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SolusOS is an elegant Lightweight distribution that is geared towards new Linux users. It uses a nicely polished version of Gnome 2.30 and also includes PlayonLinux to run Windows apps

... isn't it about time that we recognize the patent system is really, really broken? Courtesy of the always awesome Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal (and my friend Tom who sent this over), I present to you, yet another example of "the patent system" being a punchline:

The popularity of the ITC among patent holders was bolstered by the 2006 Supreme Court decision in eBay v. MercExchange. When a patent holder wins an infringement lawsuit, it is sometimes awarded an injunction against continued use of the patent by the infringer, in addition to monetary damages. The threat of such an injunction gives the patent holder extra leverage that it can use to extract larger settlements. For example, shortly before the eBay decision, the patent troll NTP used the threat of an injunction to force smartphone maker Research in Motion to fork over $612.5 million. But the eBay decision made it harder for patent holders to obtain these injunctions, tilting the playing field a bit more toward defendants.

So patent holders looked for other remedies.

YoYo Games' popular 2D game engine GameMaker will soon have an option for exporting games to Ubuntu. Similar to what Unity 4.0 game engine is doing, developers will be able to export their games to Linux platform.

The Apache Software Foundation has announced the speaker lineup and schedule for its European conference which is taking place in Sinsheim, Germany. Attendees who register before 1 October can save up to €150

Kristian Høgsberg spoke this week at XDC2012 about Wayland and Weston. Here's a short recap plus some videos that include new demos of this promising project...

Mono-based SDK for iOS and Android Xamarin, the mobile app dev company founded by the creators of the open source Mono project, have partnered with Microsoft to bring support for Windows Azure Mobile Services to apps that are running on Android and iOS devices.…

Splitting it up to save time, headaches The Worldwide Web Consortium (W3C) says it's still on track to release the final HTML5 specification in 2014 – and to prove it, it's issued a tentative plan outlining the steps it will take to bring the web markup language to its next version and beyond.…

Version 2.2 of the WordPress for Android mobile app includes an all-new stats view and adds support for setting Featured Images in posts

The latest release of the GeeXboX multimedia live CD distribution allows users to watch live TV from DVB sources. It also supports Full HD video on additional hardware

Today I created a short video on Sabayon Linux 10 XFCE. Sabayon comes in many flavours of desktop managers. XFCE is probably one of the lightest, so I decided to look at it. I have to admit, I have always had issues with Gentoo, Sabayon is based on Gentoo and from what I have read helps Noobs like me come to grips with Gentoo. As far as Sabayon’s ‘Out of the Box’ theory it is basically sound as installation, although different from other distributions I have played with was flawless.

Despite public perception to the contrary, GNOME developers pay a great deal of attention to the opinions of users, senior GNOME developer Vincent Untz told iTWire.

Canonical, Ubuntu's parent company, is taking a new way to address the Windows 8 UEFI secure-boot problem.

This week we look at the benefits of hiring a hacker, a history of the microprocessor in pictures, and modern robots designed to do a job, but never rebel.

The chairs of the W3C's HTML Working Group have presented a plan to approve a stable HTML5 specification before the end of 2014. The plan proposes to formally define a stable set of features as HTML 5.0, but when the HTML Working Group will approve this plan is as yet unknown. Features for which no stable specification is available by then could be moved to an extended "HTML 5.1" set of features that could be completed by 2016.

We take a look at the steps needed to create a unified directory that you can use from any of your multi-boot installations

Speed is essential in multimedia, graphics and signal processing. Sometimes programmers resort to assembly language to get every last bit of speed out of their machines. GCC offers an intermediate between assembly and standard C that can get you more speed and processor features without having to go all the way to assembly language: compiler intrinsics. This article discusses GCC's compiler intrinsics, emphasizing vector processing on three platforms: X86 (using MMX, SSE and SSE2); Motorola, now Freescale (using Altivec); and ARM Cortex-A (using Neon). We conclude with some debugging tips and references.

Similarly to current versions of Mac OS X and Windows, Linux is now capable of a hybrid sleep state. The 3.6 kernel also provides improved random data and reduces the work load of EFI bootloaders.

Canonical, through Jon Melamut, announced on September 20th that they will plan to implement support for Secure Boot in the upcoming Ubuntu 12.10 (Quantal Quetzal) operating system.

I applaud the European Union for trying to persuade Microsoft Corporation to allow more competition in Windows 8. However, they are trying to solve the wrong problem. In The Linux Week in Review 45, I will give give my opinion as to what problem we should REALLY be trying to solve.