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Google is to launch a service that would enable users to access their personal computer from any internet connection, according to industry reports. But campaigners warn that it would give the online behemoth unprecedented control over individuals' personal data. The Google Drive, or "GDrive", could kill off the desktop computer, which relies on a powerful hard drive. Instead a user's personal files and operating system could be stored on Google's own servers and accessed via the internet.

Jimmy Wales, the founder of Wikipedia, is backing a system to help prevent incorrect changes being made to entries in the online encyclopedia. His endorsement of what are termed flagged revisions has been sparked off by an inaccurate change made to an entry about Senator Edward (Ted) Kennedy, claiming that he and his colleague Robert Byrd had died, after a lunch in honour of the newly inaugurated President, Barack Obama. In actual fact, shortly after arriving at the hospital, Kennedy was already on the way to recovery. Byrd, too, was examined, but members of his staff denied he had suffered any medical problems. As Wales writes on his talk page the incorrect report would never have gone online if flagged revisions had been in use.

I wasn't particularly happy when I heard that Python 3 wasn't backwardly compatible with previous versions of Python, but I tried to keep an open mind about this. When I heard that Programming in Python 3 was being published in Addison-Wesley's Developer's Library series, I saw a chance to get up to speed quickly with what had changed.

Like me, you've probably read articles on how free software, or open source, is going to thrive in 2009, and how businesses everywhere are going to survive the recession by migrating to it. Perhaps you agree with those views; perhaps you don't. However, what I find most interesting is what people mean by the words "open source" and, to be even more specific, what business model they have in mind.

LXer Feature: 25-Jan-2009

This week's Roundup starts off with Steven Rosenberg talking about his Thunderbird IMAP setup and why he wishes it was better at it. We have a couple of desktop related articles where Bruce Byfield gives us his Ideal Linux Desktop Setup and gHacks shows us how to shorten Linux boot time by going through what services you really need turned on.

I've been wanting to write this for some time, but aside from wanting to use Ubuntu for a reasonable amount of time, I'm pretty lazy. What finally prompted me to write this was Amarok, a music player I liked so much better than iTunes that it bordered on being difficult to express. At any rate, I've now been using Ubuntu 8.04 "Hardy Heron" as my only work box for over six months, running it on a Compaq nx6325 laptop. I tried running Ubuntu at home as well, thus freeing myself from the annoyance of having to buy or steal most of the interesting pieces of software I like, but I pretty much just use that box for gaming so that wasn't worth it. It was still nice looking for the short time I used Ubuntu though - my brand new NVidia card powering my 30" LCD at some ungodly resolution, the same resolution Windows calls "native" for the monitor.

We've all heard of Firefox and GNOME DO, but there are some little utilities you may not have noticed that make life a lot easier.

A web content management system (WCMS) is software designed to simplify the publication of Web content. In particular, it enables content creators to submit content without requiring technical knowledge of HTML or the uploading of files. A CMS is most commonly used in creating an intranet or in establishing a presence on the Web.

There are number of factors coming together that lead me to believe that open source's moment is right now, today, this year. Open source already runs so many things and just last week as Barack Obama was elected the 44th president of the United States, he asked Scott McNealy of Sun to prepare a report on open source technologies as a first step toward exploring the use of open source in government.

Based on Ubuntu 8.10, you might pass Linux Mint off as being yet another Ubuntu spin-off, though Mint has been around now for while (first release was on the 27th of August, 2006) and it's still a popular distribution, sitting in the number 3 spot on the Distrowatch page hit ranks. It shares the same Ubuntu 8.10 repositories and can also benefit from Ubuntu's large user base for support as the majority of solutions will be applicable to Mint. So why use Mint? What are the benefits? Well, the main benefits are out of the box support for audio and video codecs, DVD playback and Firefox plug-ins. This was very important when Mint first hit the scene as Ubuntu didn't provide the user with painless codec installation or DVD playback. Mint provided users new to Linux or just users who preferred a good out of the box experience with a complete Linux distribution.

Want to beef up the software bundle that comes with your Linux-based Netbook? Here are five nifty applications and tools that are worth a closer look.

What does this have to do with Linux or Open Source? As always, helios crafts his story so that after a few sentences, you really don't care. Rest assured...it will tie in, and in a surprising manner.

Manufacturers and PC vendors would have you believe that there's only one way to speed up your machine: buy new kit. And then, in 18 months, buy new kit again. However, it's usually our software that's the real bottleneck. If you've been using Linux for a while, you'll already have discovered lighter alternatives to some of the platform's bloatfests – for example, using AbiWord and Gnumeric in the place of OpenOffice.org.

Turning your personal computer into a media server means that you will be able to play video (AVI, MPEG, MPEG-2, DivX, XviD, MKV, WMV, MP4 or even DVD ISOs or VIDEO_TS folders) and audio files (MP3, OGG, FLAC or WMA) or view your favorite photos (JPG, PNG, GIF, TIFF) stored on your PC's hard drive on a big screen TV set or LCD/Plasma high-definition display, via a PlayStation 3 or Xbox 360 console. The following tutorial will teach you how to set up such a media server, step-by-step, from configuring your PC and gaming console, to installing and setting up the media server software in your Linux box. We've offered two media server installations, so you can choose whichever fits you best.

This how to will allow you to configure a Postfix mail server with virtual hosting. Virtual hosting means that you can add as many maildomains as you want and subsequentially as many mailboxes for these domains as you want. Here we we use an LDAP backend for both the MTA (Postfix) and POP3/IMAP server (Dovecot), and a web based management interface.

Everyone knows that Linus Torvalds 'is a Linux' but did you know he is also a born-again gnome?

A month ago we compared Intel's graphics performance between Ubuntu 8.10 and the latest Ubuntu 9.04 daily snapshot at the time. With those tests we found Intel's performance had degraded significantly. However, with many new graphics packages having been released since then, we have carried out some additional tests this morning to look at where the Intel Linux graphics performance stands today.

Open source has reached the third wave of its evolution and those who have been using the older models which were procurement-driven need to adapt. That's the message which Simon Phipps, the chief open source and standards officer from Sun Microsystems, brought to the Australian national Linux conference this morning.

Volunteer projects like SETI@home successfully crowdsourced scientific computing to a cloud of idle home computers. Trusted bare-metal desktop hypervisors enable scaling this to a commercially viable business model.

I used to be a KDE user. I thought KDE 4.0 was such a disaster I switched to GNOME. I hate the fact that my right button doesn't do what I want it to do. But the whole "break everything" model is painful for users and they can choose to use something else.