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Open...and Shut By Silicon Valley standards, Red Hat is a loser. It doesn't have an app store (though it once tried to create one). Its chief executive isn't a fresh-faced kid (though Jim Whitehurst doesn't look much older than 20). And its headquarters isn't in San Francisco or Silicon Valley, but rather in the comparative backwoods of North Carolina.…

The 4th edition of this post-installation guide targets both "Maverick Meerkat" and "Lucid Lynx". It covers every aspect of setting up Ubuntu: media codecs, browsers, fonts, languages and much more.

There’s a reason they’re called “movies.” They’re supposed to move. Your eyes are keyed to follow motion, and the constant revelation of new information in a moving shot holds your interest longer. Thus, while four seconds might be about the maximum comfortable length for a static shot, shots in which the camera or subject are moving extensively can often last more than a minute without feeling slow at all. Storyboards made entirely from static images make it hard to judge active shots. It’s useful, therefore, to be able to insert some movement at the storyboard phase by panning and zooming a drawing. Here I’m going to demonstrate such an animated storyboard using Inkscape and Blender.

Read the article at Free Software Magazine.

We have covered Atolm GTK theme before and now this beautiful theme gets a PPA which makes it really easy to install and get updates for Ubuntu users. The theme itself got a number of improvements in the latest update. Atolm theme is done by the same artists who created beautiful Orta GTK theme.

Linux Mint will serve just about anyone admirably. It is based on the very popular Ubuntu (which in turn is based on the rock solid Debian), but includes an additional layer of testing, more conservative changes from each version to the next (every six months), and has an even more robust set of software installed by default.

Some people love Facebook, others hate it, and many have a little of both. It can be a great way to keep in contact with old friends and relatives, but it’s also a great way for third parties to harvest loads of free data that may not be used the way you want. Plenty of social sites have popped up over the years in the hopes of dethroning Facebook, but not many have had the goods, or really provided much that would entice a user to switch.

It may or may not be true that Twitter has been censoring Wikileaks as a trend but a quick pro-active search reveals that it’s a red hot topic. In the one or two minutes I browsed the search results nearly seven hundred more appeared. The arrest of Julian Assange has prompted a firestorm of abuse and sarcasm. And deep anger. Read the article at Free Software Magazine.

The promise of HTML5's <video> tag was a simple one: to allow web pages to contain embedded video without the need for plugins. With the decision to remove support for the widespread H.264 codec from future versions of Chrome, Google has undermined this widely-anticipated feature. The company is claiming that it wants to support "open codecs" instead, and so from now on will support only two formats: its own WebM codec, and Theora.

Seems like everybody's running Ubuntu these days. It's become the default Linux distribution. I run it myself on several machines. But it's not perfect for everything. Linux is all about choice, and if you want something besides a standard system bogged down with all the bells and whistles, there are lots of choices.

Eucalyptus Systems, which provides a platform to turn legacy hardware into Amazon EC2-compatible private clouds, claims 20 percent of Fortune 100 companies use Eucalyptus Enterprise Edition cloud. Here are details.

LibreOffice RC3 has been released today. This articles details two ways to install LibO, from the official .deb archives or from the LibreOffice ppa.

Linux Mint Debian Edition 10 is out, and it’s just what the doctor ordered for Linux gearheads who want a rolling release with the extra touches that make Mint unique.

LinuxQuestions.org is proud to announce that voting for the 2010 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 Web Framework of the Year. The polls will close on February 17th. This is the tenth annual LinuxQuestions.org Members Choice Awards. Last year's winners include Ubuntu, Firefox, Gnome, VLC, MySQL and Python.

Red Hat is out today with the GA release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.6 (RHEL). After the big launch of RHEL 6 last year though, there isn't a whole lot to be excited about in the latest 5.x release. That said RHEL 5.x users that aren't in a position to move to RHEL 6 will likely be very happy with the update. Each incremental update of RHEL always brings with it additional driver and bug fixes, which make them important for users.

You love tinkering with your computer. You've tried Ubuntu and Fedora, and they're good, but you feel something is not quite right. Maybe you don't like all those daemons loading on boot, or maybe you want to build your Linux desktop stack just how you want it? Perhaps you're completely new to Linux and want to learn exactly what makes a Linux workstation tick? It's time for you to try Arch Linux. Arch Linux is often called the binary Gentoo&emdash;an appropriate description. Arch gives you a full but simple command-line base to build on, but unlike Gentoo, Arch uses i686 or x86_64 optimized binary packages instead of source code.

Cherokee is a very fast, flexible and easy to configure Web Server. It supports the widespread technologies nowadays: FastCGI, SCGI, PHP, CGI, TLS and SSL encrypted connections, virtual hosts, authentication, on the fly encoding, load balancing, Apache compatible log files, and much more. This tutorial shows how you can install Cherokee on an OpenSUSE 11.3 server with PHP5 support (through FastCGI) and MySQL support.

In the open-source world, attracting new users to your product is hard enough. The ultimate challenge, however, is enticing third-party developers to build on top of your platform. Recognizing this fact, the team behind Ubuntu is preparing a “Developer Manual” to encourage contributions. Here’s the update.

Changing the default application for one type of file is very easy, but Ubuntu still lacks an easy way to change a batch of filetype associations. This howto reveals a clumsy but efficient workaround.

Elementary project refined Linux desktop like no other. And now, the much anticipated Elementary OS codenamed Jupiter is all set to have its first ever official release. The official tagline goes like this - "Its gonna be huge". Considering the sheer amount of changes and improvements Elementary OS is going to bring with it, the release of Jupiter is going to be huge indeed!

Good news for all the Orta fans: a new version has been released today with a new Nautilus Elementary style (configurable from the Orta Settings Manager) as well as many bug fixes.