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Well, not quite. In fact, it’s been darn cold this week in the Mid-Atlantic USA, with lows down in the single digits Fahrenheit, wind chills below zero. But nevertheless, change is in the air — in this case, the Fedora trademark guidelines. But before I get to talking about those, I wanted to give a nod to Joe Brockmeier, with whom I’ve talked about this subject before. Joe and I share an interest in doing tough grindstone work to enable communities, and one of the things that gets in the way sometimes is the long arm of the law — in this case, trademark law. That’s one reason why I started working last summer with Red Hat Legal to revise our trademark guidelines.

Last week, Google's Marissa Mayer and Eric Schmidt appeared in separate interviews on the Charlie Rose show, and not surprisingly they spoke in one voice where privacy and trust were concerned. They both said that when we use online services, we give up privacy in the process. There it is on the table. They are providing the service, and you're providing the information, and should you be concerned about this trade-off, Schmidt says simply: "Trust us."

The latest version of Knoppix represents a radical remake of the venerable Live CD Linux distribution. Knoppix 6.0 is leaner, faster, and more versatile than ever.

We'll come right out and say this – Linux breaks. There, we've got that off our chests. No matter how much we might like our chosen distro, there is no denying that things can go wrong, or that it might not even be right in the first place. Here's our guide to dealing with some of the most common problems, and some advice on how to deal with new disasters. The types of difficulties most often seen can be split into a number of broad categories: booting, hardware and drivers, misbehaving software and networking are among the most popular topics for discussion. We can't show you solutions for every problem that might arise, but we can show some of the common issues people face and, more importantly, show you how to go about identifying a problem.

A New York State Assembly bill intends to give open source developers the opportunity to offset 20 per cent of their development expenses, up to a maximum of $200, against tax. The bill summary explains that the New York parliament considerably reduces its costs by using open source software "such as Mozilla for email, Firefox for web browsing and WebCal for electronic calendars".

Rather than throw old hardware away because it can't cope with Vista's bloat, we show you how to put it to good use - read on to learn how to transform your old computer into a mail server, a fileserver, a web server, a spam blocker, a PC for kids and more!

Compiz may be the prime suite of effects on the desktop, but it can’t go too far beyond decorating the windows themselves. What if you could give GTK+ widgets effects themselves? Depending on your theme, you may be able to.

The SCO Group of Lindon has filed an appeal reasserting its ownership of the copyright of Unix computer operating system software, a move officers believe will get it back on track to pursue claims against IBM in a case that has riled the open source software community. In a brief posted Friday by the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals, the software company seeks to overturn rulings by U.S. District Judge Dale Kimball in Utah. Last year, Kimball held that Novell retained certain copyrights to the Unix system after it was sold in 1995 to a California company and that was subsequently purchased by The SCO Group. Left standing, that decision could prove fatal to SCO's claim against IBM over code in the popular Linux system.

The following is a translation of an interesting post by Kumail on Ubuntu Life. Ubuntu is a great operating system, but a small modification and adding here and there will make the ubuntu desktop an enjoyable experience, such as animated waalpapers and a visual folder hierarchy.

LXer Feature: 08-Mar-2009

In this week's LXWR we have more news coming to light on the Microsoft vs. TomTom suit, fat free XFCE, going back to dial-up to save some cash, news and opinions on netbooks, Flock ditches Firefox for Chrome, Linux gets put to the Mom test and much much more.

We are proud to announce the 6th major version of Zenwalk GNU/Linux. This release comes with the biggest changelog in the history of the project to offer many new features and optimizations. As usual, our challenge was to provide latest versions of the most modern applications as well as kernel, while keeping the usual level of simplicity and performance that makes Zenwalk special in the GNU/Linux world. We spent the 2 last month polishing the desktop around the new XFCE 4.6, making sure that this brand new version is well integrated into Zenwalk 6.0. We also replaced Gnome Office with our lightweight and optimized version of Openoffice 3.0.1, splited in 2 packages : the base package provides Writer, Calc, Impress and Draw ; the “extra” package (available via Netpkg) provides Math, Darabase and Java support.

