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As promised, Jon Masters follows up his look back at 2011, with a look ahead at what 2012 holds for Linux kernel development…

The Linux 3.3 kernel staging pull request has been submitted to Linus Torvalds. As said by Greg Kroah-Hartman, the 3.3 staging merge is big and "overall, the story is pretty good."..

One Laptop per Child (OLPC) demonstrated a & fully functional& version of its long-delayed XO 3.0 tablet, equipped with a 1GHz Marvell Armada PXA618 processor running Sugar Linux or Android 3.x. Like OLPC's XO 2 laptop, the eight-inch tablet is aimed at educational systems in developing nations, and it will feature an optional sunlight-readable Pixel Qi touchscreen plus the ability to draw power from an optional solar panel or crank charger....

Names of operating systems and applications in the world of Open Source are not always as good as they originally appear. Is there any solution? I did a little research and found a solution...

Andrew Wyatt proudly announced a few minutes ago, January 10th, the immediate availability for download of the Fuduntu 2012.1 Linux operating system.

While there's no doubt that the leaders in the Linux desktop contest are GNOME and KDE, that does not mean they are catered for everyone. Different people have different needs and there were and still are voices in the community that criticize some of the choices the designers of the two desktops made. We, as always, prefer not to take sides, but we noticed that, as it often happens in Open Source, alternatives started to appear, addressing the aforementioned issues. Today we'll talk about two of the alternatives, so you know you always have a choice. So, for GTK and/or Qt fans that know how to install software on their distro of choice, we give you Cinnamon, an alternative to Gnome3, and Razor-Qt, a lightweight alternative to KDE4.

This tutorial shows how you can install and run a TYPO3 (version 4.6) web site on a Debian Squeeze or Ubuntu 11.10 system that has nginx installed instead of Apache (LEMP = Linux + nginx (pronounced "engine x") + MySQL + PHP). The guide also covers the use of the nc_staticfilecache extension which allows TYPO3 to cache pages as complete .html files for faster delivery (increases response times for static pages by a factor of 230; it's similar to Drupal's Boost module). nginx is a HTTP server that uses much less resources than Apache and delivers pages a lot of faster, especially static files.

The wilder shores of the internet are awash with bizarre stories but the one I'm about to relate just has to be one of the most extraordinary things I have ever heard in relation to FOSS. You will have heard about SOPA and the reaction against it in the open source community including petitions, boycotts of GoDaddy etc. Look, that's small potatoes. What these guys are planning is out of this world. Literally. Read on.

Read the article at Free Software Magazine.

Cinnamon is the brain child of Linux Mint founder and is available for Debian-based distros as well as RPM-based systems such as openSUSE and Fedora. The availability of the project for other distributions makes Cinnamon a great project. I think and will become quite popular among other non-Debian systems as well. openSUSE and Fedora already have repositories (testing) for Cinnamon and non Ubuntu/Linux Mint users can install it too. So, suddenly Cinnamon has a bigger user-base than Unity which is available only under Ubuntu. There are two problems plaguing Unity – it's availability only on Ubuntu (not even Linux Mint uses it) and the defensive stand of some of the developers. Instead of listening to users and giving them what they want, users are told to learn how to use Unity. That's not how it works in a world where there are many options. It may work in the Windows or Apple world where its 'my way or highway' approach. So, even the most enthusiastic users who do want to use Unity are discouraged. This limits Unity's growth. Cinnamon, on the other hand is available for wider audience and will enjoy stronger feedback and contribution. Just look at the amount of Gnome shell extensions are there as compared to Unity lens and scopes!

Some people don’t like the way Ubuntu’s user interface has changed in recent versions, and a person from Rome, known as lucazade in the Ubuntu Forums, has done something about it. The Italian has produced a distro called FreezyLinux. It’s based on Ubuntu 11.10 and Gnome 3.2.

As I am writing this, it’s still classified as a beta. It’s too big for a CD, but might fit on a 1 GB flash drive.

A British community interest company, Rhombus Tech, is part of the way towards developing a micro-computer on a circuit board, much like the Raspberry Pi.

KahelOS is a desktop Linux distribution derived from Arch Linux. Unlike Chakra, another Arch Linux-based desktop distribution, which uses the K Desktop Environment, KahelOS uses the GNOME 3 desktop environment. It employs a rolling-release development model, and comes to use by way of the Republic of the Philippines. While the last two releases of KahelOS had 32- and 64-bit editions, for this release, only a 32-bit edition has so far been made available for download, and it is an installable Live DVD ISO image weighing in at about 2.7 GB. The boot menu is shown in the image below.

Nothing unethical here. All these codes are perfectly ok and legit. If you like tweaking and playing with your Android, this little piece of information is just for you. With these codes, you can have better control of your Android device. I tried these codes on my Samsung Galaxy tab and they worked there. I’m pretty sure they will work on any Android phone.

Canonical uploaded the final bits of the stable Linux kernel 3.2 on the official software repositories for the upcoming Ubuntu 12.04 LTS (Precise Pangolin) operating system. Ubuntu 12.04 LTS testers can now upgrade their Linux kernel to version 3.2 by running the Software Update app or from the terminal window, issuing the sudo apt-get dist-upgrade.

The French GNU/Linux company, Mandriva, may be forced to shut its doors as soon as January 16, following the refusal of one of its main shareholders to accept a recapitalisation scheme.

Frank was only a couple hundred yards from his camper, but already he was gasping for breath.  He wanted to blame the 8,000 foot elevation of the North Rim, but suspected he couldn’t pin all of his distress on the thin air.  After all, he hadn’t engaged in anything more strenuous than a fast walk since high school.  And he hadn’t been in great shape then, either.

Now, Linux Mint has assumingly broken all time record on DistroWatch and how looks huge with 3160 rating which is more than 1,077 more than Ubuntu. There is no way that Ubuntu will cover this distance in the near future, unless they change something dramatically.

I don't like the mp3 format at all. I try to avoid it. I recently bought a couple of jazz songs from Amazon in mp3 format. In this tutorial, I'll show you a simple Bash shell script that you can use to convert mp3s to Ogg vorbis on your GNU/Linux system.

Softpedia has been informed that Canonical plans to make an exclusive demonstration of an Ubuntu TV and Ubuntu In-vehicle Infotainment (IVI) at CES 2012.

A few days ago, Canonical uploaded the final bits of the Mozilla Firefox 9.0 web browser on the official software repositories for the Ubuntu 11.10 (Oneiric Ocelot) operating system.