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When Nicholas Negroponte, the founder of the One Laptop Per Child project, said two months ago that the project needed to be managed "more like Microsoft" he was speaking nothing but the truth. The OLPC was set up, initially, to provide laptops as educational tools to children in developing countries. But the shine has all gone from the project now, due to poor take-up, an unseemly row with Intel and infighting that has led to top people quitting. There is also a patent infringement lawsuit over the keyboard.

Hardy Hero, a new version of Ubuntu, was announced a little while ago, and the features for this release of Ubuntu are actually rather compelling to me. Because Gutsy only wowed me on two levels - a better wireless stack and the inclusion of tracker by default, here’s some of what I would like to see with Heron.

Ok, so I kinda liked the latter iterations of the Graywolf look for Amarok 2. Apparently, not many others did though. So Lee Olson ( our main artist at the moment ) and I have been thinking of alternatives for a while. And It would seem we have finally come up with something that has managed to get most of the Amarok team excited. It is still in the initial phase and a lot of work is needed still, but so far it is already a huge improvements to the overall look of Amarok 2, at leasts in my humble opinion. This new look is much more clean, and actually a lot closer to our initial idea of what Amarok 2 should look like.

Discover Distributed Image Management for Linux Clusters, a scalable image management tool that allows blades to run a Linux distribution over the network without a local disk. Furthermore, learn how this tool can be used for fast incremental maintenance of images.

As we discussed earlier in our RSS reader options for Linux article, this platform also has its fair share of solutions for those of us who are looking to subscribe to podcasts as well.

The attacking left forward fakes his body to the left as he gracefully slides to the right around his opponent. Dribbling carefully into position, he sizes up the Australian goalie, who, he recalls, tends to play a little aggressively to one side, especially in that last match against Italy. An opposing fullback closes in and the forward ducks the move, falling back slightly and eyeing the goalie’s stance. Finally he sees his chance as the goalie shifts his weight – the forward takes the shot – he scores! The world championship is won by the challengers! The crowd goes wild…the photographers’ bulbs flash…and the forward returns to the locker room, to find an electrical outlet into which he can plug himself to recharge his power cells.

Yep, hugs and kisses (XOXO) to the OLPC's XO-2 laptop, which was unveiled today by Nicolas Negroponte during the One Laptop Per Child Foundation’s day-long media event at the MIT Media Lab. Not much detail was given regarding the new ULCPC's specs, but the new system has two touch-sensitive displays and no hard keyboard.

Linux is in our computers, our phones, our Wi-Fi equipment, and our TiVos -- why not our cars? Intel Corp. and Wind River have been working with both the embedded and automotive industries to advance in-vehicle infotainment (IVI) with open, Linux-based, standards-based, interoperable hardware and software called Open Infotainment Platforms (OIP).

There was a time when I thought the Linux desktop was going to take a market share at least equal to Apple’s. Maybe even 5% or 10% of the total desktop market. I had high hopes that the One Laptop Per Child Initiative would put Linux laptops in the hands of impressionable young minds who would never have the chance to become dependent on Windows. Though that plan has fallen through the cracks. I don’t hate Microsoft Windows I just don’t have a desire to see any operating system dominate the market in such a way that the lack of competition stifles innovation and forces users into an endless upgrade cycle, offering progressively smaller incremental value.

Fyre is an open source application which creates images and animations based on histograms of chaotic functions. Fyre works in Linux and Windows, its interface is based on GTK libraries. The article at Free Your Media blog gives some tips on using Fyre.

A Hong Kong-based manufacturer is shipping a Linux-based ultra-mini PC (UMPC) laptop for only $250 ($180 in volume), which appears to give it the lowest price yet for a Linux laptop. Bestlink's Alpha 400 offers a 400MHz CPU and a 7-inch, truecolor display.

The free software RAW photo converter Rawstudio released version 1.0 in April, marking the culmination of two years of work. This release carries on the Rawstudio tradition of providing a lightweight, dependable tool for photographers. Source code tarballs and binaries are available through the project's Web site. As of press time, pre-built packages are up for OpenSUSE and Ubuntu. In addition, Ubuntu users can access the 1.0 release and daily builds through Rawstudio's APT repository.

The last week Toledo hosted the biennial9th European Congress on Telepathology and 3rd International Congress on Virtual Microscopy, thanks to the excellent organization of Marcial Garcia Rojo (Hospital General de Ciudad Real, Spain), Gloria Bueno García (University of Castilla-La Mancha, Spain) and Jose Sagristan and colleagues (Health Care Service of Castilla-La Mancha, SESCAM, Spain).

In a recent post on his blog, Mark Shuttleworth, CEO at Canonical, has talked about synchronicity between Long Term Support releases from different Linux distributions. One of the arguments he brought to support this idea was that developers could focus more on the important role of component selection, integration, testing and patch management, instead of on the core component feature development.

Netflix and Roku today jointly announced a tiny set-top box (STB) said to offer unlimited streaming of DVDs and TV episodes on Netflix members’ TVs. The $100 “Netflix Player by Roku” is rumored to run a customized version of Linux along with robust DRM technology.

War§ow is an FPS computer game for Linux, aimed at network gaming; it is characterized by specific graphics and an emphasis on tricks and good fun. PolishLinux.org has a review with screenshots.

Despite the rather surprising news that Microsoft won't have a comprehensive open source strategy until 2015, there's increasing evidence that it has at least established its shorter-term tactic: to head off the growing use of GNU/Linux. That might seem an obvious thing to do, but it's different from earlier attempts to paint *all* of open source as hopeless for enterprise use. Instead, Microsoft is adopting a “divide and conquer” approach, whereby it sends out soothing messages to open source application projects – including much billing and cooing in an attempt to encourage hackers to make their code work better on Windows – all the while putting in the boot where GNU/Linux is concerned.

I've written this guide with non-geeks in mind. A year ago I always did installations for my friends. With recent advancements in Ubuntu Linux, this is no longer necessary. This guide assumes you are currently running Windows, and want to have both Windows and Linux on the same machine. Simply view the following screen shot gallery in order, following the instructions as you go. Do that, and a few mouse clicks and about an hour later you'll be the proud owner of a computer running Linux!

Tulip a framework that allows you to create, visualize, manipulate, and export large graphs. Tulip can import graphs from the popular Graphviz package and allows you to export a graph visualization in a number of bitmap image formats as well as SVG and EPS for eventual inclusion into a PDF file. Packages for Tulip are available for Ubuntu Hardy and for openSUSE as a 1-Click Install. There are no packages of Tulip in the standard Fedora repositories, but there are binary RPMs offered on the Tulip download page. In this article I'll install version 3.0.0 from source on a Fedora 8 64-bit machine.

Mark Tolliver, CEO of the source code audit company Palamida, talks about how painful personal experiences led to its creation, the kind of surprises Palamida *always* finds in people's code, and why incorporating open source code in projects will get easier for companies.