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This tutorial shows how you can set up an Ubuntu 10.10 (Maverick Meerkat) desktop that is a full-fledged replacement for a Windows desktop, i.e. that has all the software that people need to do the things they do on their Windows desktops. The advantages are clear: you get a secure system without DRM restrictions that works even on old hardware, and the best thing is: all software comes free of charge.

By default, digiKam uses SQLite as its back-end for storing important metadata and thumbnails. But the photo management application also provides support for the popular MySQL database engine, and it comes with a database migration tool that can help you to move your data from SQLite to MySQL.

The following topic scares me for two reasons. First, maybe I read too many sci-fi novels about Artificial Intelligence (AI) going wrong (or right, we’ll get to that in bit). Second, most HPC people are pragmatic individuals who deal with numbers and results that have a firm mathematical underpinning. Talking about AI as an HPC application is not quite a mainstream discussion.

Cloud computing and open source applications is a great combination. You get all the benefits of the cloud: easy to deploy, easy to maintain, low upfront and long-term infrastructure costs. But you also get all the benefits of open source: flexibility, low cost applications, and control — control of your software and most importantly, your data.

While we are close to seeing the Linux 2.6.36 kernel, this week LinSched for the Linux 2.6.35 kernel was released. LinSched is a simulator that allows testing the Linux kernel scheduler in user-space for modifying and observing its scheduling behavior.

This week IBM announced it would be supporting Oracle's OpenJDK. At first glance it seems like "Great!" Isn't it good that two big supporters of Java are getting behind a single open source project? Well, in my personal opinion, no. It is bad. Bad for Java. I'll try to explain why.

We will post more about the event as we draw sponsors, vendors and volunteers. Basically, we're just going to collect machine donations...there will be no repairs or diagnosis on site like there is during Linux Against Poverty. We'll take care of that on this end. However we could use some of our great volunteers to help staff the event. Please email me if you are interested in helping.

Akkana Peck completes her introductory series to CouchDB, one of the newfangled distributed "NoSQL" databases. In Part 2 we learn more fundamental ways to manage CouchDB with Python.

I became impatient with the history lesson in Chapter 1 and wanted to test drive HTML 5. What's different? What's new? Guess I'll have to work to find out. As the blurb I found at Amazon said of HTML5, It’s not one big thing. It's not a matter of learning a new markup language from scratch, which is both a good and bad thing. In fact, again to quote the author's blurb, “Upgrading” to HTML5 can be as simple as changing your doctype...In HTML5, there is only one doctype: !DOCTYPE html. That's encouraging, but just how easy is it to learn HTML5 and how easily can you learn it from Pilgrim's book? I went in search of the answers.

One of the more exciting aspects of Ubuntu 10.10 is undoubtedly the Unity shell in Ubuntu Netbook Edition and the 'uTouch' touch screen capabilities bundled with it. In his latest blog entry Canonical’s Gerry Carr unveils this new user experience in a cool video demonstration that shouldn’t be missed…

The Free Software Foundation has announced the initial criteria of the "Respects Your Freedom" hardware endorsement programme. Under the programme, the FSF will endorse products that comply with its conditions, which include; using only free software in all parts of the product, ensuring the software can be built using only free software tools and allowing user installation of modified software. The non-profit organisation is seeking to get feedback on these criteria and hopes to use the process to raise the interest of hardware manufacturers.

Whether you are a command line newbie or a proficient terminal user, you'll probably appreciate CLI Companion. This nifty little tool couples the terminal with a database of frequently-used commands.

Itching to upgrade to Ubuntu 10.10? Not so fast! Look before you leap, you may want to stick with Ubuntu 10.04, especially if you’re a netbook user.

During OpenOffice.org's tenth anniversary, Oracle announced it will participate in ODF Plugfest, one of the conferences aimed at furthering the Open Document Format interoperability, held October 14 - 15 in Brussels . Oracle also stated they would continue developing, improving, and releasing OpenOffice.org as open source software.

New open source projects launch all the time and there’s so many great ones out there it’s hard to find the diamonds in the rough. Here are 10 promising young FOSS projects to keep an eye on as their development grows. Download or use them in the meantime as they develop, they are awesome!

Like it or hate you have to admit: Ubuntu has done wonders for the Linux desktop. Through Canonical's works, community development, and the various spin offs such as Linux Mint, PinguyOS, Zorin, and many others there is no arguing that Ubuntu based systems are the most popular choice for the Linux desktop operating system. Ubuntu has almost become synonymous, or at the very least as popular, as Linux in general.

Urban Terror is one of the most popular Linux multi-player first person shooter (FPS) game played by hundreds of players daily. The cross-platform game that runs on Windows and Mac as well comes with many multiplayer game modes like team survivor, team deathmatch, capture the flag, capture and hold etc.

While we already know that by the time KDE Software Compilation 4.7 rolls around it may optionally support OpenGL 3.0 within the KWin compositing manager, but with time KDE's Plasma may begin using more OpenGL too. Aaron Seigo has written a lengthy blog post about what he hopes to achieve with Plasma and its library going a few releases out into the future. This includes a rather extensive rework of Plasma and its drawing, which would include the use of more OpenGL to allow for greater hardware acceleration.

Every now and then, when surfing the blogosphere, I come across waves after waves of postings stating how “Linux needs to rely less on the CLI” or “Windows is perfect for basic users because everything can be done with the GUI”…blah, blah, blah. In fact it was this article that prompted this posting. It gets tiring reading the same things over and over again, but it hasn’t stopped me from adding my 2 cents.

This week's entry looks at a unique new audio editor, some important updates, and a very cool programming environment for graphics (and much more). As always, some tasty treats are cooking in the Linux audio kitchen.