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You’ve heard the talk, the complaints, and the scathing reviews. Both GNOME 3 and Ubuntu Unity have been met with a hailstorm of bad publicity — so much so that people are turning away from adopting Linux — at least Linux that uses either of these two desktops. So if you want to switch to Linux but you don’t want to use either of these desktops, what can you do? Well, I’ll give you five what-to-do’s that will ease the troubled Linux desktop selection.

According to market analyst Nielsen’s August market data, more than half (56 percent) of the smartphones acquired over the most recent three months ran Android. Perhaps the market analyst’s most interesting observation, though, is that innovators prefer Android to iOS by a margin of 40 to 32 percent.

In the '60s, John Cooper took the staid Mini and enhanced its performance to make the Mini Cooper. Around the same time, Carroll Shelby took Ford Mustangs and made them a fire-breathing, track scorching legend. In that same vein, some Linux developers are taking mass produced, mainstream distros and adding high performance changes to them, creating pixel-burning distros worthy of racing stripes on the hood and flames on the fenders.

The courts are increasingly getting involved in mobile technology as patent and trademark infringement lawsuits proliferate. It could have an impact on IT as court decisions and patent trolling lead to market uncertainty (which is probably the idea).

In October 1999, Poul-Henning Kamp sent an email to the FreeBSD mailing list with the subject line A bike shed (any colour will do) on greener grass.... In that long note, he explained Parkinson's Law of Triviality, which is also known as bikeshedding or the bicycle-shed example.

Since Oracle obtained MySQL in the Sun takeover, many FOSS folks have been wary of Oracle’s plans for the open source database, a wariness that wasn’t eased by Oracle’s handling of the OpenOffice/LibreOffice split. When a couple of weeks ago we learned that Oracle has added three commercial extensions to MySQL, many figured that was the beginning of the end of MySQL as a free and open project.

Live DJs chasing a simplistic but attractive application are going to love Giada. At the same time, Giada also covers something I've been wanting for a year now, which is a way to trigger individual samples from a computer keyboard simply in real time.

The attack on Kernel.org last month was "a big wake-up call," according to Green Armor's Joseph Steinberg. "This breach could have been astronomically worse. If the attack had been carried out with more sophistication, the attackers could have done a lot worse damage than they did. The gut feeling is that it is more of an accidental intrusion."

With the official release of GNOME 3.2 coming later in the week, Red Hat's Matthias Clasen has christened the official version of the GTK+ 3.2 tool-kit. GTK+ 3.2 brings several interesting features since the inaugural GTK+3 release earlier in the year.

It used to be very easy to install custom themes in Gnome 2, but if you have upgraded to Gnome Shell, particularly in Ubuntu Oneiric, you will find that there are not much customization options available for you. While Gnome Shell supports theming, there doesn’t seem to be an option for you to switch to the theme you want. For those who are tired of the default look in your Gnome Shell, here is how you can easily install and switch to a custom theme.

Learn how to use the PyLogsParser python library to analyse ssh attacks from your log files.

Canonical added the default GNOME 3 desktop theme, Adwaita, to the default themes of the upcoming Ubuntu 11.10 (Oneiric Ocelot) operating system, due for release on October 13th, 2011.

Synchorep is an opensource software to synchronize two directories, that mean reporting all modifications of one to the other and vice versa. At the end of synchronization, both directories will be strictly the same.

This is usefull principaly for nomads who work with a laptop or usb key but may interest also users who want making differencial copy to gain time.

While there are still several days left of this year's Oktoberfest, to take a short break this morning from benchmarking the wonderful beer, food, and Bavarian females, here are benchmarks of the new Intel HiZ Linux support. Just a few days ago a new, nearly ready patch-set was published for implementing hierarchical Z support within Intel's Mesa DRI driver.

Gnome Pie is an application inspired by a World of Warcraft addon called OPie, that tries to offer a different way of launching applications in Gnome.

The Android Marketplace offers a variety of games to choose from. Even though many of those games are absolutely free, only a handful of them are open source. While that may not bother many Android users, there are a lot of FOSS enthusiasts who love to have everything that’s open source. So, whether you’re an open source fanatic, or a FOSS purist, here are 5 great open source games that you can try out on your Android device.

FTP is a very insecure protocol because all passwords and all data are transferred in clear text. By using TLS, the whole communication can be encrypted, thus making FTP much more secure. This article explains how to set up ProFTPd with TLS on an Ubuntu 11.04 server.

The following FLOSS for science related books were released during the month of August 2011.

More than 100 users report substantial memory leaks in Firefox 6.0.2, including leaks that some say amount to 1.5 GB. Testing appears to verify those reports.

Researchers at UC Riverside have received $1.5 million from the NSF and other sources to study a more power-efficient processor that encodes data with charge-density waves (CDWs) rather than electrical currents. A prototype for a CDW-based computer has already been built, showing promise for processors that could & drastically reduce power consumption and increase speed in the next generation of computers,& claim the researchers....