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Today, the Debian Project has overwhelmingly decided in a General Resolution to formally acknowlege the contribution made by many people who help Debian in ways other than maintaining packages - by opening up the process of becoming an officially recognised Debian Developer.

Google Android chief Andy Rubin has responded to Steve Jobs's extended rant against Google's mobile OS, unloading a cagey tweet meant to defend claims of Android "openness." On Monday afternoon, during a surprise appearance on Apple's quarterly earnings call, Jobs took aim at Mountain View's repeated claims that Google is "open" while Apple is "closed." The Apple cult leader dubbed such Google talk "disingenuous" and a "smokescreen" meant to hide the "real" differences between two companies' mobile OSes: Android and iOS.

Wallpaper Clocks have always been of great fascination for me. Unlike many other desktop eyecandy that we have discussed before, Wallpaper Clocks are quite unique and will work almost like your ordinary wallpaper in terms of memory usage. If Ubuntu 10.10 customization tips are not good enough you, try wallpaper clocks. A big surprise is assured.

In a recent IRC meeting of the OpenOffice.org Community Council members of The Document Foundation(TDF) were asked to resign their roles on the council. The Document Foundation is the organisation recently launched by OpenOffice community members to manage and develop the LibreOffice fork of the OpenOffice suite of productivity applications.

What is at the heart of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) experiments? It should not surprise you that open-source software is one of the things that powers the most complex scientific human endeavor ever attempted. I hope to give you a glimpse into how scientific computing embraces open-source software and the open-source philosophy in one of the LHC experiments.

Having used Nautilus (the default file manager in Ubuntu) for several years, I have really no complaints about it. It does its jobs well and you can also install scripts and actions to increase its functionality. However, after installing Nautilus Elementary, I am surprised by the simplicity and the enhancements that it adds to the file manager, which makes Nautilus even more user-friendly and useful. If you haven’t install Nautilus Elementary yet, you got to give it a try.

Using GNU Screen can make life much easier, but how often do you start a job and then realize "I wish I'd started screen first"? I used to do it all the time, then I configured things so screen starts by default when I log into my server. Why do I want screen to start automatically when I log in? Like many folks, I work from more than one computer. I like to be able to SSH into a machine and pick up where I left off from another system. Many admins and other users like to run their IRC sessions with a combination of GNU Screen and irrsi, just so they can have a persistent session.

The main tunable settings for PostgreSQL are in a plain text file named postgresql.conf that's located at the base of the database directory structure. This will often be where $PGDATA is set to on UNIX-like systems, making the file $PGDATA/postgresql.conf on those platforms. This article by Gregory Smith, author of PostgreSQL 9.0 High Performance, mirrors the general format of the official documentation's look at these parameters at http://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/static/runtime-config... However, it is more focused on guidelines for setting the most important values, from the perspective of someone interested in performance tuning, rather than describing the meaning of every parameter. This should be considered a supplement to rather than a complete replacement for the extensive material in the manual.

I have just put online a 3-parts tutorial explaining how to generate one print-ready PDF out of a set of plain ASCII files written using the txt2tags markup syntax. Part 1 explains the advantages of working in this way on large texts, Part 2 describes the general flow and Part 3 the central script.

The Bordeaux Technology Group released Bordeaux 2.0.10 for OpenIndiana today. Bordeaux 2.0.10 is a maintenance release that fixes a number of small bugs. With this release we have bundled Wine 1.2.1, updated firefox to 3.6.8, Added support for Apples Safari 5.0 Web Browser, Updated to the latest winetricks release and fixed desktop shortcuts.

Bradley M Kuhn published an interest blog post at the weekend explaining why he believes Canonical is about to go down the open core licensing route and heavily criticising the company for doing so. My take on the post is that it is the worst kind of Daily Mail-esque fear mongering and innuendo. Not only does Bradley lack any evidence for his claim, the evidence he presents completely undermines his argument and distracts attention from what could be a very important point about copyright assignment. The premise? Mark Shuttleworth has admitted that he plans to follow the open core licensing strategy with Canonical.

Simon Brew ponders one of the finest television programmes in recent memory, and wonders if its advocates share parallels with some in the open source community…

Mark Shuttleworth's Ubuntu Linux operating system is quickly moving from being a niche player in the market to an environment which caters for a broad range of users.

During the three and a half years I have spent using Linux I have tried every different type of desktop under the sun and of them all Enlightenment's E17 is my personal favorite. The following are a few reasons why it may be worth breaking out of your Gnome/KDE comfort zone to give E17 a try.

Every time you log into a Linux system, you’re using the Pluggable Authentication Modules (PAM) behind the scenes. PAM simplifies Linux authentication, and makes it possible for Linux systems to easily switch from local file authentication to directory based authentication in just a few steps. If you haven’t thought about PAM and the role it plays on the system, let’s take a look at what it is and what it does.

Nobody writes much about the Debian Live Project, which went from a bunch of stable images for Intel architectures to offering stable and testing images not just for i386 and amd64 but also for PowerPC, the latter in a time when many distributions (Fedora, Ubuntu) have abandoned the Power architecture almost entirely.

In 1996, Microsoft got together with a group of companies that included NCR, Epson, and Fujitisu to produce OLE for POS (abbreviated OPOS), which stands for Object Linking and Embedding for Point of Sale.

Will Linux ever become a major desktop operating system, the way that Windows XP was? My colleague over at PC World, Robert Strohmeyer, thinks that "The dream of Linux as a major desktop OS is now pretty much dead." I beg to differ. Many of his points make sense. Strohmeyer wrote, "Ultimately, Linux is doomed on the desktop because of a critical lack of content. And that lack of content owes its existence to two key factors: the fragmentation of the Linux platform, and the fierce ideology of the open-source community at large." But I disagree with his emphasis.

Wind River announced the fourth-generation of its commercial embedded Linux distribution, adding 95 packages. Based on Linux 2.6.34+ kernel, Wind River Linux 4 offers GCC 4.4, EGLIBC 2.11, and GDB 7 cross-compiling toolchains, and provides multiple virtualization options, PREEMPT RT real-time Linux, multi-team collaboration features, a new native x86 build environment, and support for the upcoming CGL 5.0, says the company.

Stephen Colebourne has proposed that Oracle split the Java Community Process into core and ecosystem organisations with Oracle retaining control of the core parts of Java while the surrounding JSR (Java Specification Requests) are handled by a newly independent body.