MontaVista has announced Meld, a new community for developers of embedded Linux devices. Meld provides a forum for developers of all skill levels to connect and share information, ideas, and software around embedded Linux designs, accelerating their development efforts and delivery of commercial products. Developing embedded Linux systems is a complex process. Meld addresses these challenges by bringing embedded Linux developers together in an online community.

Project Gutenberg is a real treasure trove for bookworms and casual readers alike, but turning etext files into a readable form is not as easy as it may seem. In theory, since etexts are just plain text files, you should be able to open and read them on any platform without any tweaking. In practice, however, this approach rarely works.

It took a little longer than we had expected, but we can finally announce that Sacred Gold has been sent to the production company, and we expect it to be ready to ship in 2-3 weeks. We expected to have had it ready weeks ago, but some last minute issues caused some unexpected delays. But that is all past us now, and the game is in production!

It's been a decade since Linux proponents first argued their OS was ready for mainstream adoption. Yet for all intents and purposes, Linux remains nonexistent on "regular" people's desks. Sure, developers and other tech experts use Linux, but that's about it. So when my colleague Neil McAllister, author of InfoWorld's Fatal Exception blog, made the case for desktop Linux, I snorted, "Give me a break! Desktop Linux is nowhere." He challenged me to try it myself. He had a point: It had been a decade since I fired up any desktop Linux distro. So I accepted his challenge. My verdict: Desktop Linux is a great choice for many regular Joes with basic computer needs. And not just on netbooks.

Microsoft owns FAT32, but it didn’t appear to pursue its rights against companies that supported FAT32 in their Linux thumb drives and consumer electronics. Until the TomTom case. At which point Jeremy Allison of Samba says Microsoft had secret cross-licensing deals with all those other guys which violate the GPL. So the question becomes, who should Software Freedom sue?

While Linux is widely used in servers and is growing slowly on the desktop side, the embedded market for Linux is one that continues to have momentum. One such proof point for came this week from the year end financial results for embedded operating system vendor Wind River. For its fiscal 2009 year, which ended on January 31, 2009, Wind River reported $359.8 million in revenue, a 9 percent increase in year over year increase. The companies net income hit $10.8 million, which is a turnaround from the net loss of $2.4 million for the prior year.

The Free Software Foundation (FSF) has announced additions to the speaker lineup for its March 21st-22nd LibrePlanet 2009 conference. The conference, to be attended by GNU/Linux users, free software activists, and programmers from around the world, stresses three themes: strengthening global free software activism, addressing the threats posed to free software users by moves toward "cloud computing" and "software as a service," and advancing the projects on the FSF's High Priority Projects list. Jeremy Allison, lead developer of Samba, will be giving a talk entitled, "The Elephant in the Room. Free Software and Microsoft." Evan Prodromou, member of the autonomo.us working group and founder of the identi.ca free software microblogging service, will be sharing lessons learned from his experience bringing free software concepts to web services.

Microsoft's dismissive attitude of VDI, or virtual desktop infrastructure, calls to mind Red Hat's stance toward the desktop as a viable Linux commercial offering. Red Hat has said it has yet to figure out how to monetize the Linux desktop as a product, but now seems to be figuring out a way to make the desktop pay while continuing to give it away via the Fedora distribution. With its recent desktop virtualization agreement with Microsoft and other work it's done, Red Hat may soon be offering VDI capabilities.

If there was one thing Linux Format magazine learned from the Readers' Round Table event it organised, it was that us Linux folk like to get out and have a good chat. Over the several hours we were all together, we covered dozens of subjects, and the conversation was lively and opinionated. And that was with only nine of us. Imagine what such a meeting could be like if there were more attendees, more of a schedule and a little better organisation? This is the realm of the Linux User Group – a network of Linux enthusiasts that weave a web of community across the UK, and across almost every country in the world.