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A lot has been happening since CloudStack was proposed as an project for Apache and accepted as an incubating project. Since April, a lot of work has been going on to do things “the Apache way” and prepare for the first release out of the Apache incubator. If you’re not on the developer mailing list, though, it might not be entirely clear what’s going on – or when you can expect the first release.

Netflix has made its storied Chaos Monkey—a software service that deliberately attacks and randomly disables resources the company runs in the Amazon Web Services cloud—available on GitHub under an Apache license.

KDE has announced its Version 4.9 Releases to KDE Plasma Workspaces, KDE Applications, and the KDE Development Platform, dedicated to the memory of KDE contributor Claire Lotion. The full announcement has details. These releases got special attention to the general levels of quality and stability. In particular, there was a focus on eliminating any regressions from previous releases. Thanks to the efforts of the KDE Quality Team and its new contributors, the 4.9 Releases are the best ever.

Trying to understand the recent patent licensing deal between Microsoft and Amdocs is like watching a poker tournament, where you never know if a player is bluffing or if they have a pat hand. In this case, it appears that Microsoft is bluffing when it comes to Linux. An inspection of the facts, as they are known, indicate that the “Linux licensing” element of the story is only more Microsoft FUD–with Amdocs being a willing participant.

Above all, IT needs to ensure that critical systems keep running no matter what, even during a system upgrade because when things go south, it can get ugly in a hurry for you. It's a lesson RBS, a Scottish Bank, has been learning the hard way.

(Sacramento, CA, USA and Kassel, Germany: August 1, 2012) The Linux Professional Institute (LPI), the world's premier Linux certification organization (http://www.lpi.org) and its affiliate, LPI-Central Europe (http://www.lpice.eu/), will host a forum for Linux professionals at the Warsaw University of Technology in Warsaw, Poland on September 28, 2012. The event is being held under the honorary patronage of the Polish Ministry of the Economy (Ministerstwo Gospodarki: http://bip.mg.gov.pl/).

The most used graphic program in the free software jungle is Gimp. It is a hugely powerful piece of software, but when all you want to do is to crop a JPEG image without any loss of quality, it's positive overkill: that's when you need CropGUI. As the name suggests, CropGUI is a graphical front end for cropping images, written in Python. That's it. That's all it does. No bloat, no dense feature set. One piece of software, one function. It's not in the repositories or available as a third-party binary but installing it from the compressed tarball is, like CropGUI itself, simple.

So, in my opinion, Ubuntu's target audience is simply the one which wants to use computing power to get a job done.

Normally, when you right click on the Gnome terminal, there will be the option to turn on/ off the Menubar. When you click on this option, the menubar in the Gnome terminal will disappear. However, if you close this terminal and start another one, the menubar will appear again and you will have to turn it off once more.

This tutorial shows how you can install MyUnity, the extended Unity desktop configuration tool, on Linux Mint 13. MyUnity can usually only be used on Ubuntu operating systems, however you can get it to run under Mint as well with a little source-file customization.

While Linux might not enjoy a huge desktop market at present, there are some of you who think that's about to change. Especially the gamerz among you.

Different operating systems give you different degrees of freedom, different degrees of access to knowledge of “what is inside”. And, what is more important for a non-technical user, they give you different user interfaces.

LXer Feature: 01-Aug-2012

ownCloud is a baby in the cloud space, but a fast-growing and useful baby. ownCloud was born at a KDE community event in 2010, and is already an easy and flexible server for sharing and syncing files.

Version 1.0 of Pygmyfoto, a no-frills application for publishing a photo roll on the web, is now available on GitHub.

Educational initiative One Laptop per Child is to equip the next generation of its XO laptop with a Neonode touchscreen. No release date and no other details about the device have been revealed

Linux do(es) crash. It is not so frequent, but it happens. You know what to do when an application refuses to obey, but if everything fails, the last solution is using the supreme power on Linux: the magic SysRq key. By using this key with a combination of “Alt” and another letter, you will be able to make your computer respond no matter what. It was already evoked, but a little explanation does not hurt, and the more you know, the more prepared you will be when facing a real problem. Also, understanding the individual effect is always better than just repeating a combo learned by heart.

While word crept out last night that Nokia would be closing down their Brisbane office where several of the Qt components are maintained and developed, it looks like the Qt infliction is going much further. Nokia's now reportedly trying to offload Qt entirely.

In my entomological work I often need to compare two images of bugs side-by-side. Comparisons are surprisingly hard to do with either of the image viewers I normally use, namely Eye of Gnome and Ristretto. First I open two instances of the viewer and adjust their window sizes and positions for easy side-by-side comparison. I then open one image in one viewer window, and the other image in the other window. If I want to zoom in or out, or pan across the images, I have to do this independently in each viewer window. If I don't save this two-instance arrangement on a dedicated workspace using 'Save session on exit', I'll have to repeat the setting-up next time.

During summer sessions, computer hardware is getting seriously hot and needs our attention. The most common problem causing artefacts into your screen is due to overheated graphics cards. Either passive (without fan) or active (with fan) cooling, the optimum results stem from the best fit between your GPU processor’s surface and its heatsink. Thus many heatsinks are nickel-plated with a copper base block, or fully copper-plated if you pay some extra money.

Word has leaked out that Nokia will be shutting down their Brisbane Australia office next month. This is the office that's responsible for developing and maintaining several Qt components...