and what I learned. I wasn't sure how it would be this year, with a slowed economy. Compared to last year, it had fewer exhibitors, but roughly the same number of attendees. The raffle tickets sold out, which is a good sign for any fund-raising activity.

Last year Gentoo canceled their 2008 release plans to focus on putting out just one release per year, while in years past they had put out as many as four releases per calendar year. There has not been a new official release of Gentoo since July of 2008, albeit they are one of the distributions to use a rolling release approach, but in honor of their tenth birthday they have begun work on a new LiveDVD. Gentoo has been producing timed snapshots of their installation media, but this will be the first Gentoo release in 2009.

This is the third entry in the continuing "cave dwellers" saga and their new lives with Ubuntu. Someone posted a comment on the previous cave dwellers entry about iTunes not working on Linux and I was absolutely sure that it did. It doesn't. Much to my surprise (and disappointment), iTunes isn't available as a native application on Linux. What's a penguinista to do? Try WINE of course!

To me this inconsistency is a true sign that computer discrimination and software profiling not only exists but should be a very big concern for all of us. There is no other reason that the Pearson system works with a Linux operating system sporting Firefox except for their Microsoft based computer course which they claim doesn't work with anything but Microsoft which is actually untrue.