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It’s a new year, and LibreOffice (the office productivity suite forked from OpenOffice.org) is the new face of open source productivity software. Or is it? And more importantly, will it remain so as OpenOffice is reborn under the Apache Foundation? Here's the update.

Call it “Chromegate.” Just a few weeks after Google Chrome was reported to have overtaken Mozilla Firefox to become the second most popular Web browser in the world, Google’s glory has been tarnished by a “jaw-dropping,” massive online Chrome advertising campaign that would seem to violate Google’s own guidelines, uncovered by SEO Book blogger Aaron Wall. Essentially, Google was caught paying at least one PR company to spam the Web with hundreds of crudely written “sponsored posts” from bloggers promoting Google Chrome — posts comprised of what would seem to be just placeholder text and unsubstantiated pro-Google Chrome statements.

My journey with Linux began in 2009, one week before the release of Ubuntu 9.04. I was a long-time Windows user who knew of nothing else, but what Microsoft had to offer for my computer. Years of frustration culminated with me clicking away on Google to look for an alternative, if there was even one. Boy, did my eyes fill with wonder as I found out about Linux, in general, and more specifically Ubuntu. I read and read about it and came to find out that I could test drive it right from the cd itself. It works! It really works! I was estatic. I was free from the shackles of Microsoft Windows. Ubuntu 9.04 made it’s way onto my computer and I have not looked back since. From that time on, I have come to realize that Linux was all around me and I didn’t even know it.

The Blender Foundation has started a new "Open Movie" project called "Mango", and this one is of particular interest to me for Lunatics, because of the technical goal: motion tracking. Motion tracking is principally about putting animated 3D objects into real footage so that it matches the background "plate" (i.e. the original footage).

Read more at Free Software Magazine.

Consumerization drives IT people crazy but it’s also driving the brave new world of bring your own device. Join the revolution or get left behind.

We have come to a crucial point in our series of articles regarding C development. It's also, not coincidentally, that part of C that gives lots of headaches to beginners. This is where we come in, and this article's purpose (one of them, anyway), is to debunk the myths about pointers and about C as a language hard/impossible to learn and read. Nonetheless, we recommend increased attention and a wee bit of patience and you'll see that pointers are not as mind-boggling as the legends say.

Couple of weeks back Microsoft announced that it will participate in Consumer Electronics Show (CES) for one last time in 2012. Interestingly, this will be first ever CES participation for Canonical. Canonical will display latest Desktop and Cloud features as well as have demonstrations on Ubuntu One. Plus an exclusive Ubuntu concept design will be announced during the show.

It looks like 2012 is going to be a great year for free culture. Possibly my favorite development is that MusOpen has organized its planned symphony recordings for this January. In September, 2010, the free culture organization raised over $68,000 (several times their $11,000 goal) through a Kickstarter campaign, with the intent of commissioning a "internationally renowned orchestra" to perform the Beethoven, Brahms, Sibelius, and Tchaikovsky symphonies.

Cinnamon is another attempt to make the GNOME 3 desktop acceptable to those in the community who have so far refused to have an unpalatable substance rammed down their throats. While MATE is a fork of GNOME 2, Cinnamon is a fork of GNOME 3 Shell. And though better than the other attempts, it does not really represent a sharp break from GNOME 3 + MGSE. Imagine GNOME 3 + MGSE without the Applications view or menu, and you have Cinnamon.

The incident that prompted Newman and Feldman’s analysis was the removal from the internet of the Sweet 16, a freely available clinical assessment tool used by physicians to screen patients for cognitive problems. The tool was taken down because of legal action by the creators of a similar tool called the Mini-Mental State Examination (MMSE). Clinical tools tend to resemble one another, Newman said, “not because their creators are unoriginal, but because the tools are based on the same research and the same science.”

Despite the challenging U.S. economy, Red Hat sure sounds optimistic. The open source company plans to hire roughly 1,000 people in 2012. And this isn’t a pure Linux strategy. Red Hat also continues to invest in virtualization, storage, middleware and cloud computing. Here's the strategy.

I am becoming more and more convinced that the real thread to free software (and I am talking here about software released under a free license, not software that you can download and use for free) is contempt. Proprietary software is a competitor, but not a real threat. Proprietary software cannot really kill free software: no matter how many law suits you start, how many patents you file, how many pre-installed versions of Windows you have, common sense will always win. Contempt, however, the the real danger.

The autonomous region of Extremadura in western Spain, which has pioneered the use of open source solutions in public administrations since 2005, has abandoned the development of its custom LinEx distribution. The Spanish newspaper Público reports that the project was abandoned after control of the Centro de Excelencia de Software José de Espronceda, which was responsible for the development of LinEx and other projects, was handed over to the central Spanish government in Madrid. In May 2011, the Extremadura branch of the Spanish Partido Popular (PP) party won the government elections in the autonomous region.

Canonical will have a presence at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas, from the 10th – 13th January. The booth, in the Upper Level of South Hall 4, is at location 35379 within the Las Vegas Convention Center.

Looking ahead to this new year, "I wish and expect that the world will discover FLOSS, particularly Debian GNU/Linux, to be the rich and efficient software system I have been using for years," said blogger Robert Pogson. "It is as different as night and day from that other OS, with all its restrictions and fragility."

Ace Microsoft reporter Mary Jo Foley swears she’s not drinking. Microsoft really is getting ready to enable customers to make Linux and Windows virtual machines (VMs) persistent on Windows Azure, its public platform-as-a-service (PaaS) cloud service. That Microsoft was going to enable users to set up persistent VMs on Azure came as no surprise. While Azure has persistent storage, its inability to keep a VM persistent has annoyed many people, and not just Linux server managers. I know several SharePoint and SQL Server administrators who’ve avoided Azure because of this lack. There are ways to hack your way around the lack of a persistent Azure VM, but they’re not easy.

David Tavares, the French developer behind the jaw-dropping Pear OS Linux operating system is proud to announce today, January 3rd, the immediate availability for download and testing of the first Alpha version of Pear OS Linux Debian Edition.

Cinnamon is a GNOME Shell fork created by Clement Lefebvre, the Linux Mint founder, which tries to offer a layout similar to GNOME 2: a bottom panel with launchers, GNOME2-like systray and notifications and more.

LinuxQuestions.org is proud to announce that voting for the 2011 LinuxQuestions.org Members Choice Awards is now open. The Members Choice Awards allow the Linux community to select their favorite products in a variety of categories. Awards will be given out in 31 categories this year, including Server Distribution of the Year, Desktop Distribution of the Year, Mobile Distribution of the Year, Browser of the Year, NoSQL Database of the Year and Open Source Game of the Year. The polls will close on February 9th. This is the eleventh annual LinuxQuestions.org Members Choice Awards. Previous winners include Red Hat, Ubuntu, Firefox, MySQL, Gnome, KDE and Python.

BF Programs has created an app called 'Stream for Android' which brings most of the Steam features to Android. Caveat: It's not an official Steam App. What is basically does is lets you check your Steam's public profile.