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Bruce Byfield reports that Linus Torvalds may have switched too soon from the KDE 4 desktop because of usability problems. Less than a week after he made his off-hand comments, KDE 4.2 has been released, adding many of the customization settings that Torvalds and others complained were lacking in the KDE 4 series.

A great deal is being made of the fact that Linux creator Linus Torvalds has switched from using the KDE desktop to using GNOME, something he did many months ago, and something he mentioned in passing during an interview last month. Microsoft TechNetWhat New in Administration and Management with Office Communications Server 2007 R2 The latest person apparently trying to cash in on the seemingly eternal mine-is-better-than-yours angle of the two desktop environments is the usually sober Glynn Moody, with the opinion that Torvalds may have switched too soon, before KDE 4 became more usable and revealed why it is a much better environment than GNOME.

The Linux blogs were feeling the love a bit early this week, perhaps in preparation for Valentine's Day. Much of the discussion centered on how to support those who are new to the Linux experience, and how to help them break out of the "Windows mindset."

Two Microsoft Business Solutions veterans have joined Openbravo, a fast-growing provider of open source enterprise resource planning (ERP) and point of sale (POS) software. The moves signal growing momentum for business-centric open source applications. Here's the scoop from The VAR Guy.

Landon Fuller has released a beta of Plausible CrashReporter (plcrashreporter), for the iPhone to simplify the process of getting crash reports from users. Currently, to get a crash report, a developer has to ask the user to sync their iPhone, look on the hard disk for the correct crash log and then get the user to send it to them. With Fuller's solution, an in process signal handler catches the crash and writes a crash report. When the application is run again, it can check for a crash report and submit the report via a HTTP server, an email, or store it locally.

This guide shows how you can create USB startup disks (on your USB flash drive) from various Linux distributions with UNetbootin. This is useful if you want to install a Linux distribution on a computer that has no CD/DVD drive.

When I first heard about the project of porting KDE on windows I was very skeptical of the reason behind it but not so much of the viability of such a project since Trolltech decided to release the Qt 4 license under GPL for the windows version. KDE on windows is an audacious project aimed at porting all KDE applications on MS Windows natively. KDE also has a similar project for Mac OSX.

Much has been written about how Linux is an optimal OS for a lightweight netbook. And netbooks themselves are on a tear: ABI Research is projecting that 35 million will be shipped in 2009, and estimates that number to increase to a stunning 139 million by 2013—not bad for a category of PC that no one heard of 18 months ago. But some buyers of Linux netbooks are running into trouble. MSI’s recent return rates – four times that of Windows XP models – and the recent controversial story of a woman who couldn’t do required classwork because she couldn’t run required software on her Linux netbook indicate that, at the very least, there’s a learning curve for the average user.

The Midnight Commander file manager developers have restarted work on the, once quite popular, file manager for the Linux/Unix console. Midnight Commander was inspired by the famous Norton Commander for DOS. In recent years, there had been no development at all, but now a "Bugfix Release" 4.6.2 has been made available. The new release, as the tag suggests, contains no new features.

The Fellowship of the Free Software Foundation Europe is proud to announce its latest initiative: pdfreaders.org, a site providing information about PDF with links to Free Software PDF readers for all major operating systems.

Since it's nigh on impossible to produce accurate figures of operating system usage, we have to make do with figures that provide a rough estimate, at best. One such set of statistics are the figures from Net Applications, which tracks the 160 monthly visitors to its hosted websites. The latest figures from January 2009 have been published, and they show that the rise of Mac OS X continues, as well as that of the iPhone and iPod Touch. Unsurprisingly, Windows 7 did quite well too.

Obama's inauguration must have brought out the optimist in tech journalists. In the last week, Ron Miller and Charles Babcock have written to implore Microsoft to open source Windows. While inspired and with some solid reasoning, I don't think it's going to happen anytime soon. Here's why. As much as I believe in open source, I don't think it's realistic to expect Microsoft to change course so quickly or drastically, even though Vista has been a pretty big mess for the company. (I would, however, be happy to be proved wrong on this front.)

Debian developers are planning to release their latest OS offering - called Lenny - on February 14. Debian developers are planning to release Lenny, the latest version of the operating system, on February 14. The team issued a second release candidate

As Linux personalities go, there is nobody more famous than Linus Torvalds, the man who started it all by developing the Linux kernel in 1991; read on for our exclusive interview with the chief architect of the most important part of your Linux distribution. In the news section, Fedora gets set to include KDE 4.2 in current and previous releases, Debian developers announce the imminent release of version 5.0 "Lenny", OpenSolaris focuses on improvements to compete with Linux, Keir Thomas releases his Ubuntu Pocket Guide and Reference book as a free download, netbook distribution Easy Peasy publishes a feature list of the upcoming version 2.0, and the Intel-sponsored Moblin project releases a new alpha build of its operating system for mobile devices. Finally, we are pleased to announce that the recipient of the DistroWatch.com January 2009 donation is the Openbox project.

LXer Feature: 01-Feb-2009

My apologies for the return to the old format. With the big game yesterday I pretty much forgot to put this up.

A Wiki engine is a type of collaborative software that runs a wiki system. This facilitates web pages being created and edited using a web browser. This type of software is usually implemented as an application server that runs on one or more web servers.

It's been discussed to distraction...whether advertising Linux would do any good or not. Well, we've posted some professionally-done audio files for you to work with. Cut them, splice them, add your own input and music or get inspired and create a new one from scratch. The Linux Community is reaching a tipping point of it's own. When that happens, the true talent comes to the forefront...as you will see here.

Sun Microsystems CEO Jonathan Schwartz talks about the economy, disruptive technologies and necessity as the mother of invention. Jonathan thinks that the economic downturn and the Wall Street meltdown will make IT managers more open to change than they have ever been before. And that is going to benefit Sun and its open-source strategy, contends Schwartz, who is also the company's president and a high-profile blogger.

Following the plan outlined in the previous release update, we are now in deep freeze, which means that we'll only be migrating to testing packages that fix RC bugs. The weekend of February 14th is going to be our tentative target for release. We've checked with all the involved teams (which are many!), and the date works for all of them. The intention is only to lift that date if something really critical pops up that is not possible to handle as an errata, or if we end up technically unable to release that weekend (eg., a needed machine crashes). Every other fix that doesn't make it in time will be r1 material. Please be sure to contact us about the RC fixes you'd like included in the point release!

Introduced in Windows Vista Service Pack 1 and then last week as a Windows XP update was exFAT. exFAT, or the Extended File Allocation Table, is Microsoft's new file-system for use on mobile devices like large USB flash drives. exFAT addresses the file-size and partition size limitations of Microsoft's FAT32 file-system and brings other improvements to the table as well, albeit it's proprietary. No read or write support for exFAT has yet to enter the mainline Linux kernel, but a set of read-only patches have emerged.