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Developed as part of KDE4 was Nepomuk to handle meta data of all kinds on the desktop in a generic fashion regardless of file type as a step towards a semantic desktop. While Nepomuk continues to advance, the KDE developers are now collaborating with GNOME developers to bring Zeitgeist to the KDE desktop too. Zeitgeist is one of the GNOME 3.0 projects and is basically a desktop engine for logging and tagging all sorts of desktop activity from document openings, the web-sites you visit, emails and notes you create, etc. This information is stored on your system in a central database so that via other GNOME applications you can access this data or perform queries to help you in different ways.

Ever since the proposed acquisition of Novell by Attachmate Corporation there has been much curiosity, but almost no information, relating to the other major piece of the deal: the acquisition of 882 patents by a consortium led by Microsoft for $450 million.

You may need to export variables in some circumstances in order to use them. The export command places the variable in the environment. The environment, which is the list of name-value pairs like PATH, is inherited from the parent process. The export command allows the child process to modify the environment.

Today the U.S. Supreme Court agreed to hear Microsoft’s appeal in a case that could make it easier to invalidate a patent. If successful, Microsoft’s challenge should help in the fight against bad patents by leveling the playing field for showing that a patent is invalid. A Microsoft win in the case would benefit not only Microsoft, but also the free and open source software community. That’s why EFF, joined by Public Knowledge, the Computer & Communications Industry Association and the Apache Software Foundation, filed an amicus brief in the Supreme Court supporting Microsoft.

Maybe it's the post-holiday letdown, but looking back on 2010 I'm not sure the open source community has that much to be grateful for this year. Not only have we missed another year for the Linux desktop, but there's been plenty to gripe about in 2010.

Linux came a long way concerning music players in the last couple of years and if in the past there were only few choices for users - XMMS has to be mentioned here - well, now there are so many players to choose from, and if most share the same features, each one provides an alternative by bringing a new feature or a different interface. This I can tell, can satisfy any user's taste. Without further ado, here are no less than 16 graphical music players for Linux.

When Novell first announced that it was being acquired by Attachmate for $2.2 billion, the question of who would retain ownership over Unix copyrights was an open issue. As part of the Novell sale, the company also revealed that it is selling 882 patents to a Microsoft-led technology consortium for $450 million. Potential ownership of Unix by the Microsoft-led group could have led to a new round of patent battles between Microsoft and the open source community. In a terse statement, Novell has now publicly stated that it will not be selling Unix as part of the patent sale.

Most commercial software today depends on open source software. The commercial software might be using an underlying open source platform, or it might be incorporating open source components, or it might be provided as a commercial open source product itself. Whichever the case, the software firm behind the commercial software needs to ensure that its interests are met by the open source software projects it depends on. This article shows how commercial software firms manage or steer open source software projects to meet their business needs.

It’s common to hear commentators and business leaders justifying practices that wouldn’t be recognised as “open source” by many of us on the grounds that they have to make money somehow. Actions that deny the software freedoms of end users – and even developers – appear like a fungus, spuriously justified by the need for profit. Phrases like “we can’t give everything away” garnish the thought, and it’s easy to be drawn into sympathising with them. But they are wrong. Open source itself is not about making money – that’s the job of its participants. Open source is the pragmatic product and projection of software freedom.

My name is Oscar Castañeda, I am a student from Guatemala currently doing a master’s in Computer Science at Delft University of Technology (TU Delft) in The Netherlands. For the 2010 Google Summer of Code I completed a project with the Google Open Source Programs Office as my mentoring organization and professor Michel van Eeten (TUDelft) and Nitin Bhide (Founder SVNPlot) as my project mentors.

These virtualization tips and techniques are presented to educate, save money and save endless Googling for answers. With luck they’ll propel your virtualization efforts forward with new momentum and with minimal frustration helping you to improve the performance, reliability and security of your virtual machines.

The announcement that Attachmate would acquire Novell for $2.2 billion has naturally provoked a flurry of comments and analyses in the free software world. But it's important to pick apart the news to find out what is truly new – and to distinguish between what this changes, and what remains the same.

As you may know I was quite keen on the ideas and potential of Google’s Wave project and like many thought it a bit of a shame when they closed the project. When the creator of Wave Lars Rasmussen left Google for Facbook, Wave seemed finished before it had started. At the time they pulled the plug Google said the project would live on but details were scratchy. Now we know more and the good news is that in yet another kudos point for free software and the development models around it, Wave will rise again and this time maybe even stronger but certainly with greater freedom. Read the full article at Freesoftware Magazine.

Attachmate buying Novell came as a bit of a surprise to industry watchers, but now that the deal is inked (but not closed) what does it mean for SUSE, openSUSE, and the rest of the Linux industry?

PAC is a Perl/GTK Gnome replacement for SecureCRT/Putty/etc... It provides a GUI to configure SSH/Telnet connections: users, passwords, EXPECT regular expressions, macros, etc.

Puppy Linux founder Barry Kauler has announced the release of version 1.4 of Quirky. The Quirky Linux distribution is a platform for trying out new, "quirky ideas" and is in the same family as Puppy Linux, but its creator points out that it's a "distinct distro in its own right."

LXer Feature: 29-Nov-2010

In this second part of a two part guest editorial and tutorial Dr. Tony Young (an Australian Mycologist by trade) shares his trials, tribulations, successes and disappointments in working with the new version of KDE. In this installment he configures media players, K3b, Crossover Office, Lucid and Post Script and his final thoughts on his adventures.

iRedMail is a shell script that lets you quickly deploy a full-featured mail solution in less than 2 minutes. Its object is to make a Linux mail server installation and configuration simple, painless and easy to use. Since version 0.7.0, iRedMail supports OpenSuSE (it supports both i386 and x86_64). iRedMail supports both OpenLDAP and MySQL as backends for storing virtual domains and users. This tutorial shows how to use the OpenLDAP backend on OpenSuSE 11.3.

The Diaspora project has launched a private alpha test of its open source social network. It is opening up its own hosted instance of Diaspora to a select group of testers, starting with people who contributed financial support when Diaspora was first getting off the ground. The initial group of participants can invite other people, and the developers will be opening up the service to more users each week.

There are many Linux applications dedicated to taking screenshots. However, you minght want to use the command line to do this, either because you want to build an automated script, or because you have a terminal screen handy.