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The North American LinuxCon has only just kicked off today, but there’s already been some news out of the show

In every new release, Ubuntu loses something from upstream Gnome. This time in Quantal is the drop of Nautilus 3.6 and Gnome Control Center 3.6 (not quite sure about it yet). But things aren’t so bad. Thanks to Rico Tzschichholz and Ubuntu Gnome Community people, Gnome 3.6 looks almost perfect in Quantal! And things will get even better in 13.04 ;)

Steve Langasek, Ubuntu release manager, has proposed on the Ubuntu-devel mailing list to drop the alternate CDs for Ubuntu 12.10 Quantal Quetzal.

Better management of memory and updates highlight the latest release of the Mozilla Foundation's Web browser, Firefox 15. Firefox's development team has steadily improved the browser's memory management over recent months, but with this release of the program, it's targeting a major contributor to the software's piggish memory ways: add-on applications.

With today's updates, Canonical upgraded the default web browser to Mozilla Firefox 15.0, in all its supported Ubuntu operating systems.

MuPDF is a small and fast PDF viewer that can quickly open large PDF files, even on slow computers.

The foreman in the Apple v. Samsung trial has now done an interview with Bloomberg News, giving him an opportunity to answer some of the criticisms of the verdict. It's a video on YouTube, titled "Apple Jury Foreman: Here's How We Reached a Verdict", and while he answers the criticisms, he describes how the jury, under his instructions, decided that the Samsung prior art didn't invalidate an Apple patent. In doing so, I think he has revealed the biggest mistake of all made by the jury, one so large I don't believe it can be ignored. At a minimum, Apple shouldn't want to win like this. His aha moment, as he calls it, and assuming what he says on the video is accurate, was based on a misunderstanding of what constitutes prior art.

In discussing the first patent on the list, he says they got into a discussion about the prior art that was presented at trial. Here's why they discounted it:

SAN DIEGO. Every year for the past four years, Jim Zemlin, the Executive Director of the Linux Foundation gets in front of thousands of Linux developers and users at the LinuxCon conference to detail the success and the State of Linux.

OK, LibreOffice is free for the download, and you can install it on as many different machines as you choose. But a free price and a free license aren’t much good if the software doesn’t have the features you want. Happily, that’s usually not a concern with LibreOffice or its predecessor, OpenOffice.

Some time ago, I promised myself to stay away from LXDE-based distributions. At the same time, I wrote about three of them in the last 6 weeks.

Can I compare them somehow? Probably yes. Let’s do it.

Brewed by the "Yeastie Boys", Digital IPA is an ale that uses QR codes and social networking to help refine the formula over time.

Blender is such a highly specialized and powerful rendering app that at least two Linux distros are built around it. This cross-platform 3D graphics application matches features and performance of the leading commercial equivalent software packages. Professional-strength rendering software is not a tool for tinkerers.

Know what is happening in “real time” on your systems is in my opinion the basis to use and optimize your OS. On ArchLinux or better on GNU/Linux in general the top command can help us, this is a very useful system monitor that is really easy to use, and that can also allows us to understand why our OS suffers and which process use most resources. The command to be run on the terminal is:

$ top

Let’s see now every single row of this output to explain all the information found within the screen.

This tutorial explains how to use the GeoIP module with nginx to block visitors by country. This is made possible by the GeoIP database which maps users' IP addresses to countries. nginx must be compiled with the HttpGeoipModule to use the GeoIP database.

The library that's too cute to kill The effort towards a Qt library for Android is progressing, with a fourth and final alpha release being sent out the door – despite confidence in the platform having steadily eroded since Nokia dumped it.…

Improved WebGL support for in-browser 3D gaming Another month, another Firefox update. But although Mozilla's breakneck release pace can be bewildering for some users, new Firefox versions continue to bring performance, stability, and security improvements – and in the case of the newly released Firefox 15, some nice goodies for gamers.…

As someone who's been working as a system administrator for a number of years, it's easy to take tools for granted that I've used for a long time and assume everyone has heard of them. Of course, new sysadmins get into the field every day, and even seasoned sysadmins don't all use the same tools. With that in mind, I decided to write a few columns where I highlight some common-but-easy-to-overlook tools that make life as a sysadmin (and really, any Linux user) easier. I start the series with a classic troubleshooting tool: sar.

This tutorial provides step-by-step instructions on how to install Xen (version 4.1.x) on a CentOS 6.3 (x86_64) system. Xen lets you create guest operating systems (*nix operating systems like Linux and FreeBSD), so called "virtual machines" or domUs, under a host operating system (dom0). Using Xen you can separate your applications into different virtual machines that are totally independent from each other.

We wrap up our investigation of vector graphics editors with a look at Adobe's Illustrator, along with a selection of more specialist applications, including Microsoft's Visio and the free, open-source LibreOffice Draw.

If you’re learning a foreign language, there is always the need to go beyond the standard textbooks and listening materials. Resources like CDs,DVDs, and even movies in that particular language help you become a good listener and communicator. Also, these days, there are plenty of software available that help you learn better and faster. On Linux too, there are many such applications that can push you further in your linguistic endeavors without you having to pay a single penny. Here is a list of the best ones.