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It is also the first version of recent Ubuntu releases that will not have an alternate installer installation image, as most of the features from the alternate installer have now been incorporated into Ubiquity.

After exactly two years of neglect I released a new version of the Ubuntu remix with Romanian, Hungarian, German and English languages included by default. It is based on Ubuntu 12.04.1, and keeping in line with the traditional goals of the project, it targets Linux newbies who find some of the standard Ubuntu applications lacking or who are taken aback by anything too unfamiliar. It also targets lazy people who would otherwise change about the same things on a vanilla Ubuntu install. So it features the Classic GNOME 2 desktop, Chromium, VLC, Pidgin, Flash, multimedia codecs and the rar and p7zip archive format handlers.

It seems the crazies are back to invading the Linux kernel mailing list and/or have expanded their trolling cult. After it was proposed in August that Linux doesn't need x86-32 support and Linux doesn't need keyboard support, the latest proposal is to drop support for Ethernet, multi-monitor, multiple user accounts, and no more optical drive support...

Gnome 3.6 hasn’t even been released yet by the work towards to 3.8 is massive. This time I extracted the latest Gnome Calendar mockups from the experimental Gnome Git.

Always keep on mind that these are very early tentative designs and there is a good chance to change, postponed for next Gnome releases or even they might completely dropped.

I have a new Linux blog, one which will have articles I would have published at O'Reilly Broadcast (or O'Reilly News or Linux Dev Center) in the past. As most of you know, I wrote/blogged for O'Reilly about Linux from 2006 until May, 2012. O'Reilly's blog sites are still there but they've done away with Linux blogging. I've also written features for DistroWatch but my involvement in the development of a Linux distribution makes continuing there appear to be a conflict of interest.

I had the opportunity to test drive a friend's Asus (Google) Nexus 7, the latest entry into the tablet space. It has an attractive price point, a clear display and most of the tools that you would expect from a tablet. But despite this, there are some serious limitations that might have you think twice about adopting this device as your go to tablet.

Lately we’ve been treated to (or bombarded by) a slew of articles and blog posts proclaiming the failure and/or the death of Linux on the desktop. I could describe what I really think of these articles but my language would be a bit more colorful than would be appropriate. Suffice it to say it’s all bunk as far as I am concerned.

This week we look at why a SUSE OpenStack product is a good thing, the rise and fall of Flash and why Scrum Master and project manager are not the same.

Full disk encryption and LVM configuration in Ubuntu’s graphical installer showed that two very important features that were missing in Ubiquity, the installation program of Ubuntu Desktop, will finally be incorporated into the version that will ship in Ubuntu 12.10.

Continuing to advance as an open-source project is a game engine that's written from scratch with an aim of being compatible with the original Half-Life "Gold Source" engine. This GPL-licensed engine is already working with many original Valve games and mods. A Phoronix reader wrote in this morning to bring up Xash3D, which is self-described as a "Custom Gold Source Engine build from a scratch." The Xash3D engine isn't brand new but has been around for a while now and is continuing to mature -- it should already work for almost any existing single-player Half-Life mod without having any compatibility issues. The multi-player code to the Xash3D engine is also incomplete at the moment.

This guide explains how to set up mod_chroot with Apache2 on a Debian Squeeze system. With mod_chroot, you can run Apache2 in a secure chroot environment and make your server less vulnerable to break-in attempts that try to exploit vulnerabilities in Apache2 or your installed web applications.

Ubuntu 12.10 Quantal Quetzal is on its way, and the first beta of the distro has just been released for people to test

MongoDB is a very popular document-oriented, horizontally-scalable NoSQL datastore. With Spring Roo version 1.2, you can build Spring applications with MongoDB as data storage solutions. Investigate MongoDB and then build an enterprise Spring MongoDB application using Spring Roo.

The WordPress developers have released an update to their open source publishing platform that closes important security holes. Version 3.4.2 of WordPress addresses two privilege escalation vulnerabilities that could potentially be exploited by a malicious user to bypass certain security restrictions. WordPress is often a target for attackers and ensuring it is secure protects not only the published content but the readers of the content.

It's been a tough couple of months and in particular, the past three weeks. Let's take a break from the problems and just laugh for awhile. Maybe at these, maybe at others, and most probably at ourselves.

The thicket of lawsuits surrounding the mobile industry has grown to the point that it is hard for any individual action to stand out. If any case has managed to make itself visible in that crowd anyway, it is the battle between Apple and Samsung currently being fought in the US. The first stage of that battle has just been resolved, heavily in Apple's favor. It will be some time before this story truly reaches its end, but some of the more interesting implications for the industry, and for free software, can already be seen.

Back in May, we were one of the first to write about some people claiming to have figured out a new cut of steak, and trying to patent that cut. The story got a lot of attention in a lot of places, as many people (reasonably) think that patenting a cut of meat seems particularly crazy. The good folks over at Planet Money just recently decided to explore the question of meat cut patents. They talk to Tony Mata, the "inventor" of that new meat cut, dubbed the Las Vegas steak, but the... er... "meat" of the conversation actually involves talking to his mentor, Gene Gagliardi, the "inventor" of the Steak-Umm, KFC's popcorn chicken and, according to this video, Popeyes' "Rip'n Chick'n", which Gagliardi calls "Fing'r Pick'n Chick'n" and for which he holds US Patent 5,346,711 on a "Method of making an animal muscle strip product."

Definitely not directly FOSS related but of interest I think - Scott

When Stephanie Lenz in Pennsylvania put a video on YouTube of her 18-month-old son bopping to Prince’s song “Let’s Go Crazy” she did not expect a lawsuit. But four months and 28 views later, the musician’s recording company, Universal, howled that the 29-second “performance” infringed its copyright and demanded that YouTube take it down. That was in 2007. Since then computers, smartphones and the internet have made copyright law look even more obsolete. But the response so far has been not to update the laws but to widen their scope and stiffen the penalties. In January websites including Wikipedia briefly shut down in protest against tough anti-piracy laws promoted by the entertainment industry in America and elsewhere. Now the tide is turning. For many politicians, property rights for media moguls are taking second place to attempts to boost growth by making life easier for technology companies. Ordinary users like Ms Lenz are getting a look-in, too.

SmartSim was created using the Vala object-oriented programming language, the GTK+ and Cairo graphics libraries by then 16-year old sixth form student Ashley Newson from Oxford..

First, there was Google's Nexus 7, and now there's Amazon's Kindle Fire HD, the Android tablet has come of age and the iPad team should start worrying.