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A bug report posted in the bug tracker for the next version of Ubuntu 9.04 (Jaunty Jackalope) describes a massive data loss problem when using Ext4, the future standard file system for Linux, available as an option when installing Ubuntu 9.04. The report describes a crash occurring shortly after the KDE 4 desktop files had been loaded, resulting in the loss of all of the data that had been created, including many KDE configuration files.

Google's Android operating system gave Linux-on-mobile sales a healthy boost in the fourth quarter of 2008. In its latest report on the state of smartphones, IT analysts Gartner said that Linux-based mobile sales increased from 2.7 million units in the fourth quarter of 2007 to 3.2 million units at the end of 2008. This was despite a general slowdown in growth for the entire smartphone sector over the same period.

Earlier this week the FFmpeg project reached version 0.5, which was quite significant considering no new FFmpeg release was made available in years. This release contained a plethora of new encoders and decoders, support for VDPAU, a variety of bug-fixes, and many other improvements. What is next for FFmpeg? When will we see proper Blu-ray support? Will there be a 1.0 release in the foreseeable future? To answer these questions plus others, I spoke with three of the main FFmpeg developers about this very popular -- and important -- open-source multimedia project.

San Francisco (CA) - At the Hotel Kabuki in San Francisco on April 8-10, 2009, a meeting of the great OS minds will take place. There, sponsored by Intel, will be assembled together the Linux Foundation, Sun Microsystems and Microsoft representatives. For the first time ever, the three-way group will sit down at a single table to debate and discuss the future not only of their respective operating systems, but also the OS industry in general. What will come from such a meeting? I believe truly that only God knows.

To quote Wikipedia, "Drupal is a free and open source modular framework and Content Management System (CMS) written in the programming language PHP. It is used as a "back end" system for many different types of websites, ranging from small personal blogs to large corporate and political sites". According to the back cover of this book, "Newcomers will find a thorough introduction to the framework, while experienced Drupal developers will learn best practices..." Cool. A "something for everybody" book. That's one reason why I included a basic definition of Drupal at the beginning of this review. Apparently, you don't have to be particularly familiar with Drupal to find a use for the Byron, Berry, Haug, Eaton, Walker, and Robbins ("whew") book.

“…almost all of the newest hardware coming out has Linux support. The critical mass has been reached. Go download Ubuntu 8.10 and see for yourself what the fuss is about. You won’t regret it” That’s probably just the sort of thing you’d expect to hear from me right? Perhaps so but it’s not the sort of thing you expect to hear from veteran computer journalist John C Dvorak. He has never had much love for Linux and he’s been very critical (some would even say derogatory) in the past. So when someone sent me an email saying he’d been writing about Linux again I groaned to myself and thought “another kicking from the mainstream press just what we need”. I was completely wrong though, he seems to love the latest Ubuntu and is even telling the whole world and his mate to go and try it out. This could have a big effect on the uptake as he’s a guy a lot of people listen to and trust for computer advice. If he says Linux is cool people might actually listen. At least the sort of people who would dismiss me out of hand as a liberal hippie douche. He uses two crucial words "critical mass" but is he right?

Firewall Builder GUI has a built-in revision control system that can be used to keep track of changes in the objects and policy rules. If data file has been added to the revision control system, every time it is saved, the system asks the user to enter a comment that describes changes done in the file in this session and stores it along with the data. The program also assigns new revision number to the data file using standard software versioning system whith major and minor version numbers separated by a dot. When you open this data file next time, the program presents a list of revisions alongside with dates and comments, letting you choose which revision you want to use. You can open the latest revision and continue working with the file from the point where you left off last time, or open one of the older revisions to inspect how the configuration looked like in the past and possibly create a branch in the revision control system. Here we take a closer look at the built-in revision control system.

The Mandriva development team today announced a release candidate for its 2009 Spring release, codenamed Pomerol. Release candidate 1 includes KDE 4.2.1, GNOME 2.25.92, Xfce 4.6, X.org server 1.6, OpenOffice.Org 3.0.1 and the brand-new qt 4.5.0. In addition to features such as Speedboot, included in the beta release last month, 2009 Spring RC1 includes the experimental hybrid ISO technology. Hybrid ISO allows users to dump an ISO image to USB storage devices which can be used to boot additional devices such as netbooks.

