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Charles H Schulz has announced the opening of voting to select a new name for the Mandriva community distribution that will emerge from the current work on creating a new Mandriva foundation. Mandriva is currently in the process of reorganising, and part of the plan involves handing the development of the distribution to the community.

In tech today, it has become a truism that "if you're not paying for it, you're the product". Somehow we have applied this wisdom to consumers without recognising that the same principle applies to enterprises and their developers. Recently, however, Netflix and LinkedIn have reminded us just how precarious it is to build on someone else's platform - or API.

Those of us who type in Latin characters may easily overlook what it takes to get text into windows or command lines in other writing systems. Entry of characters not found on one's keyboard requires the use of an input method (IM) which turns multiple keystrokes into characters. There are plenty of capable projects, but they often lack deep integration into the desktop environment or widget toolkit. In April, GNOME developer Rui Matos proposed a feature for the upcoming GNOME 3.6 release that would integrate the IBus framework into the core GNOME desktop, tackling this precise challenge. IBus is a framework that allows the user to select — and switch between — multiple IMs. The plan spawned considerable debate, not only on the merits of IBus, but on the wisdom of tightly integrating a single component into the desktop environment. Complicating matters is the divide between the bulk of the GNOME developer community and those users who depend on input methods, primarily from the Chinese-Japanese-Korean (CJK) language communities.

Arch linux has the reputation of being for the hard-core linux enthusiast, and this is largely accurate. It can be a pain to install in particular, but the documentation is insanely detailed and helpful, so anyone that can read and follow instructions should be able to handle it.

Will Schroeder is the CEO of Kitware Inc., a company that builds open source scientific software that also depends on open source. He suggested that open source is the most effective way to get things done through agile, collaborative innovation. Traditionally science was open, critically reviewed and widely available. Results were shared and new innovations could build on previous discoveries. It is now largely closed and largely protected by patents.

So much going on here at DickMacInnis.com that it's hard to keep up with regular updates. As such, I've got some big news concerning several of the new things I've been working on..

Called Firefox OS, and built on HTML5, the same markup language used to build modern websites and Web applications, it has managed to garner the support of leading vendors in the business.

Google's canning their engineering efforts in Atlanta, Georgia this month. Their engineering staff is moving on, but as one last effort, they were allowed to open-source portions of their last project: Collide...

The Document Foundation is planning to release LibreOffice, the free software office suite, for Android devices. A good amount of work has been done on the app and here we bring the latest screenshots of how this app will look like.

Though I'm very much a fan of the "traditional" menu, I had an inkling that I'd enjoy using the "type to search" box to start applications in GNOME 3 (or, more specifically, GNOME 3.4 in the just-frozen, still-Testing Debian Wheezy).

Regata 7 is released! Regata is a new Brazilian desktop Linux distribution developed by the team Aqui63 based on openSUSE 12.1 and the desktop environment KDE 4.7.

Have you ever wondered how to dump thousands of files to a text file and sort them alphabetically? This tutorial will show you how to do it and create a bash script.

The presentations and videos from Red Hat's in-house conference provide information on current and forthcoming products from the open source specialist, including version 7 of Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

While the ultra-closed nature of their devices is a major reason why I don’t personally use Apple products, it is their recent litigation against competing open-source products that really gets my goat.

Alexander Tratsevskiy has announced last evening, July 3rd, that the Beta release of the upcoming Calculate Linux 12 is now available for download and testing.

The "cat" command is one of the most popular linux commands. It is used to display a file in the terminal. However, one problem is that when using "cat" to read a big file, it will display the whole file in the terminal so you will have to scroll up a huge wall of text to read the file. The "less" command is somewhat similar to "cat", it is also used to read a file but "less" displays only a part of the file instead of the whole file. To read files with "less", you just need to scroll up and down. The real advantage of "less" is that because it doesnt read the entire file so with very huge files, "less" will start faster than "cat" or any text editor like vi.

If you are using the latest KDE edition of your favorite distribution, your window titlebar could be missing a button or two that you most certainly need. That is definitely the case on Sabayon 9 KDE. The titlebar could also be sporting spacers that you do not need, as is the case on Kubuntu 12.04.

SPDY (pronounced "SPeeDY") is a new networking protocol whose goal is to speed up the web. It is Google's alternative to the HTTP protocol and a candidate for HTTP/2.0. SPDY augments HTTP with several speed-related features such as stream multiplexing and header compression. To use SPDY, you need a web server and a browser (like Google Chrome and upcoming versions of Firefox) that both support SPDY. mod_spdy is an open-source Apache module that adds support for the SPDY protocol to the Apache HTTPD server. This tutorial explains how to use mod_spdy with Apache2 on Ubuntu 12.04.

When it comes to operating systems for the TI OMAP4 PandaBoard and PandaBoard ES, Ubuntu Linux is usually the winner for several reasons. However, with last month's release of Fedora 17 for ARM, how is the Red Hat sponsored distribution running on these ARM development boards? Here's an overview of my experiences when running the latest Ubuntu and Fedora releases on the ARM Cortex A9 development hardware along with Arch Linux. There are also benchmarks comparing the ARM Linux performance.

Na’Tosha and Levi, the two developers at Unity3D who are working on the Linux publishing support of their company's popular game engine share a few thoughts on why they are supporting Linux.