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In an effort to bring Open Source education to America's Heartland, a group of volunteers have teamed up to host the Mid-America GNU/Linux Networkers Conference on May 6-7, 2011. These dedicated volunteers have attended, spoken at and sponsored other similar events in far flung parts of the United States and the world, from Florida and California to The Netherlands and Australia.

The Perl Foundation and the Parrot Foundation took part in Google Summer of Code this year, and as the organization administrator, I am very proud of and humbled by all the students and mentors that I worked with. I am constantly reminded that there are very intelligent developers who are very young, and the Perl and Parrot Foundations are very lucky to attract them and have them in our communities. I firmly believe that the passing Google Summer of Code 2010 projects have had a large positive impact on our codebases and many people will benefit from them for years to come.

For a long time Apple has been known as a company that creates new and innovative products. It makes me slightly sad that the up coming Apple OS 10.7 (Lion) is going to follow in the steps of the iPad and be less than innovative in the area of new features.

Chris Wilson of Intel back in July had written a branch of the Intel X.Org display driver (xf86-video-intel) that added back user-space mode-setting support to their open-source driver that did not need the Graphics Execution Manager (GEM) within the kernel to function. This code was previously stripped away from the driver previously since KMS+GEM is the future they wanted to head in, but for those with vintage Intel i8xx-era graphics hardware using these newer code paths frequently resulted in lock-ups and other problems. Rather than trying to solve the actual problem at hand of GEM and KMS for this old hardware, the easier solution was viewed to just add back non-GEM UMS support...

Mainstream graphical applications for the Linux desktop are generally developed with either Gtk+ or Qt. These open source development toolkits supply user interface frameworks and other components that are needed to build desktop programs. Although Gtk+ has historically been favored by the major commercial Linux distributors, Qt's numerous technical advantages and growing relevance in the mobile industry are increasingly difficult for Linux vendors to ignore.

There are numerous open source firewall, router and network server projects. In this two-part tutorial we will discuss the free community version of Endian. It's a Linux distribution that can turn any system into a full-featured network and Internet security appliance. First, we will perform the basic configuration of Endian. This includes setting up the Internet connection and creating a local network with DHCP enabled. Then, we will set up the OpenVPN server. (Note that this tutorial is based on Endian Firewall Community version 2.4, released May 29 2010.)

Steve Jobs has apparently weighed into the debate over Apple's decision to deprecate Java on the Mac, and his terse explanation was promptly deprecated by Java founder James Gosling. According to MacRumors.com, a concerned Java developer emailed the Apple cult leader on Thursday to ask about Apple's plans for the platform, and as he's been known to do from time to time, Jobs responded.

It's a bit of irony, I guess, that there's no easily invoked option to encrypt the /home partition in the OpenBSD installer. I call it irony because the project is all about security and encryption, yet the developers seem to have a reason why encrypted user data isn't an option in the installer itself.

When I started covering digiKam on my Scribbles and Snaps blog, I did it mostly to document features I personally found useful for my photographic needs. Surprisingly, the blog articles turned out to be rather popular with other digiKam users, so I kept covering digiKam's nifty features as I discovered them.

Unfortunately there are no Gnome Shell daily builds in the Ricotz testing PPA anymore (for any Ubuntu version) and even though Ubuntu 10.10 has just been released, the Gnome Shell version in the official Ubuntu repositories is quite old so if you want to run the latest version of Gnome Shell (from GIT), you'll have to compile it. Fortunately, this is not as hard a I initially imagined.

It seems to me that hardly a week goes by when I don't see a release about yet another vendor joining the Linux Foundation. This week, the vendor is OpenLogic, an open source support and services vendor that I've covered for many years. It struck me as odd that OpenLogic is just joining the Linux Foundation now.

When it comes to dowloading photos from a storage card and organizing them in the process, Rapid Photo Downloader is just the ticket. But if you prefer to do that from the command line, here is a simple Bash script cobbled together by yours truly.

While users of Ubuntu 10.10 "Maverick Meerkat" have had access to an early release of the Catalyst 10.10 Linux driver that AMD had sent over to Canonical in advance in order to provide X.Org Server 1.9 support, the rest of the Linux-using public now finally has access to the official Catalyst 10.10 build. Those that have already used Catalyst 10.10 in the Ubuntu Maverick release have been rather excited for its changes.

Although the Oracle – Google Java lawsuit looks ugly, there is a possibility that something good comes out of it: full Java SE appications running on Android.

The organizers of a Linux presentation inside a shopping center asked me to prepare a short list of questions to hand out to all the visitors of that shopping center, that is to people that probably have no interest at all in software as such. Since it may be useful in any other FOSS advocacy event, I have put online an English version of those questions.

Ray Ozzie, Microsoft's chief software architect, is leaving the company. There are a couple of moments in Microsoft's long history that will be remembered as when the company changed forever. One of those is, naturally, when Bill Gates handed over the reins. The other will be the day that Ray Ozzie, Microsoft's chief software architect, leaves the building.

Apache HTTP Server is one of the most iconic open source projects in human history. It’s also the world’s most used and respected web server. In this tutorial you’ll learn how to add your own features to it…

Lighting techniques are highly dependent on the location of the scene at hand. The approaches to lighting an outdoor scene are radically different from the techniques used to light an indoor scene. Knowing these differences and when to use each is important when aiming for a believable result.

Back in July, Rackspace and NASA announced an effort to create sophisticated open source cloud computing infrastructure that could compete with proprietary offerings. Dubbed the OpenStack project, it's targeted to manage both software-centric and storage-centric aspects of cloud computing, focusing on clusters that can leverage distributed resources. The platform is now available under an Apache license, and NASA and Rackspace have discussed plans to switch their current cloud computing infrastructures to OpenStack, in an effort to leverage a more scaleable platform. OpenStack has substantial resources behind it, and is yet another sign that open source cloud efforts are to be taken seriously.

Even though I'm actively testing Ubuntu 10.10 (installed to a 4 GB USB flash drive) and find it extremely compatible with my current hardware (Lenovo G555), I expect I'll be sticking with Fedora 13 for at least the next few months. Everything's working too well to upset this particular apple cart.