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Linux Magazine's Senior Software Editor Brockmeier, talks with Ted Gould of Canonical about the upcoming release of Ubuntu Unity. In this interview Ted touches on Unity's UI design decisions, hardware drivers and bundled software.

Saab Automobile unveiled an Android-based in-vehicle infotainment (IVI) concept supported by an open API and app store. The & Saab IQon& system is equipped with an eight-inch touchscreen, provides streaming multimedia, navigation, and on-board storage, and offers API access to more than 500 sensor signals that can be remotely relayed back to Saab dealerships.

Software patents are frequently in the technology news, a multi-billion dollar licensing model existing in parallel to the traditional ways people acquire technology. Very few patents are enforced, but those that are often result in the transfer of secret and large amounts of money — not connected to the amount of work required to create the invention, but to the thickness of the wallet of the defendant.

Nearly two months ago AMD released Radeon HD 6000 series open-source support -- complete with kernel mode-setting and Mesa/Gallium3D OpenGL driver acceleration support -- but this support had only covered the "Northern Islands" ASICs and not the newest Radeon HD 6900 "Cayman" graphics processors. Cayman's design is much different from the Northern Islands and previous-generation Evergreen GPUs, but the open-source support for these highest-end AMD graphics processors is beginning to emerge.

In conjunction with the Game Developers Conference (GDC) in San Francisco this week, Unity Technologies has released a version of its Unity development platform for games and other 3D apps on Android devices. Meanwhile, Android gamers can turn to a free new Nvidia & Tegra Zone& app for Android that points to games optimized for the Nvidia Tegra 2 processor.

Last week, in "Ubuntu: Where Did the Love Go?" I presented one view of Ubuntu and its relationship with other parts of the free and open source software (FOSS) community. One of the first and most articulate responses to the article came from Ubuntu's community manager Jono Bacon.

The Linux Foundation announced that its Intel-backed Yocto Project, which develops open source tools for Linux-based embedded systems, will align and merge technology with the OpenEmbedded community known for its Linux build system. The Linux advocacy organization also announced new partners in the Yocto Project, including major embedded Linux semiconductor manufacturers and software development firms.

After our review of KDE 4.6, we received a great deal of positive comments, but not all of them were sparkling assessments of KDE’s functionality. For that reason, I have decided to get back to the basics this week with a little how-to guide for KDE 3 users who may be reluctant to switch to KDE 4, Gnome or other desktop users who avoid KDE because of certain usability problems, and anyone who might be new to the software and its unique desktop interface.

Canonical will release tomorrow, March 3rd, the third and last Alpha version of the upcoming Ubuntu 11.04 (Natty Narwhal) operating system, due for release at the end of April, 2011.

Expected in March, the forthcoming kernel will contain the new LIO target framework for implementing Storage Area Networks (SANs). Also new are a kernel-side media presence polling feature for disk drives and various Device Mapper optimisations that are relevant for desktop systems.

Mobile World Congress 2011 was quite literally overwhelmed by the sheer number of new Android OS based devices. Among the devices, the ones who completely stole the limelight were the Tablets. Almost all major hardware manufacturer has a Tablet in the pipeline and most of them are running open source Android OS. Here we are going to feature some of the best and most promising Android based Tablets unveiled at Mobile World Congress 2011.

Recently, the Foreign Office of Germany made the announcement (translated news report) that it is migrating away from Linux back to Windows as its desktop solution. We've covered the concept of national adoption of Linux at a government level a couple of times before, but this is one of the first cases of a government moving back the other way. The most important action that community can take at this point is ask, “why?”

iRedMail is a shell script that lets you quickly deploy a full-featured mail solution in less than 2 minutes. Its object is to make a Linux mail server installation and configuration simple, painless and easy to use. Most components used in iRedMail are provided by Linux distributions officially. It means that iRedMail users can get software update support for as long as the the distribution is supported. iRedMail supports both OpenLDAP and MySQL as backends for storing virtual domains and users. This tutorial shows how to use the OpenLDAP backend on Debian Squeeze.

Some of us want to be able to release high-definition video (possibly even 3D) without evil copy protection schemes. I’ve been avoiding Blu-Ray as a consumer since it came out, mostly because Richard Stallman said it has an evil and oppressive DRM scheme. After my first serious investigation, I can confirm his opinion, and frankly, it’s a pretty bleak situation. What can we do about it? Here’s five ideas for how we might release high definition video.

Read the article at Free software Magazine.

The upcoming Bordeaux for Linux and BSD 2011.03 release will see a major shift in how the program is written and the new features that will be available to current and future Bordeaux customers. This is a brief introduction to explain some of the many planned features that will be available in the upcoming Bordeaux 2011.03 release.

Dell’s latest netbook cum sub-notebook boasts the latest AMD technology and dual boots with Ubuntu. We’re still in shock, but have pulled ourselves together long enough to bring you a full review…

When you need to apply the same action to multiple photos, digiKam’s batch processing capabilities can come in rather handy. And the photo management application provides different ways to apply actions to a photo batch in one fell swoop.

Red Hat has changed the way it ships the source code for the Linux kernel. Previously, it was released as a standard kernel with a collection of patches which could be applied to create the source code of the kernel Red Hat used. Now though, the company ships a tarball of the source code with the patches already applied.

With the latest GNOME 3 development snapshots came a lot of disappointment. Several blogged and dozens commented about the missing minimize and maximize buttons. Folks had grown used to using those buttons and wondered how to cope without. Mostly they just wondered why were they removed? Where did the buttons go?

GNOME 3, the first major-version revision of the popular desktop environment in eight years, is slated for release in April. The good news is that you can now easily take the new release for a test spin with a spare USB key, and provide some real-world feedback to the project before the final code gets released into the wild.