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After some days with the latest Ubuntu Linux desktop release, I was planning to devote a few graphs to extolling its many virtues. This is not a hard exercise because Ubuntu 10.10 is exemplary, about as good as it gets at doing the main things desktop operating systems were originally invented to do. It’s refined, uncluttered, comes with plenty of apps for most people and, most of all, it’s stable and fast. It runs happily in 1GB of RAM, something no version of Windows has done since the obsolete XP. There’s even a netbook edition with larger icons.

In Linux, setting an image as the desktop wallpaper is not a difficult task, but getting it to change automatically at a certain interval is. If you have a good collection of wallpapers and want to see them in action on your desktop, there are some nice wallpaper changer software, i’ll try to give you an overview of some of them: Desktop Drapes, Webilder, wallpaper-tray, desktopnova, wally

QEMU, the processor emulator that can be used alone for running unmodified guest operating systems and can optionally take advantage of KVM (the Kernel-based Virtual Machine) for greater virtualization performance with Intel and AMD hardware, has finally reached version 0.13 after suffering from a few delays. As was reported by us back in January of this year, QEMU 0.13 would focus on bringing new features and with this release they have achieved introducing several new features.

"So we've probably all seen the mock-ups for Firefox 4.0 by now, but has any of it been implemented? In the Windows version, yes. On the GNU+Linux version, partially. And it looks like it's going to stay that way. I'm going to show you what's different in the current development version (nightly 4.0b8pre) from 3.6."

You have all heard the jokes that the end of the Mayan calender on December 21st 2012 might bring about "the end of the world" in some type of cataclysmic event. Regardless of whether or not this is necessarily true, there have been more than a few technology releases/announcements in the past couple years that many of us thought would never happen.

A software synthesizer, also known as a softsynth, is computer software which creates digital audio. Computer software that generates music is not a recent arrival. However, with processors that offer multiple cores and faster clock speeds, software synthesizers can complete tasks that previously needed dedicated hardware.

I firmly believe that systems should be self maintaining. In my career as a Linux Architect, I am always deep in thought; thinking of new ways to improve the environments that I am responsible for managing. These thoughts typically lead to the development of new methods to improve service delivery which reduce operations and maintenance costs, and ultimately improve the product that I deliver to my customers (consumers of my delivered services). In my mind, a Linux server is just a tool used to deliver a service. When the tool fails, the provided service fails and ultimately; I fail.

Wine 1.2.1 arrived last week as a bug-fix release for Wine 1.2 that was introduced back in July, but for those living with the bi-weekly development snapshots to leverage new features already in Wine 1.3 like ARM support for winelib, Wine 1.3.5 is out with more feature activity.

Thanks to the relatively simultaneous development of smaller and cheaper laptops and advances in open-source computing, schools that could not afford 1-to-1 computing programs a few years ago are finding ways to adopt them today.

At the start of September we reported on Unigine's OilRush game, which will have a native Linux client and really be the first title to make its debut that's powered by this advanced OpenGL (and DirectX) engine (after Primal Carnage abandoned Unigine) that up until now has just really been seen by gamers and consumers with some amazing tech demos. The OilRush game is still expected to be released this quarter, but some new screenshots for now are available.

Naev is a 2D space trading and combat game similar to Escape Velocity, many of you may have played before. Escape Velocity which have a huge fan following, inspired many games and NAEV is one of them. Naev can be played on many Linux distros and is tested on Ubuntu, Gentoo, Fedora and Arch Linux.

If you spend much time with any open source project, you're probably going to be spending time in IRC. If you want to make sure you don't miss a minute of your project's conversations, you'll want to check out Smuxi.

LinuxCertified Inc, a leading provider of Linux training and services, today announced its next Linux Device Driver Development Course class to be held in South Bay, CA from October 25th - 27th, 2010.

Regardless which platform you are using, there’s bound to be a calculator included in the stock OS. For simple calculation, these calculators work fine, but if you want to do more complex calculation, like solving an algebraic expression, it won’t make the mark. Qalculate is a powerful calculator for Linux that can solve complex mathematical expressions, units conversion, graph plotting and many more sophisticated functions.

Alcatel-Lucent has switched from VxWorks to Linux for a new "intelligent" 10-gigabit Ethernet enterprise switch. The OmniSwitch 10K Modular LAN Chassis supports 5Tbps (terabit per second) performance over 256 10G Ethernet ports, and offers intelligent management features, such as flow-based quality of service with variable flow control, as well as virtual output queuing, says the company.

Should free software advocates join with pirates as comrades? Some suggest that the culture of free software and the culture of piracy are naturally connected. Is there a connection?

Installing the proprietary Nvidia or ATI graphics drivers in Ubuntu (10.04 or 10.10) will make Plymouth (the boot screen) look very big and ugly. The script in this post should fix this.

The KDE Development Platform is an attractive base for developers of Qt applications. At its core, the KDE libraries provide job APIs for asynchronous processing, transparent network access, caching and more. The KDE PIM Development Platform also provides libraries for common transport and storage standards such as POP3, IMAP, vCard, iCal, MIME messages (email) and more. With Akonadi, the KDE 4 Development Platform is a complete framework for creating full-featured PIM applications with modern modular design, extensibility and scalability.

When Google first announced Chrome OS, a cloud-focused operating system back in July last year, it all seemed a little too vague. Everyone knew that Google could do exactly this, if it wanted to, but the question was why they would want to. The company also said it was aiming to release Chrome OS by the end of 2010.

There are several different ways to make backups of data for any operating system. In the "glory days" of UNIX people would usually write a cron job that would create a Tape ARchive of their system and write that TAR to a tape drive. Well, those days are long gone, as are those scripts. What is here? dd. Dd is very powerful and rather under appreciated tool.