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The Free Software Foundation reckons its new version of the General Public Licence removes the problems bedevilling version two, but not everyone is convinced the problem even exists. The FSF reckons that Linux developers need to move quickly to GPLv3 if they're to avoid Android (and similar Linux-based platforms) getting tied up in legal battles, despite the fact that many are claiming such battles are no more than figments in the eyes of publicity-hungry bloggers.

The Fedora Project, proudly announced a few minutes ago (August 23rd) the immediate availability for download and testing of the Alpha version of the upcoming Fedora 16 operating system, due for release in November 2011.

For those that have long sought after a single-window mode for the GIMP graphics application, the wait is over. The GIMP 2.7.3 development snapshot and it finally has a working single-window mode. The news announcement for GIMP 2.7.3 states, "The most visible changes in 2.7.3 are the fully working single-window mode, including working session management, and the introduction of a new hybrid spinbutton/scale widget which takes less space in dockable dialogs."

Gimp 2.7.3 is an image editor brings many new features and improvements as we have seen few features earlier in this post. Gimp 2.7.3 includes single window mode, new hybrid spinbutton/scale widget which takes less space in dockable dialogs, and working session managements. Gimp2.7.3 is a part of the development tree towards the stable release Gimp 2.8 will be released soon.

According to WordPress founder and lead developer Matt Mullenweg, 14.7 per cent of the top million web sites in the world are now powered by the open source blogging and publishing platform, up from just 8.5 per cent a year ago. The project's latest data also shows that 22 out of every 100 new active domains in the United States are running WordPress.

Every conference, at least the good ones, has a theme to tease out and lessons to learn. LinuxCon North America 2011 was one of the best, and having the good fortune to be in Vancouver, BC last week for LinuxCon, I learned quite a bit. Now, I'm not just talking about technical stuff. There were plenty of great technical sessions and case studies. For instance, I learned quite a bit about Oregon State University's Open Source Lab (OSUOSL) during Lance Albertson's talk Friday. But what I'm talking about are the larger lessons and themes that come out of a conference. When you get a bunch of people in an industry together, you often find some larger trends worth thinking about. LinuxCon was definitely no exception.

In a flurry of filing activity in the Oracle v. Google case this past week, a couple of rulings by the court stand out. First, Google has won the right 325 [PDF] to file a motion for summary judgment on the Oracle affirmative defense of "assignor estoppel." Second, Google has won the right 328 [PDF] to file a motion for summary judgment on the issue of infringement outside the U.S. under 35 U.S.C. § 271(f). This last one is really important for reasons we will explain.

In today’s data center, millions of instructions per second (MIPS) and gigabyte per second (GBPS) throughput are well and good, but being green (having a low power consumption) is becoming just as important. That’s why Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu Linux, is betting that in the long run, ARM processors will play an important role in tomorrow’s servers and datacenters.

Back in January, in a post "Does Android Have a Forked Future?" we explored the fact that Google seemed poised to explore several different paths with its Android mobile OS. Specifically, we noted that with Android 3.0 (Honeycomb), Google seemed to be aiming targeted features at tablet developers, while other versions of Android would be more appropriate for smartphones and other devices. Since then, many stories have appeared charging that Google is being less than open with Android, and it's generally accepted that Google won't necessarily release the newest version of Android to all hardware developers at once. With Google's Motorola Mobility acquisition, how likely is it that Google will pursue an even more closed Android strategy?

A new development version of GIMP has been released version 2.7.3. GIMP is the GNU Image Manipulation Program.

This tutorial shows how to set up network RAID1 with the help of DRBD on two Debian Squeeze systems. DRBD stands for Distributed Replicated Block Device and allows you to mirror block devices over a network. This is useful for high-availability setups (like a HA NFS server) because if one node fails, all data is still available from the other node.

Discovering new distros is the fun part of open source software. Here is a very brief list of three new releases and an even more brief discussion, allowing you linux-logothe pleasure of exploring these first hand.

Wind River announced a new version of its Linux-ready, embedded device test automation software. Wind River Test Management 4.0 can now identify high-risk segments in production code, as well as focus testing solely on changes made between builds, among other new features, says the company.

One of the main reasons not to run Debian Stable is that you have newer hardware that doesn't respond well to the older packages in the release. For those with Intel Sandy Bridge and other newer chips, the X server as it is packaged in Squeeze can be a problem, which can be solved by running Testing or Sid, or now with X in Squeeze Backports.

TeamViewer is excellent software for allowing the control of your computer from remote places, sharing the desktop and transferring the files between the computers or compatible devices all through the internet. TeamViewer is available not only for computer operating systems like Windows, Mac and Linux, but also for mobile operating systems like Android and iOS.

Sales of the "discontinued" HP TouchPad have been brisk after its price was cut to as little as $99, and hackers are working overtime to port Ubuntu and Android to the WebOS-based tablet. Meanwhile, analysts speculate on who might acquire HP's WebOS operations, which include a 2,000-plus patent portfolio that one analyst says could recoup the cost of HP's Palm acquisition.

Ubuntu Software Center is seeing its second round of upgrades, this time changes are even more dramatic. Good to see Canonical putting so much thrust on Software Center which has the potential to become Ubuntu's major money spinner in the near future.

There has been a lot of talking, over the past few months, about a Firefox extension called Firesheep which, in the words of author Eric Butler,

“demonstrates HTTP session hijacking attacks“.

Discussions around the Internet on the matter have been quite heated, with lots of people thanking him for his efforts in raising awareness on the security issues of modern Internet applications, and many others blaming him for making it way too easy for anyone -even people who know close to nothing regarding security- to hack into other people’s accounts on social networks, webmails and other web applications, provided some conditions are met.

LXer Feature: 22-Aug-2011

Is the tech press too focused on negativity, to the detriment of the FOSS community? I don't know how he does it, but Bruce Byfield writes calm, thoughtful, lengthy articles that somehow ignite mad passions and flamefests. In his latest piece he discusses some of KDE4 developer Aaron Seigo's thoughts that the tech press presents an unbalanced, negative perspective, and sparks yet another round of heated discussions. So what's going on here?

Computing environments may revolve around heavy usage of NFS infrastructure. Network areas are hosted and provided by storage file servers, with compute servers mounting the exported areas into their directory tree. Periodically, the mounts expire when not in use and are removed from the directory tree on local machines.