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Starting with version 11.04 alpha 2 (to be released on February 3rd), Xubuntu will use a new theme called "Greybird" as the default theme.

“Against all odds, Linux.conf.au is here!” This week more than 500 people from around the world are arriving in Brisbane for Linux.conf.au 2011. As last month Brisbane and indeed much of Queensland was devastated by severe flooding, it’s an incredible effort by the conference organizers that the conference is able to continue at all.

While NVIDIA puts out beta Linux graphics drivers quite often as a means of soliciting testing prior to declaring a new stable GPU driver update, AMD does not but rather they rely upon their NDA-covered select beta testers to put each Catalyst release through its paces before declaring a stable update in their timed monthly manner. Today though it seems AMD has put out a Catalyst Beta driver that's targeting their workstation customers (those with the FirePro / FireGL / FireMV hardware) but as in their usual unified manner, it will work with any supported Radeon (R600+ GPU) as well.

The Red Hat sponsored Fedora community Linux project has suffered a security incident in which its infrastructure was compromised. Long story short is that a Fedora contributor had his/her credentials stolen and then an attacker began to use those credentials to attempt to tamper with the Fedora infrastructure. Due to the limited privileges of the exploited account (and some good luck) it appears as though there has been no risk to Fedora's build or infrastructure. This story could have ended up far differently - just look at what happened to Fedora in 2008.

A few minutes ago, the Document Foundation company launched the final and the first stable release of the LibreOffice open source office suite for Linux, Windows and Macintosh platforms.

Fedora 14 has version of Libvirt 0.8.7 and qemu-0.13.0-1 installed via Rawhide Preview Repo. However, straightforward attempt to virt-install Windows 7 on virtio boot device fails to detect device after viostor.sys gets preloaded. It’s a known bug [1]. Actually, thread at Red Hat Bugzilla – Bug 656353 contains required patch , but doesn’t contain any explanation how to rebuild and reinstall required package python-virtinst-0.500.4-1.fc14.noarch.rpm.Detailed workaround for this issue follows bellow.

Let me start with a short story about a situation I dealt with this past summer. I flew out to a client site where I found a broken architecture, management with no idea what was wrong while pointing fingers, and a completely dispirited team. After two weeks of taking a look at what was running (and what wasn't) we'd isolated a dozen specific problems with specific workable solutions, and did so using that dispirited team getting excited about fixing stuff and showing up for meetings. Other teams at the client - testing and environment groups - were shocked with the speed we moved as well as how informed and on top of things we were. The two real bad employees were corralled and worked around - the rest lined up and rocked through.

This document describes how to install a PureFTPd server that uses virtual users from a MySQL database instead of real system users. This is much more performant and allows to have thousands of ftp users on a single machine. In addition to that I will show the use of quota and upload/download bandwidth limits with this setup. Passwords will be stored encrypted as MD5 strings in the database.

Bodhi Linux is a light weight and minimalistic distribution in development that is based on Enlightenment 'E 17' Desktop Environment. At its core, Bodhi Linux is based on Ubuntu 10.04. Bodhi is a Buddhist term and in Sanskrit, it means Enlightenment or getting enlightened. Bodhi Linux takes a user centric approach where it believes that it is upto the user to decide how his desktop should look like, what applications are installed and how it functions.

What do IBM, VMware, SAP and Dell have in common? They're all using Novell to build Linux appliances. Dell officially announced this week that it is joining the SUSE Appliance Program, financial terms of the partnership are not being publicly disclosed. The SUSE Linux Appliance Program is an extension of the SUSE Studio appliance technology and enables vendors to build and manage their own Linux software appliances.

IBM on Jan. 24 launched a Virtual Desktop for Smart Business push -- which allows Windows or Linux desktops to be hosted and managed centrally. I'm intrigued. But the Big Blue effort sounds suspiciously like a previous initiative called the IBM Client for Smart Work package, launched in 2009 with Virtual Bridges and Canonical's Ubuntu. So how does IBM's latest virtual desktop push differ from earlier efforts? Here's the update.

The Fedora Project is getting ready to break a lot of networking scripts that depend on the ethX naming convention — by being the first major distro to ship Consistent Network Device Naming.

Filmaster.com, an open source film community website that serves only Creative Commons content, unveiled their movie recommendations & reviews API enabling external programmers to create independent services that harness its power as explained in this bog entry. Sounds like a great opportunity for open source media centers (Boxee, XBMC or even MythTV or VLC?) to integrate social features into the apps!

Linux and open source verteran, Richard Hillesley, wonders if the much-used aphorism that ‘information wants to be free’ is still prescient in the light of of current events…

In Canada, powerful actors want to make the Net more expensive, less open. [Canadians, let's start rock and rolling on this issue -- see http://openmedia.ca/ for additional info. - Barbara]

The first stable release of the free office suite is available for download. The Internet, January 25, 2011 - The Document Foundation launches LibreOffice 3.3, the first stable release of the free office suite developed by the community. In less than four months, the number of developers hacking LibreOffice has grown from less than twenty in late September 2010, to well over one hundred today. This has allowed us to release ahead of the aggressive schedule set by the project. Not only does it ship a number of new and original features, LibreOffice 3.3 is also a significant achievement for a number of reasons:

VLC 1.1.6 is released, this new released comes with small features and fixing important bugs and a security issues.

I don’t know if we’ll ever see the year of the Linux Desktop or not, but it looks like 2011 is going to be the year of the Linux Tablet. The future success of Linux as a tablet and phone platform might not look as open and utopian as many supporters of free software would like, but it seems that it’s inevitable none the less.

Never let it be said that the Debian project does not listen. For some time there has been growing dissent about the presence of non-free binary blobs in the Debian GNU/Linux kernel. Identi.ca and other public arenas became almost hunting grounds for some of the more fanatical freedom advocates within the community. Recommendations for using gNewSense and other 100% free distributions became more prevalent as the concerns over the non-free Debian kernels grew. The Debian project has now announced that from the release of Squeeze (Debian 6.0) their GNU/Linux kernels will be available without the non-free blobs.

Read the article at Free Software Magazine.

The 3D powerhouse Blender is arguably the most complicated piece of desktop software in the open source world. It handles every part of the workflow used to create a CGI film or a 3D game: creating objects, rigging them to move, animating them, controlling lighting, rendering scenes, and even editing the resulting video. Each release packs in more new features than most people can understand without consulting a textbook (or two). One of the down sides, though, is that over the years Blender has developed the reputation of being difficult to learn. Fortunately, the latest release takes on that challenge head-first, and makes some major improvements.