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K3b is a powerful, feature-complete burning application for KDE 4 which comes with support for burning CDs, DVDs, ISO images, Blu-ray discs, audio CDs, creating ISO images. K3b supports multisession mode, features on-screen display, sound notifications, it can copy from one device to another, allows to rip audio CDs using the transcode utility, rip Video CDs or DVDs or create eMoviX projects.

Are your friends convinced that they should be paying for their operating systems because Linux sounds too complicated or because they think it won't do what they want it to? Fear not, here's your guide to bringing your friends over to the light side...

"Windows users started taking games for granted a long time ago. As evidence, the average price Windows users are paying for the recent "Humble Indie Bundle #2" is $6.63." ... "GNU+Linux users seem to have a very different attitude towards games. With this scarcity of games, GNU+Linux users have become desperate."

There's the release of Wine 1.3.10 on this Christmas Eve for those with extra time to test the newest Wine over the holidays. Wine 1.3.10 has a number of changes worth checking out...

Ubuntu recovery mode is a basic boot configuration for repairing a broken system. In this mode it skips most configuration files and daemons in order to achieve a functioning root prompt. For the security-conscious administrator this itself is a problem.

In early November we delivered benchmarks of EXT4 vs. Btrfs on an early Linux 2.6.37 kernel as our latest round of tests comparing these two leading Linux file-systems. There were some changes in the Linux disk performance with these file-systems using the latest Linux kernel code, but overall it was not too interesting. However, as the Linux 2.6.37 kernel does introduce a new mount option for Btrfs, the space_cache option, we decided to explore its performance in today's article.

There is a discussion going on @ Ayatana mailing list regarding the merge of Me Menu (the applet that displays your name, used to set your status) and Messaging Menu (Chat, Email, etc.) and mockups have already started to be posted:

About 3 years ago when I started my my Linux adventure one of the challenges I initially had was finding an easy way to convert videos to formats I could play on my mobile phone. I remembered having to search through the web and the only option available then was FFmpeg which (don’t get me wrong) is a very power ?tool for converting from one video file format to another, but it was commandline and not something a newbie like me (coming fresh from windows) would want to try out. Fast forward to 2010 and the landscape has changed.

Xonotic preview 0.1 is released, this release is still a preview, which means that is not a stable release yet, in this release many things have progressed, both in features and graphics. Xonotic is a free (GPL), fast-paced first-person shooter that works on Microsoft Windows, Mac OSX and Linux. Xonotic is a direct successor of the Nexuiz Project.

One of the strangest things that I have heard recently is that Microsoft is porting their Windows operating system to the ARM platform. By itself, that wouldn't seem all that strange. ARM is clearly an up-and-coming platform for which many different companies are writing a ton of software. The strange thing about this move by the Redmond Washington giant is that the port is almost completely unnecessary.

If 2010 was the year that taught open source "how to disappear completely," 2011 will be the year we're reminded that "anyone can play guitar"…or open source. At present, open source is de rigueur with the underdog class, those vendors seeking to challenge incumbents like Apple and Oracle.

Amid an enterprise environment that is now more receptive to utility computing and focused on service-based contracts, open source software adoption has grown over the past two years and entered the IT mainstream.

Today I present you an interview with Bertrand Florat the creator of Jajuk. “Jajuk is software that organizes and plays music. It is a full-featured application geared towards advanced users with large or scattered music collections. Using multiple perspectives, the software is designed to be intuitive and provide different visions of your collection.” Jajuk has many interesting features and being developed in Java is available for Linux (it’s available as package in the main distribution), Windows and Mac OS X. I found this great project some time ago (I’ve been the first Italian translator), but my work and laziness brought me away, today I’ve met again with Bertrand and he’s been so kind to give me some of his time for this interview.

Mozilla has released a beta version of the MPL 2.0, the first update to its open source license in more than a decade. Mozilla chief lizard wrangler Mitchell Baker calls this a "feature complete" beta, saying it "addresses all major known issues". The license is shorter and simpler than the aging MPL 1.1. The beta draft drops the word count from 3,702 words to 2,289. But it's also designed to make the MPL more compatible with other licenses, including the Apache license and the GPL. Its patent language has been massaged to look more like that in other licenses. And it removes the "original software" and "original developer" concepts.

Twitter has seen an extraordinary increase in the number of tweets, brief posts of 140 characters. That's right, an absurd constraint, with no pictures, video, or audio. Nevertheless, these short messages seems to bring out the best in humour, understanding, and observation, with tweets often sticking to the facts. 25 billion tweets were made in the past year alone using this text message service by over 100 million people around the world!

Somewhere along the line, the Ubuntu development team disabled a standardized keyboard shortcut that many long-time Linux users had grown accustomed to. Namely: using the ctrl-alt-backspace key combo for quickly and conveniently restarting the system’s X window system when needed.

Include virtualization group during initial install. Comment out lines 343,344 in /usr/share/virt-manager/virt-manager.py to allow virt-manager to start . Set up bridged networking as follows . .

The kernel now includes some components for supporting operation as a Xen host (Dom0). Switching into and out of sleep mode should be accelerated by the use of LZO compression. Following years of work, almost all parts of the kernel are now able to run without using the big kernel lock (BKL).

Using Linux on a laptop has always been a hit and miss affair. With sometimes obscure proprietary hardware, many laptop manufacturers have showed no interest in supporting the free operating system. Nevertheless, through hard work by developers and support from some hardware manufacturers, Linux now supports a wide variety of laptops and netbooks.

A couple of new Nautilus 3.0 mockups were posted by Allan Day on his blog. Althouth they look a lot like some older mockups, they are more polished and make better use of space: