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Picasa is a photo organizing and editing tool from Google that does most of what most people need to do with their digital pictures. Now Picasa, previously a Windows-only program, has binaries available for most popular GNU/Linux distributions. The Linux version of Picasa is still a beta release, but it's ready to handle photo storage, organizing, and light photo editing on your Linux computer.

DistroWatch states - The Ubuntu team is proud to announce the Release Candidate for version 6.06 LTS of Ubuntu, Kubuntu and Edubuntu - codenamed 'Dapper Drake'. The Release Candidates includes installable live Desktop CDs, server images, alternate text-mode installation CDs and an upgrade wizard for users of the current stable release. We consider this release candidate complete, stable and suitable for testing by any user. OSDir has some sweet shots of both Ubuntu 6.06 RC and Kubuntu 6.06 RC.

It appears that the European Commission has had a sudden change of heart on the issue of software patents. In its response (Microsoft Word document) yesterday to a question posed by a Polish European Parliament member, the EC said that the European Patent Office would not grant any more software patents and that any patents that have already been granted may now be challenged and overturned in court.

Brussels, 24 May 2006. In a reply to a question from Polish MEP and inventor Adam Gierek, the European Commission has confirmed that the European Patent Office's (EPO) case law is not binding for member states, nor (under the proposed Community Patent regulation) for the European Court of Justice (ECJ). For the first time, the Commission has also clearly stated that computer programs are not patentable subject matter, without hiding behind the infamous "as such" cop-out.

A unique closed-source network monitoring product called Splunk is helping the Oregon State University Open Source Lab (OSUOSL) further its mission to "accelerate the adoption of open source software across the globe."

While Big News Media frets that the NSA may be sifting through cell phone chatter to find terrorists, the VA lets crooks steal Social Security Numbers by the millions. As if that's not bad enough, local officials across the nation have become ID-thief enablers by posting individuals' Social Security Numbers on their websites. Email Battles tells you why locals do it, and what you need to do to protect your own identity from local officials' incompetence.

Linux will become the dominant operating system (OS) for Oracle (Nasdaq: ORCL) Latest News about Oracle databases by 2007, displacing Solaris, according to a recent survey from the Independent Oracle Users Group (IOUC) -- but just by a smidge.

Red Hat | Europe, Middle East, Africa Training News | May 2006

You can speed up downloads or web page access time with Apache mod_deflate module. The mod_deflate module provides the DEFLATE output filter that allows output from your server to be compressed before being sent to the client over the network. This decreases the amount of time and data transmitted over the network, resulting in faster web experience or downloads for visitors.

Mozilla Corporation CEO Mitchell Baker readily admitted to silicon.com that the enterprise is "not our sweet spot" but said the organisation offers an enterprise customisation kit created by an IBM developer and said it's interested in working with partners to address the needs of corporate IT.

We're so hosted, dude

Salesforce.com's chief executive Marc Benioff has encouraged businesses to adopt hosted email and collaboration from Google and dump Microsoft.

Following its recent Mainz, Germany meeting, the Portland project has now decided on its next moves. Portland, an ad hoc group of commercial and community Linux desktop developers, aims to create a common set of interfaces and tools to allow all applications to easily integrate with the Linux desktop.

ATI has just released a new proprietary Linux driver for both x86 and x86-64 architectures. Interesting features and fixes? Support for X.org 7.0+, toggling between console and X no longer hangs, and you can run more than one X server at a time.

The software world is becoming more distributed every day. The rise of multi-core processors, clusters, and grids means thinking about parallel program execution. Before you plan world domination though parallel computing, you may want to learn some of the basics rules of the game.

I fear Debian could be left with mostly developers who are happily motivated with just packaging another piece of software. While there's nothing wrong with feeling that way and working on that basis, we don't want to lose the people who want to work on things that cut across sets of packages, like speeding up the boot time, improving the installation experience, making the distribution attractive for speakers of $language, making sure Debian supports as much hardware as best it can, porting Debian to interesting new architectures, integrating Xen and SE Linux with Debian, making a useful default desktop install, etc. [Ugliest blog evar, but makes some interesting points]

Learn to efficiently initialize memory on Power Architecture systems. Software Developer Carlos Cavanna compares simple loops clearing one bit at a time to more elaborate algorithms, including the dcbz instruction to zero whole cache lines at a time. The article concludes with some rough performance numbers to help you tune your own applications.

As Microsoft developers gathered in Seattle to hear Bill Gates's keynote speech on the future of Microsoft and the coming release of its updated operating system Vista, protesters wearing bright yellow Hazmat suits swarmed the entrance of the city's convention center, delivering an unsettling message to the corporation: your product is defective and hazardous to users.

Our community has been abuzz with the rumor that Sun has made its implementation Java free software (or "open source"). Community leaders even publicly thanked Sun for its contribution. What is Sun's new contribution to the FLOSS community?

Further educating event attendees, CP-TA, OSDL and SA Forum are joining PICMG and SCOPE Alliance on Monday, June 5 at 2 p.m. for an industry panel discussion. Held in the CP-TA / OSDL / SA Forum booth #13048, leaders from these organizations will explain how delivering on the promise of interoperable open standards-based building blocks will change the telecom industry.

This Week, From LWN - 25-May-06

One of the comments posted on last week's article about the Java license change asked: how can Debian distribute Sun's Java under the new license?
[...]
Since Debian does very few things without enduring a public brawl first, the addition of Java without discussion raised some eyebrows.

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