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Google's Android OS has been pretty well received thus far, and the presence of the Market, where users can download applications, has fared pretty well except it has missed one thing: paid-for apps. While it might sound like a bad thing that users will have to start paying for applications, the incentive for developers (ie cash) means that the whole experience should now get a little better.

Like many of you, I picked up a new TV over the holidays. Imagine my surprise when I was flipping through the instruction manual and found the GPL V2.0 and GPL V2.1 licenses in the appendix. Samsung seems to be using one or more pieces of GPL'd code inside of its Series 5 LCD TVs. I would have liked to know that the TV I was buying was using Free/open source software. All things equal, I would have purchased the TV using "FOSS Inside" vs. a similar TV not using "FOSS Inside". But I'm not representative of the consumer population. Would my wife, friends or parents make the same choice based on an "FOSS Inside" logo on a consumer electronic device? Likely not; well, not initially at least.

Bless Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols for his optimism. Writing for Computerworld, Vaughan-Nichols suggests that we don't need to wait for the Year of the Linux Desktop, because we've already had it. Somehow, I missed that. Vaughan-Nichols points to HP shipping Linux, Dell shipping Linux, etc., but come on: a trickle of retail activity does not a "Year of the Linux Desktop" make.

The Debian developers have decided to release the upcoming Debian 5 (Lenny) with proprietary firmware files to expedite the completion of the Linux distributions next release. The vote itself had several options for dealing with proprietary firmware, from a complete elimination of it, even if it meant more delays for Lenny, to an explicit waiver of the source code requirement for firmware files. The winning option was "assume blobs comply with the GPL unless proven otherwise", a principle which declares proprietary firmware as undesirable, but allows for the earlier release of Debian 5 to take priority over the removal of questionable firmware.

Google is planning to use Android for any device — not just the mobile phones. Don't be surprised if netbooks will come pre-installed with Google's Linux OS.

Nothing can beat having a great Linux distro installed on a super-fast hard drive, with all your favourite apps configured just how you like them and all your files at your fingertips. But this has one major drawback: perfect as your setup is, it's also just one machine, and sooner or later you'll be forced to leave that computer behind and use something else. Something that might run Windows. Something that might not even have Firefox. Because no one likes being parted from their data for too long, we present a smarter option: store it all on a USB flash drive.

The Compiz project, which makes a free compositing window manager, suffers from a lack of participants, direction and leadership, at least according to developer Kristian Lyngstol.

The past year brought some exciting advancements for the Linux operating system and open source software. Open technology continues to become more pervasive and the Linux kernel is now widely used in a multitude of mainstream products ranging from set-top boxes to mobile phones. With 2008 coming to a close, we wanted to take a minute to look at some events of significance to the open source software community.

It seems like a bit of a mystery how open source software ever sees the light of day. The idea of a large number of people working for glory and the greater good rather than recompense seems too idealistic to be true. In the early days this is exactly what happened, but now commercial companies have arisen, or switched over to open source, to act as the marketing arm of these communities. There are now a large number of paid workers at Red Hat, Novell, Ingres and other open source businesses and these corporations are beginning to act in ways that mirror their closed source counterparts.

There are 10 sorts of distributions in the world. Those that have specific releases, where it is better to reformat and reload with each new release and rolling distributions. Even still the specific release distributions can, in some cases, be upgraded to the newest release when it becomes available but this does not always work. The biggest advantage (or disadvantage depending on your viewpoint) is that stable (sic) versions of programs are chosen for that particular distribution release and are maintained throughout the life of that released distribution.

I just ordered my first computer yesterday: 4GB RAM, a 250 GB SATA 3gb/s hard drive, a 2.53GHz Core 2 Duo processor, a Nvidia 9800 graphics card, and a comfortable 20? monitor. But while these were all expensive (especially the video card), none of them compared to one item on the list: Windows. That’s the hope that Linux companies must look forward to.

Writers at VentureBeat decided to test the idea that Android would make an ideal operating system for netbooks by porting the, Google developed, open source operating system to their Asus EEE PC1000H. Using information from the Android Porting Google group, and encouraged by the news that a Google developer had ported Android to an EEE PC701, the writers set about the porting work and managed to get it up and running after a number of hours work.

This laptop belongs to a good friend and she loved it when I told her that we can give a new life to her laptop using GNU/Linux. This is an Toshiba Satellite Sro 435CDS built around 12 years ago. Specs? Pentium 120, 32 MB ram, 4 GB Hard. Yes this laptop has been upgrade a few years ago to highest supported specs.

The Boston Globe has an article on the difficulties President Obama will face with spending $50 Billion in Health IT: "As Barack Obama prepares to spend billions on health information technology as part of his plan to revive the US economy, some specialists are warning against investing too heavily in existing electronic record keeping systems...If America's physician practices suddenly rushed to install the systems of their choice, it would only dramatically intensify the [tower of] Babel that already exists," wrote David Kibbe, a senior adviser to the academy and a longtime proponent of health information technology, and Bruce Klepper, a healthcare market analyst..."

Last quarter AMD introduced their "Shanghai" Opteron processors that join the ranks of Intel's Harpertown Xeon CPUs that are 45nm quad-core server/workstation parts. Initial reviews of these new AMD Opteron processors have been very positive, but how do these chips perform with Linux? In this article we have our hands on a few of the fastest Shanghais, the AMD Opteron 2384 clocked at 2.7GHz, as we see how well they compare to the older "Barcelona" Opteron processors.

Steven Edwards of the Bordeaux Technology Group released Bordeaux 1.6 for FreeBSD and PC-BSD today. Bordeaux 1.6 comes with added support for Google's Chrome Web Browser, Google Earth, Google Picasa. Additionally, Cellar support has improved; you can now delete and install into an existing Cellar.

The Southern California Linux Expo opened registration for its 2009 event on December 30th. The event will take place February 20-22nd, 2009, in Los Angeles, California. The SCaLE organizers have filled the available speaker tracks, and this year's events include co-hosted mini-conferences, such as the Women in Open Source Conference (a continuation of last year's discussions to encourage women of all ages to become involved in FOSS), and the Open Source Software in Education Conference (focusing on FOSS in the K-12 setting).

The last day of the four-day 25C3 congress in Berlin ended with an edge of suspense. In keeping with the theme of the congress, speakers had "nothing to hide" about well-known and new vulnerabilities in two of the most important Internet security protocols, SSH and SSL.

Using Truecrypt you can create an encrypted share for Samba. This is a scenario where you have Windows users who need to log into an encrypted directory that is mounted on a Linux Samba share. Of course you can also create encrypted volumes for Linux users.

With the number of netbooks on the market continuing to increase each month and more of these mobile devices switching to solid-state drives for their reliability, extended battery life, and faster performance, SSDs are becoming quite common and finding themselves meeting many Linux hosts. How though does the real-world performance differ between hard disk drives and solid-state drives on Linux? We have run several tests atop Ubuntu on a Samsung netbook with a HDD and SSD. In addition, we have also looked at the encryption performance using both types of drives.