Linpus - known from their Linpus Linux pre-installed onto Acer Aspire One Netbooks - announced at the CEBIT they've entered into a strategic partnership with Insyde Software - provider of UEFI firmware -, to improve the boot speed & access to the applications of the Linpus Linux version for netbooks.

Where is a location-based application for the Android platform that gives you information on shopping, travel, gas prices, weather and news, just to name a few. It's a well engineered app that has already existed for other platforms and now has been ported to Android.

Featured guest poster - a depressed Henny Youngman: Take my life. Please. :) Yesterday we took a look at the basics of using Veritas/Symantec NetBackup to add a new TLD and drives to your existing machine. Today, we're going to go just one step beyond and assume a fairly commonplace situation, which has somehow, inexplicably arisen from THE SITUATION we found ourselves in yesterday

Georg Greve is the founder of the Free Software Foundation Europe and has served as its president since the beginning in 2001. Marking the eight birthday of the FSFE I asked him some questions on his own background and the history of the FSFE for a special birthday edition of the Fellowship interview series.

Patent and copyright law are stifling innovation and threatening the global economy according to two economists at Washington University in St. Louis in a new book, Against Intellectual Monopoly. Professors Michele Boldrin and David K. Levine call for abolishing the current patent and copyright system in order to unleash innovations necessary to reverse the current recession and rescue the economy. The professors discuss their stand against intellectual property protections in a video and news release linked here.

Tainted Object Propagation is the term defined for using incorrect or invalid inputs to get more than required information from the system and in some cases, taking control of the system. Although this technique is much widely used to misuse web applications and database oriented applications, but this holds true for any API publisher who exposes his API’s to third party application writers.

Microsoft who is already suffering from Netbook makers using the older Windows XP & custom-made distros of Linux, probably won ’t find a remedy with their upcoming Windows 7.

Microsoft is trying to prevent people using and distributing software under the GNU General Public License, a free software license, by forcing cross-patent licensing deals, according to Samba project leader Jeremy Allison. Allison told ZDNet UK that through lawsuits such as the one launched against TomTom, Microsoft was attempting to encourage licensing deals which are proscribed under the GPL.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 was released on February 15th, 2005. This report takes a look at the state of security for the first four years from release. We look at key metrics, specific vulnerabilities, and the most common ways users were affected by security issues. We will show some best practices that could have been used to minimise the impact of the issues, and also take a look at how the included security innovations helped. This report is an update to the three-year risk report published in Red Hat Magazine in February 2007.

Sometimes, a problem can be a good thing and lead you to something that is even better than what is currently taking place. Thus it is that a laptop that wouldn't work with a live CD of sidux did work with SimplyMepis 8 and convinced me to try it on my desktop. This is one problem I am glad I had because it led me to begin using SimplyMepis 8, a Debian based Linux distro that is a joy to use.

Both your money and your medical privacy are going to be gone unless a single sentence law is enacted. No less a source than the Congressional Budget Office (page 16 and 17) is saying that the recent Health Information Technology parts of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 will drive the taxpayer into a $17 billion ditch even after 10 years. That's right, the taxpayer will be paying $30 billion to LOSE $17 billion after 10 years with no break-even point even mentioned. Remember that national 'investment' in Health Information Technology is going to catapult us into Health care nirvana in which your data and privacy are secure and the health care system in the United States hums along like a well oiled Internet resulting with all of these great cost reductions and efficiencies? All we really have to do is just spend money on the problem and it will be solved. We need to 'incentivize adoption' of health care technology and all will be well. The law as written will achieve anything but that. A single sentence could change that.

VirtualBox is a family of powerful x86 virtualization products for enterprise as well as home use. Not only is VirtualBox an extremely feature rich, high performance product for enterprise customers, it is also the only professional solution that is freely available as Open Source Software under the terms of the GNU General Public License (GPL).