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The general X.Org planning summit for Ubuntu 11.04 just ended at the Ubuntu Developer Summit in Orlando. Here's a few key highlights from this hour-long discussion about the make-up of the X.Org / graphics stack for the Natty Narwhal release due for release in April.

Compiz 0.9.2 was revealed recently with a number of major improvements, new features and even new plugins. But the future of Compiz became uncertain since both Gnome with its GNOME Shell and KDE with its new KWin has decided to go forward with the new integrated desktop approach. But hold on, Compiz might just become an ever more active and important project with Canonical deciding to integrate Compiz with Ubuntu Unity.

The life expectancy of a DSLR camera is usually measured in shutter actuations. For example, Nikon D5000 is good for about 100,000 shutter clicks. That doesn’t mean that your camera dies the day it exceeds its shutter actuation limit, but the shutter count provides a good indication of the camera’s condition.

Linux averages 5.5 changes per hour, every hour of every day, and is perhaps one of the most active software projects in human history. Jon Masters charts these changes every month in quite possibly the best technical column in human history…

One of the reasons Ubuntu developers gather at the Ubuntu Developer Summit (UDS) is to figure out what the next version of their Linux distribution should be about. At the Natty UDS currently underway in Florida, Ubuntu founder Mark Shuttleworth has provided a new desktop direction with a move to the Unity shell, instead of the GNOME Shell. Moving beyond just the user interface, Shuttleworth has also shared some insight into where he sees Ubuntu headed in the next five years.

Oracle continues to be at the center of controversy despite their press release stating they will continue to support and release OpenOffice.org as an open source project. Most recently Oracle was vilified by bloggers and the press for asking members of The Document Foundation to resign from OpenOffice.org due to potential conflicts of interest.

This tutorial shows how you can enable Compiz Fusion on an Ubuntu 10.10 (Maverick Meerkat) desktop (the system must have a 3D-capable graphics card - I'm using an NVIDIA GeForce 8200 here). With Compiz Fusion you can use beautiful 3D effects like wobbly windows or a desktop cube on your desktop.

Rosegarden allows recording, arranging, and composing music. Multiple tracks can have effects added and then be mixed down for burning to CD or for distribution on the web. The built-in notation editor supports printed output via GNU LilyPond

So we set out to make the newly released Civilization V would work in CrossOver a few weeks back. I felt it was my duty to help the QA staff with the testing.

Roughly half a year and over a thousand commits after the first stable release, the KDevelop hackers are proud and happy to announce the release of KDevelop 4.1, the first of hopefully many feature releases. As with the previous bugfix releases, we also make available updated versions of the KDevelop PHP plugins. KDevelop 4.1 is more stable and polished than 4.0; we suggest everyone should update to this new version.

MontaVista Software announced the availability of an Android reference platform for the Econa CNS3xxx ARM11-based processors manufactured by its parent company Cavium Networks. The reference platform offers support for on-chip hardware acceleration blocks, and integrates drivers for peripherals including Bluetooth, 802.11n, and touchscreens, says MontaVista.

I realize that all the problems I'm having with Fedora 13's new 2.6.34.7-61 kernel are potentially (and probably actually) of my own making. I've gone outside the Fedora and RPM Fusion repositories only when I absolutely needed to do so to bring or restore functionality to my system, but that's probably what made my particular system hard to upgrade thereafter. Think of this as a) a cautionary tale on running Fedora in production, b) a wild, geeky ride, c) sort of a learning experience (and I've got more to learn if I ever hope to make this all work correctly in the future), or d) all of the above.

With Android’s growing use as the OS embedded in phones, in tablets, in set-top boxes, and in TVs, we can’t help wondering: will the Linux-based OS soon dominate the entire non-PC consumer device OS market?

Illumination software creator allows you to easily create software visually without using single code or having any programing skills. Support cross platforms Linux, MAC OS X, and Microsoft windows. You can simply select which platform you want to create this application for like Python GTK desktop, Adobe Flex, Maemo LIke Nokia N900, N810, Haiku desktop, and [...]

Five years ago, having only recently arrived at the company, I wrote The Internet Services Disruption in order to kick off a major change management process across the company. In the opening section of that memo, I noted that about every five years our industry experiences what appears to be an inflection point that results in great turbulence and change. In the wake of that memo, the last five years has been a time of great transformation for Microsoft. At this point we’re truly all in with regard to services. I’m incredibly proud of the people and the work that has been done across the company, and of the way that we’ve turned this services transformation into opportunities that will pay off for years to come.

Android has just rocketed past a major milestone: 100,000 applications available in the Android Marketplace. The announcement was made with just a tweet from the Android Dev Twitter account. “One hundred thousand apps in Android Market,” was all the tweet needed to say to spread the news. The search giant recently expanded the Android Marketplace to 20+ countries in an effort to kick its developer ecosystem in high gear.

A mere four months since the 0.9.0 release, which was the first release in quite a while, Compiz developers brought out version 0.9.2. Sam Spilsbury, developer of Compiz, announced this release on the Compiz mailing list as well as his personal blog on Sunday, October 24. This release brought a few new features and lots of stability and performance fixes. Splisbury says it should be ready for general usage.

Link: http://tech.shantanugoel.com/2010/10/25/android-open-source-... Lead: Is Android really open source or not? That is the question being asked by almost everyone. A lot of people, especially those influenced by RDF or those who are in the news industry with no idea about OS and open source but were asked by their boss to get a scoop on this pronto, tend to bring up a few keywords and then twist them around in the way they see fit to make sure it says Android isn’t open. A lot out of the rest of the people, who are indeed informed, make the mistake of thinking that “Open Source = GPL” or “Open Source = Free Software”, which is not true. I write this post to speak my mind about this matter by talking about various points thrown up by the above mentioned classes

The most important issue is their very own fork of the Linux kernel which no longer can be merged with the upstream kernel.

As expected, the intel_idle includes C4 and C6 CPU power saving modes in kernel 2.6.36, even if your BIOS doesn't announce them. (...) This can make your netbook quieter while on AC and extend battery life (...)