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Microsoft's earned the respect of certain sections of the open-source community for its engineering work around open-source and Linux. Specifically, its support for MySQL, PHP and JBoss on Windows and its involvement with Eclipse and Apache have been welcomed by developers and various community leaders in and around these technologies and projects. Yet, there remain many more skeptical and even suspicious of Microsoft and its motives, especially when it comes to statements and legal actions on patents.

Writing honestly about Linux distributions is not a way to become popular or make friends. When a given distribution, any distribution, has problems and a reporter writes about it there are always fans who will circle the wagons and/or go on the attack. I am very used to that by now. It's no surprise at all that has happened with a few CentOS loyalists. What is surprising is that it is continuing more than two weeks after I last wrote about the subject.

Some heavy lifting has been done to move Chrome to the 64-bit world. It's Linux-only for now, though, and don't expect doubled performance over 32-bit versions.

WorksWithU reported a couple weeks ago on new features in Ubuntu 9.10, like kernel mode setting and GRUB 2, that are likely to please geeks. But Ubunti 9.10 (codenamed Karmic Koala) will also sport changes aimed at traditional users.

This week I revisited a distribution I first wrote about back in 2007, Pardus Linux. It’s developed by the Turkish National Research Institute of Electronics and Cryptography, it has its own package management system called PISI (Packages Installed Successfully, as Intended), and it’s not based on any other Linux distribution, which makes quite a change these days. I was eager to see how it had developed since our last encounter.

The Linux Foundation has published an update to last year's study on Linux kernel development. The updated study reports that for each kernel release there has been a 10 percent increase in the number of contributing developers, resulting in a 42 percent increase in patch acceptance.

Mozilla has taken a position on the European Union's proposed settlement with Microsoft about browser integration in Windows 7. Both Mozilla Foundation's Mitchell Baker and Mozilla's general counsel feel that Microsoft is benefiting all too well from the settlement.

openSUSE is defaulting to the KDE desktop, according to an announcement on the opensuse-project mailing list by Micahel Löffler. From openSUSE 11.2 onwards, the installation process from DVD will offer a choice between KDE and GNOME, with KDE pre-selected. Users accepting the default installation settings will therefore get a KDE desktop.

[It always defaulted to KDE up until Novell took it over. - Scott]

All in all, I think Free Software users know from practical experience how to question and why to question; we also have learned about freedom in a way that most people don't get to--as a practical reality, an experience, not just a slogan.

Suppose you have a directory full of files with filenames such as oldfile, my-new-file, some_document. Suppose you would like to rename these files to File1, File2, file3.

Remember the olden days of hertzes and bytes? Now it's giga-everything. Paul Ferrill takes advantage of low hardware prices to build a super-duper high-power Linux workstation for cheap. How cheap? $1000? $500?

Cybersecurity is an increasingly frequent topic in the news, and this week brought word of the indictment of some of the most notorious hackers in the world. With so many breaches in the news, you might understandably be wondering how safe your own financial information is, and whether anyone is doing anything to protect you.

At the turn of this decade Miguel de Icaza was the unblemished hero of the free software movement and chief architect and co-creator, with Federica Mena, of the GNOME project, which had come into being as the free software response to KDE. Now de Icaza is regarded with suspicion because of his support for Mono. What happened to bring about this change?

The PySide LPGL Python binding for Qt is new and the Python::OpenCL wrapper now runs with AMD's ATI Stream SDK.

Ubuntu stands out as the most popular Linux distribution but which other versions make up the top ten?

This post follows up Mark McLoughlin's ANNOUNCE: Rawhide virt repo for F11 users:- Another update available in http://markmc.fedorapeople.org/virt-preview It's targeting install the most recent version of Fedora's libvirt on F11 and testing virt-manager and virt-install to work properly with Xen 3.4.1 Hypervisor been installed on F11 via xen 3.4.1-1 src.rpm downloaded from http://kojipkgs.fedoraproject.org/packages/xen/3.4.1/1.fc12/ PVOPS kernel 2.6.31-rc6 has been installed via Jeremy Fitzhardinge Git Repository to support Xen 3.4.1 Dom0.

Eminent Java developers Richard Hall, BJ Hargrave and Peter Kriens have formulated a new proposal for a simple module system for Java, which could be developed as part of Java Specification Request (JSR) 294 'Improved Modularity Support in the Java Programming Language'. The authors hope their proposal will bring the different ideas on modularisation into some sort of harmony.

Market researcher IDC predicts that Linux will continue steady growth over the next five years, reaching into the billions of dollars in 2012.

What's the point of GPLv2 libraries? What's the purpose of libraries associated with licenses anyway? Do they provide useful guidance or impose annoying restrictions? Who wants to puzzle out the legalese of licenses and their appurtenances when working with code and systems that are supposed to be open?

Terracotta has acquired EHCache, making it in turn an attractive acquisition target for VMWare. In any case, the acquisition is good for customer awareness and adoption.