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This guide shows how to install the Songbird media player (0.3 Developer Pre-Release) on an Ubuntu 7.10 (Gutsy Gibbon) desktop. Songbird is a free software audio player with media database capabilities written using XUL and VLC, with an interface similar to Apple's iTunes. From the Songbird web site: "Songbird is a desktop media player mashed-up with the Web. Songbird is committed to playing the music you want, from the sites you want, on the devices you want, challenging the conventions of discovery, purchase, consumption and organization of music on the Internet."

This past Friday we had delivered benchmarks comparing the performance of the open-source Radeon driver against the new closed-source fglrx driver from AMD. These benchmarks had just looked at the AIGLX performance when using Compiz on an Ubuntu 7.10 desktop. In all of the benchmarks except one, the fglrx driver had carried a staggering lead over the open-source competition. In addition to these Compiz benchmarks, on the same system we had also ran some additional benchmarks to see for gaming and 2D rendering how the two ATI Linux drivers compare.

How many Linux users does the BBC website get, out of the 17 million who visit? You would not think that was too difficult a question for the director of technology at the BBC to answer, would you?

In a recent article on Desktoplinux.com, Kevin Carmony, former CEO of Linspire, reported that he has switched to Ubuntu. In the same article he also said that as Linux becomes more mainstream there would be a consolidation of Linux on the desktop. By this, I presume he meant that only a few of the big Linux distributors would be vying for the desktop space through OEM deals. This makes a lot of sense as consumers would be confused by the offering of literally hundreds of distros on various models of computers. But it also raises questions about what consolidation would mean to Linux in the future.

[An excellent article submitted to LXer by one of our readers - Scott]

The recent decision by the Open Document Foundation to substitute the World Wide Web Consortium's Compound Document Format in place of the format it was set up to promote, the Open Document Format, has sparked a contentious debate over what shape the format should take. Open document advocates are debating fundamental questions about whether there should be a single document format or multiple formats that interoperate, and the relative importance of format and applications.

Looking Glass is another 3D Windows manager for Linux, it comes from SUN and it is based on Java, here is how to install it on Debian Etch, the same apply for Ubuntu.

We're creating an OS ecosystem that is complete. We come with all the software you need to browse the web, email, instant message... play movies, music, and connect to iPods... create and edit documents, spreadsheets, presentations, databases, images... out of the box. Plug and play! We recommend Google for just about everything... Gmail, Gtalk, Calendar, Maps, Docs and Spreadsheets, and more. We'd like to welcome you to the idea that Google already is your "operating system."

Seven Wonders of the Linux World, there should be more than seven, but to keep it short, here are only seven, maybe not the most important for some people.

Earlier this week Everex launched the gPC TC2502, which is a sub-$200 PC sold at a major US retailer, but what makes this unique is that it runs the gOS. The gOS (GreenOS) is designed to be a conceptual Google Operating System that is based upon Ubuntu 7.10 Gutsy Gibbon. Though this is not the conventional GNOME desktop environment but an Enlightenment E17 desktop is used that is heavily modified and reflects a green Google theme. The gOS provides easy access to Google services such as YouTube, Google Product Search, Google Calendar, and Google Maps. Also a click away are other web services such as Wikipedia and Facebook.

This is a humorous article. Here are many tips for you to become a true hacker.
For those who want to understand the c0wb0y spirit.

"The problem with swap over network is the generic swap problem: needing memory to free memory. Normally this is solved using mempools, as can be seen in the BIO layer," explained Peter Zijlstra. "Swap over network has the problem that the network subsystem does not use fixed sized allocations, but heavily relies on kmalloc(). This makes mempools unusable."

The Ubuntu Studio team is proud to announce its sophomore release: Ubuntu Studio 7.10. With this release Ubuntu Studio offers a pre-made selection of packages, targeted at audio, video and graphics users. Ubuntu Studio greatly simplifies the creation of Linux-based multimedia workstations.

Twice in recent weeks open source projects have surprised me with their lack of openness. In both cases, developers acted or spoke out in such a way as to intentionally push other developers away from their work.

I love the whole idea behind BSD. Supposedly, unlike Linux, there are real adults working in a more rational, less chaotic manner on the various distros (including FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD and the FreeBSD offshoots PC-BSD and DesktopBSD). But when it comes to actually trying to install and run BSD, I've hit plenty of roadblocks.

Fedora 8 Release Candidate 3 has been released on the torrent site. Both DVD and Live images have been provided.

Developing applications that take advantage of multi-core capabilities is still complex and challenging. Model-Driven Development Tool for Parallel Applications helps with these difficulties. With it, you can extend UML modeling that generates parallel code, and supports concurrent patterns for multi-core environments.

We are happy to announce Sabayon Linux 1.1 Professional Edition. Distribution updates: Live boot is now 3 times faster thanks to our improved OpenGL configuration tool; updated KDE to 3.5.7, WINE to 0.9.47; added Nopaste; kernel 2.6.23.1 with the addition of rt2x00 tree patches for more wireless drivers support and latest ACPI patches for support on Fujitsu laptops; changed Sabayon artwork to match latest art changes in Sabayon style;

A few days ago I was going to write up how French Linux distributor Mandriva had signed up a deal to deliver 17,000 Intel-powered Classmate PCs with a customized version of Mandriva Linux 2007, built on Mandriva Flash technology, to Nigerian schoolchildren. It wasn't a big deal, but it was still one more small step forward for Linux desktops.

I’ve thought about it for quite a time now. Should I write up a report on Systems? What happened? And was that the usual and to-be-expected stuff? How was it after all? No, I don’t have pictures - I never even thought of bringing a camera. But on Thursday, we had a party, mostly organized by Simon (thanks!), and all in all Systems 2007 was a great experience.

Sun Microsystems is claiming its first major milestone in Project Indiana, with the release of an OpenSolaris developer preview binary distribution. The OpenSolaris Developer Preview features the core operating system, Gnome desktop and graphical installer contained on a Slim Install Live CD for x86. The SPARC edition is still in the pipeline.