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Not too many releases this week, but we do have the big Jaunty release that resulted in quite a few other releases.

Linux Fund has expanded its partnership with the Gnash media player team to bring OpenStreetMap editing support to the open source Flash® player, Gnash. This work will also improve YouTube compatibility and joins Linux Fund's existing effort to bring the Real Time Messaging Protocol support to Gnash. OpenStreetMap. the free wiki world map, is an editable map of the whole world built by community contributions. To contribute and donate towards the Gnash OSM support see the Linux Fund website.

With Windows 7 ready to roll, and a world which really could care less, is Microsoft banking on XP to save the day?

Over time K3b got its reputation as one of the most powerful burning applications not only for KDE, but for Linux in general. Development at the KDE4 release evolved rapidly in the last couple of months and the first usable alpha of the KDE4 port was put up for testing a few days ago, on April 22. Earlier today I made a brief review of this release, which you can read here (nothing is new, K3b 1.65.0 comes with the same features of 1.0.5, the only major difference is that it was ported to use the KDE4 libraries).

The purpose of this Ubuntu 9.04 tutorial is to show you the steps to setting up a kernel that is highly tuned for your CPU, in this case a Pentium 4 with hyperthreading for a workstation.

X.Org 7.5 with the X Server 1.7 release was planned for release at the start of this month, but sadly they far from made it -- no test releases of the new X Server are even available yet. Though after reading Phoronix, Daniel Stone remembered this release schedule and has decided to give another try at X.Org 7.5...

I was pleased to hear a while ago that K3b got two new developers assigned by the Mandriva project and that work at the KDE4 port is going well now. Although K3b was inactive for a pretty long time (the last stable release was 1.0.5 for KDE3 on May 27, 2008), it looks like development goes at a fast pace and the first alpha of the KDE4 port was put up a little earlier this month.

CMus is a very powerful audio player for the console with a ncurses-based interface, support for themes and highly configurable. Although (at least in Debian) CMus does not come with Last.fm song submission support by default, there is a script available here as a patch, which you can apply to the source, compile CMus again and enable Last.fm support.

In OpenBSD, Flash support isn't exactly something to crow about. Flash Player 7 is all that works due to subsequent Linux Flash players needing ALSA sound support, a feature none of the BSD projects possess. And that player only works in the Opera Web browser — and only on i386. But it turns out that you can watch Flash video in OpenBSD on any platform that runs Mplayer. And this clever hack is something that even Linux, Windows and Mac users can benefit from.

This tutorial shows how to set up an Ubuntu Jaunty Jackalope (Ubuntu 9.04) server that offers all services needed by ISPs and hosters: Apache web server (SSL-capable), Postfix mail server with SMTP-AUTH and TLS, BIND DNS server, Proftpd FTP server, MySQL server, Courier POP3/IMAP, Quota, Firewall, etc. In the end you should have a system that works reliably, and if you like you can install the free webhosting control panel ISPConfig 2 (i.e., ISPConfig runs on it out of the box).

An area where open-source games have traditionally lacked is with regard to delivering high-end graphics capabilities that can compete with modern day commercial games. To this day, many open-source games still look like something that would have been pushed out of a commercial game studio years ago due to lacking proper artwork and a game engine that has an OpenGL renderer that can sustain delivering impressive graphical features with modern hardware...

I remember when I first started administrating Linux systems, I had to use the vi text editor to edit configuration files. My first encounters with vi were not of the pleasant kind. I hated vi, to me it felt completely counter intuitive with its command and editing mode. Which it apparently inherited from the days where terminals had few keys and didn't sport all the typewriter functions we have today. After a while of using vi I started to appreciate it's tremendous power. Nowadays I use it whenever I can. I must say vi has a steep learning curve but when you get past the first steps and have the feeling of the interface it's an incredible time-saver. It's comparable to the Linux command line interface, it takes a little while to learn but it's so efficient and powerful you get back the time you invested in learning a hundred fold.

Crowdsourcing has been touted as an efficient and inexpensive business practice, but can it really be a win-win proposition? Critics are vehemently urging people not to work on a crowdsourced basis, calling it the equivalent of slave labor and lamenting the jobs lost as a consequence of the practice.

Searching for that one last useless thing to round out your collection? We may have found it!

The author of ULTILEX has published a tutorial describing how to merge several live Linux distributions in one.

Recently, I had to fact-check some older articles I wrote about One Laptop Per Child in order to bring them up to date. This meant digging through the controversy in 2008, and what I found was some pretty appalling human behavior. That’s the “bitter”. The “sweet” is that both OLPC and Sugar (now separate projects) are both doing a lot of good in the world. Sugar, in particular, is doing a better job of connecting with the community. That’s a challenge for us in the community to step up and do a much better job connecting with Sugar. We need to make it the best thing ever, and that’s going to mean more than lip service. So we all need to get it installed and start contributing. Read the full story at Freesoftware Magazine.

The first major update for Google's Android platform, based on the Cupcake development tree, was released today in source form at the project's git repository. Now it's up to the OEMs and carriers to deploy it, and the community to port it to other platforms. Dig in for a list of new features.

This spring sees a burst of activity for Linux distributions. In addition to Ubuntu and Mandriva, FreeBSD and OpenBSD also put final touches on their new releases

Full Circle Magazine, the free and independent magazine for the Ubuntu community has just released its two year anniversary issue! To celebrate, there is an all new design as well as double the usual content!

Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer used the economy as an excuse for his company's first quarterly loss in 23 years as a public company, but if his big rivals were making money, it begs the question, why was Microsoft doing so poorly?