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I love working with the Ubuntu community. I love the opportunities, challenges and people that occupy it. Each day is filled with a diverse tapestry of challenges, be it growing new teams, refining governance, developing strategy, or simply chewing the fat with Ubuntu and upstream contributors from around the world. No day is ever the same. Something has been bothering me though recently. On my team we work on a huge range of different topics and ideas. We work closely with our community to identify areas of focus and scale, and we indulge in a raft of technical and social puzzles. Despite the hundreds of emails and hours of discussion, I have recently felt like something was missing. It was if we have overlooked something; the small detail in the painting that makes it all make sense.

In no less than two days I've read a flurry of articles pooh-poohing the Linux desktop as a veritable delusion and a fairy story -- something to tell young GTK+ coders before you tuck them in at night. It isn't the year of the Linux desktop; it's the year of the Linux catfight.

Long-time developer Manoj Srivastava has resigned as the secretary of the Debian GNU/Linux Project and is thinking of leaving the project altogether. In a message posted to one of the project mailing lists, Srivastava said he had taken the step of quitting the post of secretary due to the dissatisfaction over the options offered in a recent vote about the release of the next version of Debian, Lenny. The voting process ends on December 21.

After years of suing thousands of people for allegedly stealing music via the Internet, the recording industry is set to drop its legal assault as it searches for more effective ways to combat online music piracy. The decision represents an abrupt shift of strategy for the industry, which has opened legal proceedings against about 35,000 people since 2003. Critics say the legal offensive ultimately did little to stem the tide of illegally downloaded music. And it created a public-relations disaster for the industry, whose lawsuits targeted, among others, several single mothers, a dead person and a 13-year-old girl.

[Its my guess that the ISP's will be able to determine if the person doing the "illegal downloading" is actually alive or above the age of 12 before suing them. - Scott]

I love books. I read books, write books, and collect books. After years of too-small homes I finally have a house big enough to hold all my books. Yes, the bookworm's dream come true, a whole room dedicated to a book library. It's not a huge room, just a small bedroom, but it holds all of my books and there is room for future acquisitions. It even has stylish pine bookcases that I built myself. Straight and true, though I did skimp on the sanding, which makes splinters a bit of a problem. But it's a small price to pay for the luxury of having all of my books on actual shelves, and organized so I can find what I want.

The latest version of Novell’s Linux distro, openSUSE 11.1, has been released, with 230 new features, improvements to YaST, major updates to GNOME, KDE, OpenOffice.org, a new license and plenty more.

Webmin is a web-based system for Unix, Linux, OpenSolaris, and recently added Windows based Operating Systems that allow you to take full control of your server through a popular control panel and web-interface. What Webmin does is it allows you to simplify the managing course of action with a Unix and/or Linux system. You can manually edit and configure files as well as run commands to create/delete accounts, set up web servers, or manage email forwarding. You’re able to complete all of these tasks through a trouble-free web interface specifically designed for the user.

A few more pictures that speak several thousand words ;) The holidays are looming larger every day now and, I don't know about you, but it's giving me a migraine. Lots of stress and craziness, mostly surrounding who's getting what for whom and constantly wondering if they're overdoing it or not doing enough.

Eric Geier show how, with Google's Picasa, you can create online photo albums, touch-up and fix photos, make movies, and create gift CDs or DVDs without having to be an ace graphical artist guru.

Bit9, self-professed leader in enterprise application whitelisting, recently included Mozilla's Firefox browser among "the Dirty Dozen" applications with critical security vulnerabilities. Mozilla's security expert Jonathan Nightingale disputes that critique.

The success of open source software is now being driven by its rapid commercialization by the likes of IBM and Microsoft, and not simply its appeal to evangelistic developers, a new report has suggested.

Let me first say that I am a believer in the possibilities that exist for laptops in learning, and I've followed OLPC as much as my free time will allow. OLPC presents itself as a learning company rather than a laptop company. Calls to constructionism, collaboration, and children as "learning by doing" are pervasive in the website. There's this vision of how the laptop can change learning and schooling and give the our children the right tools to thrive:

As a regular browser of the Firefox Add-ons site, I'm troubled by the apparent proliferation of proprietary extensions in the last year. Maybe I've simply exhausted the free-licensed extensions that interest me, but recently every interesting-looking extension seems to be a proprietary one -- especially in the recommended list. Nothing, of course, in the Mozilla privacy or legal notice prohibits proprietary extensions simply because they are proprietary, but I find them not only contrary to the spirit of free and open source software (FOSS), but, often, annoying attempts to entangle me in some impossible startup.

What is it about the holiday season? It throws a spotlight on the best -- and worst -- aspects of human nature. It holds true in the open source world. NextStep, a hardware recycling and refurbishing organization in Eugene, Oregon, was burglarized earlier this week. Hardest hit was the organization's Ubuntu Laptop Program. NextStep provides computers, technology and job skills training to Lane County Oregon's under-served residents, and its Ubuntu Laptop Program is a major source of funding for these endeavors.

With Sun Microsystems having abandoned its Project Woodstock Web application development effort, Icesoft Technologies is picking up the slack. The Woodstock project, discontinued last month, featured a group of user interface components for developing with JavaServer Faces and AJAX. But citing resource constraints during tough economic times, Sun eliminated the project. Instead, Icesoft will provide its Icefaces software for users to move forward.

Toshiba will OEM their laptop line with OpenSolaris beginning in early 2009. This is a big win for OpenSolaris, and big win for Open Source, given the increasing number of Linux devices coming online next year.

When I heard U.S. president-elect Barack Obama make his "lipstick on a pig" remark while running as a candidate back in September, it got me thinking about language, and how it can be used to deceive as easily as to explain. While listening to an elaborate theory full of jargon, have you ever felt it seemed completely out of touch with the real world?

I was reading this comment on a story submitted here on FSDaily and started thinking that life's all about balancing freedoms. We balance freedoms (sacrifice one freedom for another) everyday. We sacrifice the freedom to do whatever we want to live in a society where laws keep us safe. And we'd rather be safe than do the things that are illegal (well most of us anyway). So we sacrifice a freedom we wouldn't exercise (to commit crimes) for ones we do want to exercise (to live without being the victim of crime).

MySQL 5.1 is generally available for production use. One of the key features of MySQL 5.1 is partitioning. This how to shows how to install and configure Zmanda Recovery Manager for MySQL (ZRM) 2.1 to perform backup and recovery of MySQL partitioned tables.

The Internet is infrastructure. This should be plain, but it's not. The reason is that neither the Net nor infrastructure are well-understood, even though both could hardly be more widely used.