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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.

With deteriorating global economic conditions making their impact felt in the wireless industry, handset OEMs and mobile network operators are looking to Linux-based operating systems to cut costs and diversify their handset portfolios, reports IMS Research. While Linux-based operating systems have had a presence in the mobile handset market for years, growth has been slow and steady until recently. However, recent announcements from Motorola, Vodafone, HTC, and Huawei, among others, all stating that Linux-based operating systems will figure in to their upcoming handset releases, clearly demonstrate that OEMs and operators are ready to embrace Linux software on a larger scale, according to IMS Research.

Last September, LWN pointed out the OpenBTS project, which is working toward the creation of a free GSM base station using GNU Radio and Asterisk. OpenBTS had just been demonstrated through the creation of a cellular network at Burning Man. More recently your editor, who had been looking in other directions, was surprised to learn that the OpenBTS developers are not allowed to tell anybody where to get the source from, despite the fact that it is available as free software. Intrigued, your editor decided to look into what is happening with OpenBTS.

Small, efficient devices such as the Acer Aspire One and Asus Eee PC are taking the battle for free software to a different front, bringing Linux to hordes of computer users who don't know or care about Linux. They just want something that works, and when they try it, they like it. This isn't just empty rhetoric: our neighbours across the road at Vista Mansions frequently pop over to ask questions about their Linux-powered Aspire One and borrow a cup of sugar. But the Aspire One's interface is aimed at newbies, and you're not a newbie: you're a Linux guru in the making, so let's see what we can fiddle with…

This guide explains how you can set up fully-virtualized guests (HVM) with Xen 3.2 on a Debian Lenny x86_64 host system. HVM stands for HardwareVirtualMachine; to set up such guests, you need a CPU that supports hardware virtualization (Intel VT or AMD-V). Hardware virtualization allows you to install unmodified guest systems (in contrast to paravirtualization where the guest kernel needs to be modified); that way you cannot only virtualize OpenSource operating systems like Linux and BSD, but also closed-source operating systems like Windows where you cannot modify the kernel.

Fedora 11 Alpha came out a month ago, 2 days later than the initial schedule, and it has recently entered its “Feature Freeze” state. Codenamed Leonidas, Fedora 11 is due to be released on May 25th and it includes a large number of new features (most of them have already been approved). I’ve been using Fedora for more than 5 years and I often run Rawhide (Fedora’s development branch) to preview some of the future improvements. I couldn’t have missed this Alpha release, so I installed it for testing (first, as a guest OS in VirtualBox and then on my laptop).

A mixed bag of jokes today. Both hilarious... unless you don't like them ;)