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LXer Feature: 28-Feb-2012

If you have been using Ubuntu for several releases now, you know the time you had to spend on your computer on the installation day, e.g to configure different nuisances, install your work software, your favorite stuff etc. One such thing is multimedia support, sometimes networking issues, graphics issues and so on. If you break your system during that process you either dig deeper into the problem or start over again. Even after installation of Ubuntu, you want certain things Ubuntu ships to not be there. Many times I have had to remove certain default packages to make Ubuntu more to my liking. Today I will show how to create your own custom ubuntu DVD.

At the beginning of this year a DMCA takedown notice was used, almost certainly for the the first time, against an open source project: OpenDDR. Glyn Moody looks at the background to this story and the issues that it raises.

FXI is preparing to launch the Cotton Candy, a tiny computer that looks like a USB thumb drive. The device, which can run either Ubuntu or Android 4.0, has a dual-core 1.2GHz ARM Cortex-A9 CPU, 1GB of RAM, and a Mali 400MP GPU that allows it to decode high-definition video.

Why get away from Gmail altogether? The company has always been snooping on email and feeding through advertisements based on keywords in the mail. But from March 1, the spying will become over-arching, ostensibly to provide a better customer experience.

Coverity's latest Coverity Scan Open Source Report has found that the quality of open source code is equal to, or even better than that of proprietary software. This is the third open source report from Coverity since it took over producing the report in 2009. The project was originally founded by the US Department of Homeland Security in conjunction with Coverity in 2006. Coverity's conclusion is that the assumption that open source software is of lower quality should not be considered a valid reason for avoiding open source.

For a long time now, Mozilla has been talking up its plans to become a serious player in the mobile operating system and smartphone arenas. We've covered the company's Boot to Gecko platform, an open, web-centric operating environment centered on the Gecko rendering engine, and Mozilla is slated to show off its new app store at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona this week. Now, Mozilla is in an alliance with Telefonica and Qualcomm that could make its smartphone ambitions reality.

Androix-x86 is a project that provides Android support for x86, making it easy to install it on netbooks or laptops. You can use it like any other Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwitch device: install applications from the Android Market, add widgets and so on.

Terrible Linux 0.0.1is released. Terrible Linux is a distribution featuring the Xfce desktop and a classic desktop interface. Based on Debian's testing branch. Terrible Linux 0.0.1 Screenshot Tour

While this weekend saw the release of the Linux 3.3-rc5 kernel, which Linus Torvalds self-admitted was pretty boring, also hitting the mailing list this past week were new kernel patches to implement auto-sleep and "wake locks" support.

The Ubuntu Stock Quotes Ticker is an Unity Launcher plugin that allows you to search for stock quotes for United States stock markets via the Yahoo! Finance website, directly from the Unity Dash.

Learn from my mistakes as I figure out how to gather forensics data on an ext4 filesystem. One great thing about writing technical articles is that you have a nice collection of documentation you can turn to. I tell people that I probably reference my books and articles more than anyone else, because although I may not always remember specific steps to perform a task, I do always remember whether I wrote about how to do it.

A funny bidimensional RPG with some strange monsters and a bunch of useless items... This is Dungeons of Dredmor!

Desktop syncing is now possible with ownCloud, through Csync and Mirall. Csync is a command line synchronization tool that comes with an ownCloud module and Mirall is a Qt tray sync client that uses Csync and allows you to synchronize data between the local machine and ownCloud.

For everyone that wants to know more about the application finder for the Xfce4 desktop here it is. The coming 4.10 release is expected to bring some big changes to the application finder. They are planning to merge the xfce4-appfinder with xfrun4. You can use the Xfce4 application finder to find and launch installed applications on your system. This is a very convenient little tool for finding lost applications. You can open the application finder by selecting run program from the main menu, or using the Alt + F2 keyboard shortcut.

The highly anticipated Mobile World Congress event takes place these days (February 27th - March 1st) in Barcelona, Spain, and this is the first time for Canonical to be present at the show.

Frank shook his head in disbelief as he turned his radio off. Who could have predicted that talking heads on the evening news would ever look to Fidel Castro to provide a cogent assessment of an American primary season? 

Modern scientific and engineering research relies heavily on computer programs, which analyze experimental data and run simulations. In fact, you would be hard-pressed to find a scientific paper (outside of pure theory) that didn’t involve code in some way. Unfortunately, most code written for research remains closed, even if the code itself is the subject of a published scientific paper. According to an editorial in Nature, this hinders reproducibility, a fundamental principle of the scientific method.

Mozilla also showing off it’s new open web based mobile platform at MWC, supported by Qualcomm and Adobe

Softpedia has been informed this morning, February 27th, by Fabio Colinelli that the fabulous MyUnity Unity configuration utility for the Ubuntu platform reached version 3.0, supporting desktop themes and Ubuntu 12.04 LTS (Precise Pangolin).

This tutorial is supposed to show you how to change your sound files' information like artist or title, also called tags, in a fast way using Easytag. I am using Linux Mint 12 as an operating system, however the steps should not differ greatly from other Ubuntu based distributions. Easytag is only capable of tagging MP3, MP2, FLAC, Ogg Vorbis, MP4/AAC, MusePack or Monkey's Audio files.