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Greg Kroah-Hartman announced last evening, January 12th, that the first maintenance release of the stable Linux kernel 3.2 is available for download and all users should upgrade to it.

A post by Kevinjohn Gallagher on "no longer recommending WordPress" to his clients has gotten a bit of traction lately. While there's legitimate criticism to be leveled at WordPress, Gallagher's isn't (for the most part) it. If you're approaching WordPress with the expectation that it's the be-all and end-all of content management systems (CMSes) you're going to be sorely disappointed. And frankly, I hope WordPress never tries to fit the ridiculous list of requirements that Gallagher tries to saddle it with.

What may sound like a perverse concept is actually one of the many ways smartphones can change your life. If you play a musical instrument but don't happen to have perfect pitch (most of us, sadly), you can buy a tuner, pitch pipe, tuning fork or any number of other aids to keep yourself in tune. If you have a smartphone in your pocket, however, you also can simply download gStrings. Available in the Android Marketplace in either a free ad-supported version or an inexpensive ad-free version, gStrings will help you tune any number of instruments accurately.

A default installation of a distribution using GNOME 3 can be a pain to use, but thanks to available extensions, you can make your GNOME 3 installation a little bit more fun to use, or at least closer to the type of desktop environment you are used to. While there are almost 100 extensions available on the GNOME 3 extensions webpage, I find three of them to be almost indispensable. Do not use GNOME 3 without them!

Box.net (box.com actually now) is a service that enables you to have a place to put files that you want to access from anywhere. Some people (ehem) use it to back up their workstations. Did your box.net mount start failing recently? They've changed a couple things.. use this guide to set it up again.

Play Cut the Rope, the well known physics based puzzle game, on any HTML5 capable browser such as Chrome, Firefox, Internet Explorer.

This tutorial explains the installation of a Samba fileserver on Ubuntu 11.10 and how to configure it to share files over the SMB protocol as well as how to add users. Samba is configured as a standalone server, not as a domain controller. In the resulting setup, every user has his own home directory accessible via the SMB protocol and all users have a shared directory with read-/write access.

This we week we explore big data, the improving IT jobs market and avoiding Agile dogma.

The rapid expansion of digital technologies, and opening up of new channels of communication and information, challenges notions of the ownership of ideas. Richard Hillesley investigates…

For the last several weeks we've looked at how the various types of PODs differ in their business models and in the services they offer. We've also looked at the importance of ensuring that your goals align as well as possible with the POD you eventually select. This week we'll use that background to construct a decision tree and question list you can use to find the POD that's best for you. I'll also suggest (from painful experience) how you can avoid some of the problems I've encountered.

Monday, January 16, 2012 is Martin Luther King Day, and in honor of that occasion I present to you a story of King's two degrees of separation from open source, specifically NASA's new open source code site.

No feature defines the KDE 4 release series more than Activities. At the same time, no feature is so little understood -- Fedora even has a package for removing the desktop toolkit, which provides mouse access to Activities. But, when you take the time to learn about Activities, you'll find them a natural extension of the desktop metaphor that just might help you to work more efficiently. Activities are a super-set of Virtual Desktops. They don't replace Virtual Desktops -- in fact, each Activity can have its own set of Virtual Desktops if you choose. Instead, Activities are alternative desktops, each of which can have its own wallpaper, icons, and widgets.

The Linux Foundation posted a calendar of its 2012 conferences. These include the Linux Kernel Summit, which will be held Aug. 26-28 in San Diego, where it will be co-located with the larger LinuxCon North America event and the Linux Plumbers Conference, both held Aug. 29-31.

In some specific spots, it's still quite rough around the edges, but if those problem areas are judiciously avoided, considering how new it is, it's a great lightweight KDE-esque environment.

If you are using Ubuntu's default user interface Unity, then you are probably familiar with Quick Lists. They are those handy menus that pop up when you right-click on an icon on the Launcher on the left of the screen, giving you options like Keep in Launcher or Quit. Some apps give you more options, but wouldn't it be nice if you could change those options, or better yet... make your own custom Launcher?

Marvell announced an education platform combining its Plug Computer, Arch Linux, and software developed in collaboration with Stanford University. The SMILE Plug micro server runs on a 2GHz Marvell Armada 300 processor, sets up a secure Wi-Fi cloud for up to 60 students, and provides a & Classroom 3.0& connected, secure, interactive learning environment....

Intel announced the fifth generation of its reference platform for education-focused portable PCs. The Classmate now features a dual-core Atom N2600 processor, delivering battery life of up to 12 hours, plus optional capacitive multitouch functionality, according to the company....

The following offers a description--prefaced by a narrative about whence came my inspiration--of a rather kludgy GNU/Linux solution I cobbled together for enhancing my on-line lectures with a video element. I am far from being technically adept as a GNU/Linux user, having only lately in my 11 years of GNU/Linux use become reasonably proficient at administering my own small stock of GNU/Linux machines and my small LAN. Despite a lack of anything that could really pass as expertise in this field, I want to offer this description for two reasons: 1) it may be of help to others who are equally inexpert as I am and who wish to do something like what I've done; and 2) perhaps those who are more technically adept will weigh in and offer corrections, point out alternative applications, make suggestions for improving what I've come up with, or all of the above. It is with these caveats that I offer a description of my humble and rather unsophisticated attempts.

Nor will users have the choice to simply disable secure boot, as they will on non-ARM systems: "Disabling Secure [Boot] MUST NOT be possible on ARM systems."

SUSE proudly announced yesterday, January 11th, that SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES) is now available to all Dell customers, on Dell Cloud, the brand-new VMware software-based cloud offering from Dell.