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Google has released a new SDK for its open source and royalty-free VP8 video codec, promising faster encoding and improved video quality. Mountain View has not changed the VP8 format, merely the software around the format. The new SDK is known as "Bali", and it's the second major update to the platform. According to a Google blog post, on x86 processors, Bali encodes 4.5 times faster than the initial V8 SDK release in "best" mode and 1.35 times faster than previous release, known as Aylesbury. Google likes to name its V8 SDKs after ducks.

If you have a big collection of music, you can’t have in all your computers, so you’d better have it only in one of them and share it with the others. There are a lot of ways to do that, you can use Samba, NFS, or other means to share you drive with others, and thus your music collection, but a better way IMHO, is to share it using a streaming server.

The Linux Foundation announced keynotes and programming for its Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit, scheduled for April 6-8 in San Francisco. The event will also kick off the year's Linux 20th anniversary celebrations, leading up to the official celebration in August.

Tiny Core is a light and modular Linux distribution. Its main purpose is to allow the easy construction of simple but powerful appliance-like desktops. Michael Reed tests the latest release…

"A bug in the Caiaq USB driver, which could be used to execute arbitrary at the kernel level has been reported by Rafael Dominguez Vega of MRW InfoSecurity. The device drivers are vulnerable to buffer overflow condition when an USB device with an unusually long name (over 80 characters) is connected to the machine."

LXer Feature: 09-Mar-2011

This is an addition to the series that was never at first envisaged. Indeed, within a recent thread (shown immediately below) and in my response to “hkwint”, I stated very clearly that I had absolutely no intention of writing further on KDE4, but this situation almost developed with a life of its own and I now think it needs to be brought out into the open for the LXer readers.

Microsoft Corp. will pay Nokia Oyj more than $1 billion to promote and develop Windows-based handsets as part of their smartphone software agreement, according to two people with knowledge of the terms.

Distributive of Porteus Linux is very light. It weights under 300 MB. You can either burn it to CD, or extract files from .iso image and copy them to your USB drive. Like in SLAX, there are 2 files in the distributive which can make your USB bootable: one for Windows users and one for Linux. I found a small issue there, because Linux-oriented file (.sh) is not marked as executable, and I could not make it executable. Neither chmod nor Midnight Commander options helped. Anyway, I have Windows XP for some reasons, so .bat file was used. Finally I got bootable USB drive with Porteus system in it. Reboot. Choose to boot from USB. Let's go!

Half-left has released what's probably the first "real" theme for the new Gnome Shell (with the new automatic workspaces, overview re-layout and so on). Gnome Shell already looks pretty cool but check out Half-left's theme called "Smooth Inset":

Jon von Tetzchner, Co-founder of Opera Software, speaking at the CeBIT last week made an argument for open standards and using browsers over apps, but for developers it doesn't have to be a rigid either/or situation.

Last month I posted about twenty two different icon sets you could use to class up your Linux desktop. Today I would like to share with you twenty of my favorite GTK themes that look fairly sleek. A picture is worth a 1,000 words as they say - so how about we just stick to a screen shot overview...

If you are running Ubuntu 10.10 or its derivatives and you are itching to try the latest version of digiKam, you don’t have to go through the rigmarole of compiling the application yourself.

Amidst news on Tuesday from Rackspace and Dell about their plans for OpenStack was a nice little nugget about Dell making its first code contribution to the cloud OS project. Dell will contribute a tool that automates server configuration for OpenStack. Looks like Dell is inching towards a PowerEdge C config already optimized for (if not pre-loaded with) the open source cloud OS (which can't make Eucalyptus happy). Meanwhile Rackspace wants enterprises to hire it to build 'private clouds' on OpenStack, which marches even more directly into so-called 'open core' Eucalyptus's territory.

While you are waiting for the Gnome 3 impatiently for the April 2011 release, you could attempt peaking at new shell. Those who have had a go at it come away excited at the substantial changes. The desktop design is spanking new and definitely appealing. New intuitive messaging, without have to switch, that allows you to reply are some of the distinctive and immediately identifiable changes.

This tutorial shows how to upgrade a Debian Lenny (Debian 5.0) installation on a Xen based Virtual Private Server (VPS) to Squeeze (Debian 6.0) including kernel update, dependency based boot sequencing and conversion to UUIDs. If you do it the usual Debian way just with apt-get dist-upgrade you will most likely end up with an unbootable system. This is mainly because the update of grub fails.

Sure, it runs Android that is (more or less) Linux. But can you call “yours” a car that you can’t customize as you damn please (respecting safety laws and regulations, of course) even if you regularly bought it?

This tutorial explains the installation of a Samba fileserver on Ubuntu 10.10 and how to configure it to share files over the SMB protocol as well as how to add users. Samba is configured as a standalone server, not as a domain controller. In the resulting setup, every user has his own home directory accessible via the SMB protocol and all users have a shared directory with read-/write access.

The annual Pwn2Own hacking challenge kicks off today, pitting security researchers against web browsers and mobile platforms. The HP TippingPoint sponsored event grows every year to include more platforms, though Linux isn't among them. Pwn2Own will target IE, Firefox, Safari and Chrome all running on Windows 7. Windows XP isn't on the target list and neither is Linux, for different reasons. I spoke with Aaron Portnoy, Manager of the Security Research Team at HP TippingPoint the other day and asked him why Linux wasn't being included. Apparently the question is among the most common questions he is ever asked about Pwn2Own.

Mark Shuttleworth, father of the popular Ubuntu operating system, proudly announced a few minutes ago the name and the goals for the next version of Ubuntu. Yes, we are talking about Ubuntu 11.10, dubbed Oneiric Ocelot and scheduled for release on October 13th, 2011.

You don't need some big fancy expensive groupware suite for simple file sharing; just set up a good stout Linux server with WebDav and be done with it. No muss, no fuss.