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LXer Feature: 06-Oct-2011

Volunteers write better code, and maintain it better. At least that's what Michael Meeks, SUSE's desktop architect and senior LibreOffice developer says.

World of Goo is a really popular game, especially among Linux folks, with an awesome physics engine and music. We have been recommending it all along. It was in our list of favorite games for non-gamer folks among Linux users. It is undoubtedly one of my favorite games in Ubuntu.

Red Hat announced yesterday the release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.2 Beta. From the press release, "This beta includes a broad set of updates to the existing feature set and also provides rich new functionality particularly in the areas of performance and scaling, identity management, high availability, advanced storage, and networking. As always, this beta delivers new hardware enablement made possible by our strong relationships with our strategic hardware partners. This beta release has been designed for optimized performance, scalability and reliability to cater to the diverse workloads running in physical, virtual and cloud environments."..

Many of you know that I've raised he!! over goofy, hurtful and esoteric software names in Linux. While many think little of this, many more have stepped forward to agree that if Linux is to even think of gaining market share, we have to think more in lines of Market instead of Me. Well the shoe's on the other foot now.

Apache releases security advisory following discovery of back door threat by researchers at Context Information Security

This week we interviewed Alan Irwin, the current developer of the Time Ephemerides project, a software and data bundle used to make time corrections in astronomical observations from the Earth’s view point. This is hardcore Astronomy friends! Enjoy the interview!

Sources tell us that Nokia is developing a Linux-based replacement for its S40 phones, called Meltemi. The news was leaked, accurately, by the Wall Street Journal last week. Now we can confirm it. The codename turned up in an internal communication we saw in April, referring to opportunities for redundant Meego staff “in the Meltemi organisation”. We inferred that was a Windows project. It isn’t.

As promised, the latest GNOME Shell Extensions (version 3.2.0) are now available in the WebUpd8 GNOME 3 PPA for Ubuntu 11.10 Oneiric Ocelot. This PPA is an attempt to have all the stable GNOME 3.2 packages that aren't available in the official Ubuntu 11.10 repositories in a single place.

Jesse Anderson is a developer who created millions of virtual monkeys on the cloud, handed them virtual keyboards and they started typing! Typing monkey talk of course. Surprisingly if you give those monkeys enough time, they could recreate Shakespearean work! Check this interview with Jesse to shed more light onto how this magic came by! And oh yes, it was all on Ubuntu

India's much talked about US$35 tablet running Android 2.2 Froyo is finally launched. World’s cheapest tablet will be called 'Aakash' and it's exact price is Rs.2,276. At current rates, final cost will be around US$50, which still makes it the world's cheapest tablet. If the price point of this Android tablet impressed you already, specifications are going to impress you even more.

Engineers are some of the heaviest number-crunchers around. If you are a grad student, post doc or undergrad, you usually get whatever is lying around as your work machine. Also, depending on how inflexible your local IT department is, you may be forced to use one of the commercial operating systems around these days. What are lowly students to do when they need to do heavy computational work?

Helena the 3rd now available to buy from the Ubuntu Software Centre

Ever since Apple announced the iPhone 4S having “A5? processor, everyone has been pointing to the below image from a test run by Anandtech and saying that the iPhone 4S will be twice as strong as the Samsung Galaxy S2. I beg to differ.

It’s been quite a while since we did that post on Firefox’s upcoming tablet User Interface, and guess what, it’s finally here! Firefox for Tablets has just landed in Aurora channel, which means, you can now download it, test it, and make the product even better. The tablet version includes all the features we discussed in our earlier post along with some additional features. Here’s more about it :

The Linux Foundation has added three enterprise, cloud-focused companies to its membership: Eucalyptus Systems, Nebula and Virtual Bridges. Here's hoping the foundation can convince Eucalyptus CEO Marten Mickos that the company's "open core" strategy isn't really "open source."

Last month at XDC2011 Chicago, I managed to get my hands on what should be the production hardware model of the XO-1.75 laptop that is expected to be released in the coming months by the OLPC project. The low-cost OLPC laptop targeted for students is now ARM-based and consumes very little power

Microsoft Corp (MSFT.O) is considering a bid for Yahoo Inc (YHOO.O), resurfacing as a potential buyer after a bitter and unsuccessful fight to take over the Internet company in 2008, sources close to the situation said on Wednesday. Microsoft joins a host of other companies looking at Yahoo, which has a market value of about $18 billion and is readying financial pitch books for potential buyers, they said.

The KVM Forum 2011 was held at the Hyatt Regency in Vancouver, Canada on August 15-16. It was co-located with LinuxCon North America 2011. LinuxCon was sponsored by The Linux Foundation who recorded a large number of videos from both events. Unfortunately, The Linux Foundation had few security breaches to deal with on their kernel.org and linux.com domains which (I'm guessing) has greatly delayed them doing post-production work on the recordings and posting them publicly. Luckily Red Hat has posted a handful of videos from the KVM Forum.

George Vlahavas from the Salix OS development team, proudly announced on October 4th that the a new edition of the Salix OS operating system is now available for download, featuring the Ratpoison window manager.

Open source enables large distributed science projects in a way that closed, proprietary software never will– here is some interesting news from IBM:

ARMONK, N.Y. – October 3,2011 -IBM (NYSE:IBM) today announced that the company is donating a portion of its Blue Spruce Project code to the Dojo Foundation’s Open Cooperative Web Framework (OpenCoweb). The Blue Spruce technology, which was developed in the IBM labs, enables real-time cooperative web solutions. It is already being utilized in an online data exploration system for the National Institutes of Health (NIH) funded study of Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease (COPDGeneR), and to create customized solutions for the healthcare industry by iTel Companies, Inc.