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A full desktop environment is the lazy man's approach to Linux. Most popular Linux distributions today employ a full desktop environment, while hand selecting each component for specific purposes.

For those of you playing along at home, you'll recall that our intrepid hero is working on a shell script that can tell you the most recent year that a specific date occurred on a specified day of the week—for example, the most recent year when Christmas occurred on a Thursday.

Back in April I wrote about an open-source graphics driver for Qualcomm's Snapdragon. This reverse-engineered driver project was actually started by an employee of Texas Instruments -- a competitor to Qualcomm -- but was being done since it was some of the only ARM hardware out there where the developer wasn't tainted by NDAs. Since Phoronix delivered the announcement of this Snapdragon GPU driver, there hasn't been much news to report.

When the Flame Virus apparently attacked computers in Iran and other Middle East countries, I immediately flashed back to a recent keynote from Kaspersky Lab CEO Eugene Kaspersky. Here's why.

Specialized Spins for Security, Scientific-KDE, Design-suite, SoaS, Games, Electronic-lab and Robotics were also released. It is very unlikely that I will review these, but there will be reviews of the main edition and KDE Spin. While the reviews are still being baked, here are a few screen shots from test installations of the main edition and KDE Spin for your viewing pleasure.

Can Mageia dazzle the world stage once again, or has it run out of tricks? Mageia has been pretty popular ever since its original release last year. While all Linux distributions give you more choice than any other operating system, Mageia was one of the few distros that has a lot of these choices upfront. This is partly due to it being an offshoot of Mandriva, however the team at Mageia have taken it noticeably further.

Up until now, the ultra-sophisticated Stuxnet computer worm has held pride of place as the most impressive cyber weapon known to have been launched against an international opponent. Happily, while the number of garden variety cyber attacks continues to rise, malware with the sophistication of Stuxnet has been extremely rare.  Recently, though, two new programs have been uncovered that appear to equal or exceed the complexity of Stuxnet.  And that's not good.

Electronic Frontier Foundation just posted an article discussing “Apple’s Crystal Prison and The Future of Open Platforms” in which they characterize Apple’s and Microsoft’s restrictive policies as affronts on users freedom, and call on Apple to lead the way by aligning with Steve Wozniak’s call for Apple to open up. I generally support the idea of more openness in computing, but I see a couple of key issues with what they wrote.

The Wine development release 1.5.5 is now available.

For the most part, Fedora Linux releases have had names that weren't particularly controversial. For instance, Fedora 16 was named Verne and the default desktop wallpaper had a submarine type theme (an hommage to 20,000 Leagues under the Sea). With Fedora 17, which was officially released on Tuesday the codename is Beefy Miracle. It's a theme that has its own mascot and it's a fun one. Yet despite that, the default Fedora 17 desktop has no Beefy Miracle. Why is that?

The first thing you should always do after installing software (apart from viewing the manpages) is to check and see if it supports plugins. If you are not a programmer or hacker it really is the easiest way to extend capabilities. The Gnome text editor supports this feature out of the box. Here's three of the best.

Read the howto at Free Software Magazine.

As open source software continues to proliferate in businesses and large enterprises, it gets ever harder to track exactly which components are being used and whether they're being used in compliance with licenses. This is no small issue. Only a couple of years ago, Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst predicted that soon 100 percent of significant software platforms and applications will contain open source components. With a nod to tracking and compliance of installed open source software, The Linux Foundation has announced the availability of The Linux Foundation FOSS Bar Code Tracker. Here is how it works.

The Samba Team and seven kernel hackers have come together with Software Freedom Conservancy to help efforts to ensure compliance with the GPL by those who implement Linux and other GPL software. Richard Hillesley talked to Bradley Kuhn of Software Freedom Conservancy, Jeremy Allison of Samba, and Matthew Garrett, who works in his spare time with the GPL Compliance Project for Linux Developers.

This document describes how to install a PureFTPd server that uses virtual users from a MySQL database instead of real system users. This is much more performant and allows to have thousands of ftp users on a single machine. In addition to that I will show the use of quota and upload/download bandwidth limits with this setup. Passwords will be stored encrypted as MD5 strings in the database.

Gimp 2.8 comes with several exciting features that have enhanced my work flow. Although my favorite feature is the single window mode I’ve also been using the new Cage Transform tool today and have found it quite impressive.

Few things scare me more than disk partitioning and GRUB configuration software. Both of those chores involve knowledge about hard drive operations and a good slice of luck. And both can render a computer unbootalbe with one slight user error. So discovering the latest version of Grub Customizer helped lower my anxiety levels considerably.

Enlightenment is Desktop Environment with minimal effect, clean, fast, modular and very extensible window manager for X11 and Linux.The libraries behind Enlightenment are referred to as EFL (Enlightenment Foundation Libraries) collectively,

There are far too many small to mid-sized businesses still relying exclusively on proprietary software and costly hardware solutions to drive antiquated technology.

This news item is coming a bit belated due to LinuxTag, but the DRM graphics driver pull went in last week for the Linux 3.5 kernel. The open-source kernel graphics driver changes this time around are absolutely huge, complete with three new KMS drivers...

Here's what the Linux Laptop Loaner program looks like: ZaReason dedicates a certain number of machines to each library. A small rural library might have two or three. A city library would start with five and see how their circulation needs are from that point.