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Google's Open Source Programs Office has recently green lit a donation of $20,000 to the Eclipse Foundation to setup a performance testing lab.

There seems to be no end in sight to the march of the tiny, sub-$100 Linux PCs arriving on the market this year, and recently two more contenders were added to the mix.

Popular free and open source real time strategy game 0 A.D. has received yet another Alpha release. Codenamed 'Kronos', this release brings many new features.

Fuduntu Linux has been around since November 2010 and was initially a Fedora remix distribution. In November 2011, however, the codebase was forked and is now an independent distribution. Overall, there are over 30,000 users accessing the repositories. While any distribution takes work and a dedicated team, an independent distribution takes even more work than a remix. Fuduntu, just like many distributions, relies on volunteers. The volunteers are what keep the distribution going. The users are great and that’s what gives the motivation to go on, but volunteers are needed to make sure that distribution keeps going for the users. Today, we’re looking for volunteers. Have you ever used a Linux distro thinking that you would really like to get in to help but there are so many volunteers, you feel that you wouldn’t be able to get as close as you would like?

And also unlike the graphical installer of Ubuntu 12.10 beta 1, that of Kubuntu 12.10 beta 1 does not yet have preliminary support for LVM, the Linux Logical Volume Manager, and full disk encryption, and there is no indication that those features will even make it into the installer by late October when the final stable version is released.

Satya, who's behind some beautiful GTK and GNOME Shell themes, has created a cool new tool that lets you customize GTK theme colors. Right now, `GTK Theme Preferences` (that's the name of the tool) works with any GTK2 and GTK3 theme and lets you customize the following:

Desktop Linux has had four years of upheaval. Since 2008, KDE, GNOME, and Unity have all faced vocal criticism from users, creating an opportunity for other desktops like Xfce, LXDE, Mate and Cinnamon to gain popularity. But, in all the discussion, one question has never been discussed: how did KDE, the first desktop environment to suffer a revolt, manage to live through the experience and continue to prosper?

Following in the success of the Fit-PC2 NetTop and Tegra 2 Trim-Slice, the latest computer out of CompuLab is the Intense-PC. The CompuLab Intense-PC is a very small form factor (19 x 16 x 4 cm), low-power, fan-less computer that features up to an Intel Core i7 Ivy Bridge processor, 16GB of DDR3 system memory, and a solid-state drive for storage. The Intense-PC is also available with Linux Mint pre-loaded as the operating system.

We have been reading lately from some frustrated individuals, talking a lot about death of Linux Desktops. While it's good to read their opinion, it seems many of these people are either getting old or don't live with current trend. Linux is already 20 years old and in 20 years one can get old. This article is just my opinion on this subject.

While the hardware hasn't even been released yet by NVIDIA, support for the very interesting and powerful GK110, a.k.a. "Kepler 2", is already starting to materialize within the open-source reverse-engineered Nouveau driver...

A few days ago we saw Gnome Split that is an application used for the splitting and merging of any kind of files. We used an mp3 file for our example and the file chunks were not playable as you would expect…

Mp3splt is another small GTK3 application that will help you split your audio files in such a way, that the produced chunks will be playable. Apart from that, it also offers some more audio specific features that will be very useful in such situations.

Anne Nicolas has announced earlier today, September 7th, that the first Alpha version of the upcoming Mageia 3 Linux operating system is now available for download and testing.

Next month's KDE SC 4.9.2 release will be slightly faster with the KWin compositing window manager while more performance optimizations for KWin will land in KDE SC 4.10 come late January of 2013...

Spritefish's Fast Burst Camera may be just the app for sports photography. I've reviewed camera apps for Android OS before, and I've been particularly fond of Vignette, with its 76 customizable photo effects including infrared. That app is superior to market leader Instagram. However, Spritefish claims that Fast Burst Camera can take up to 30 photos per second.

Microsoft, as it did with Vista, is giving Linux another chance to make the gains in the PC market with Windows 8, but can Linux take advantage of this opportunity?

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.