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It has been another busy week on the LinuxPlanet, with big kernel news last week as the momentum and excitement now builds in the lead up to this week's big LinuxCon event.

Interview with Jos Poortvliet, openSUSE Community Manager, about his desktop setup. Jos does a lot of great stuff with KDE and makes the case that KDE is worth learning.

I love Mozilla Thunderbird. I love using it with IMAP which lets me synchronize with GMail. To make the experience complete, I also like to view my RSS feeds. Setting them up is shamefully easy. There's no excuse not to try it, so let's do it.

Read the howto at Free Software Magazine.

One of the interesting Google Summer of Code projects this year was bringing OpenGL ES 2.0 support to the Blender Game Engine and also at the same time to port the game engine for this open-source modelling software to Android. Alexandr Kuznetsov is the student developer that took on this GLES / Android porting for a GSoC 2012 project, which for the most part turned out to be a success. His stated targets were making the OpenGL portion of the Blender game engine compatible with OpenGL ES, extending the Android support, and making a small game chooser / packager. He also carries a long-term goal of making all of Blender compatible with OpenGL ES.

Dot Categories: Community and EventsThe KDE Community are still looking for proposals to Host Akademy in 2013. Akademy 2012 The hosting proposal needs a strong team of local volunteers who have an eye for detail that is able to organize and host our annual community summit.

ownCloud is an open-source effort to put control back in our hands. It is still young and has rough edges, and has a way to go to achieve its ambitious goals, but it is already useful and exceptionally easy to use. You can easily set up and manage data storage and sharing, and shared calendars and contacts. The server runs on Linux, Mac OS X, and Windows, and it has clients for desktop and mobile platforms. There is an active and growing developer and user community, and improvements are coming thick and fast. This is the #1 cloud project to watch, in my occasionally humble opinion.

It seems to be the season for trolling the Linux kernel mailing list with idiotic statements. After it was proposed a few days ago that the Linux kernel drop support for x86 32-bit, today's entertainment comes in the form of a Linux user seeking to have keyboard support as "obsolete input device support" from the Linux kernel tree...

Steve Langasek has laid out plans to drop Ubuntu alternate CDs beginning already with the forthcoming Ubuntu 12.10 release...

With the licence keys now available, the mini-computer is no longer limited to decoding only H.264 in hardware. And in the process, the Pi developers have found they can enable H.264 encoding for all

I'm sitting in a Starbucks doing random whatever over an iced americano. While I waiting for my drink, I watched a guy with his friend, pick up a newspaper; and start to remark on the Samsung Apple verdict.

Guy: "Wait, so what they're saying is, Samsung is the same as Apple?" Friend: "I know, right? Makes me think twice about how much I paid for my Mac Book" Guy: "Seriously"

Not 10 minutes later, a husband and wife, same newspaper:

Husband: "... Samsung's iPad is the same as Apple's iPad, and I paid how much for the Apple one? Honey, I told you they were a ripoff", after looking up the Samsung tablet on his iPhone. Wife: "Oh wow," looking at the screen, "... that's a lot cheaper. Think we can return it?"

The Ubuntu Photo Lens is an official Unity Dash plugin that allows users to search for local and online photos. Users will be able to filter their searches by date. You can also see photos from Flick or Facebook accounts, even your friend's photos.

The proposal, as part of JSR 355, to combine the previously separate Executive Committee (EC) for Java SE (Standard Edition) and Java EE (Enterprise Edition) and the Java ME (Micro Edition) Committee has now received the approval of the Java Community Process. There were no opposing votes to the plan, one abstention (Google) and one, Goldman Sachs, who did not vote on the Java SE/EE EC; AT&T and RIM, who sit on the Java ME EC, did not vote, but that was in accordance with the processes of JCP 2.8.

Lately, we've all gotten used to analogizing patents to nuclear weapons, and equating patent strategies to those that would have led to mutually assured destruction. But in the case of the current patent wars focusing on mobile devices, trench war may provide a more apt metaphor.

When you can't just cram it into tables Data is easy. It comes in tables that store facts and figures about particular items – say, people. The columns define the data to be stored about each item (such as FirstName, LastName) and there is one row for each person. Most tabular database engines are relational and we use SQL for querying. So this "Big Data" thang must simply be very, very big tables with lots and lots of rows.…

The microblogging company will officially join the Foundation at the start of LinuxCon North America, alongside distributed filesystem maker Inktank and server builder Servergy

The EnterpriseDB developers have extended their replication technology for the open source PostgreSQL relational database to include the capability to use multiple master nodes. This allows write operations to be shared across clusters

Plex always has been the Mac-friendly offshoot of XBMC. I've never considered using an Apple product for my home media center, so I've never really put much thought into it. Things have changed recently, however, and now the folks behind Plex have given the Linux community an awesome media server.

Klaus Knopper has announced a few days ago, on August 26th, the immediate availability for download of the KNOPPIX 7.0.4 operating system.

This tutorial describes how you can install Apache2 with mod_fcgid and PHP5 on Ubuntu 12.04. mod_fcgid is a compatible alternative to the older mod_fastcgi. It lets you execute PHP scripts with the permissions of their owners instead of the Apache user.

Urs Beyerle has announced last evening, August 26th, that the final version of the Scientific Linux 6.3 Live CD/DVD operating system is now available for download on mirrors worldwide.