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Here I am at around 12:30 AM local time running updates on a client's PC that was just reinstalled with Microsoft XP Media Center Edition 2005. This reinstall was done to clean up the registry and get rid of the "sluggishness" that had set in over the past 4 years of continual use. While the interminable Microsoft updates ran on that PC sitting next to my desk, I watched a movie on my personal business tower computer that is running Mandriva 2010.1 Linux. The same computer which was also downloading files in the background, periodically checking my e-mail and keeping several other software applications going simultaneously.

October 28, 2010 -- BOSTON, Mass. -- The GNOME Project has received two grants for a total of $15,000 from Mozilla and from the F123.org-Mais Diferenças partnership for accessibility work. Mozilla has once again stepped up to support GNOME accessibility (a11y) work with a $10,000 grant. The F123-Mais Diferenças partnership has awarded a grant of $5,000 in total. This is the second accessibility grant that GNOME has received from Mozilla in the 2010 calendar year.

Robert Strohmeyer has recently proclaimed the death of the dream of Desktop Linux, after himself being an author of one of those infamous "This is The Year of Linux Desktop" articles in 2008. Frankly, I wouldn't quite say that the dream is dead, since many people can and probably still do keep on dreaming about it, but as far as the reality goes, it probably is dead, and I wouldn't quite argue otherwise.

The results of the Eclipse Community Survey 2010 are now available. Thank you to everyone, all 1696 people, that took the time to give us your feedback. A challenge for lots of open source communities is understanding the dynamics in the community, so these results provide a useful data point.

A couple of weeks ago I was in Brussels to particpate in the 4th ODF Plugfest. I planned on writing up a nice long post about it. But right when I started to draft this blog post, I came across an excellent article in LWN.net by Koen Vervloesem (Twitter @koenvervloesem): ODF Plugfest: Making office tools interoperable. Since his article is far better than what I would have written, I recommend that you go and read that article first, and then come back here for what meager additional scraps of insight I can add. . - Rob Weir

Now that Unity will be used by default in Ubuntu 11.04 Natty Narwhal, it's been getting a lot of attention and there are discussions going on about if and how the Global Menu (AppMenu) will behave on the desktop, a better way of managing multiple desktops and many other subjects. One such discussion drew my attention and I though I'd share it with you.

Link: http://tech.shantanugoel.com/2010/10/29/the-real-threat-of-w... Lead: Many say that Windows Phone 7 is a threat to iPhone and many also say that Windows Phone 7 is a threat to Android but I say that Windows Phone 7 is a threat to the world wide web and web apps. It plans to help the developers and users by going one up on fragmentation of Android but in the process will fragment the web app world itself.

China has unveiled the world's fastest supercomputer, the Tianhe-1A, at a high-performance computing conference in Beijing. The Tianhe-1A has a Linpack benchmark performance of 2.507 petaflops, according to Nvidia (Nasdaq: NVDA), whose Tesla M2050 graphics processing units (GPUs) were used in the supercomputer.

LXer Feature: 29-Oct-2010

Mr. Des Ligneris wrote that the adoption of Unity is a bold move and a good one for Canonical and Ubuntu, as the focus of computing is shifting wholesale to the internet and "The Cloud". It is an interesting viewpoint from Mr. Des Ligneris. I don't see the Unity plans as a blessing though. There is no point in turning a full fledged desktop machine into a "Mobile Internet Device". Their use cases don't overlap. While a desktop is certainly capable of performing MID tasks, it is not the intended operating area of a desktop machine.

Jon McCann, lead designer for GNOME Shell, shares his thoughts on Ubuntu's decision to replace GNOME with Unity. He is not happy.

Perhaps as important as the ability to properly and effectively scale hybrid clustered CPU environment (in this case over 6144 Intel Xeon CPUs and 5120 AMD GPUs), is the fact that the underlying operating system is entirely Linux.

Elementary 2.5 was released days ago and the latest Elementary theme brings in the much awaited dark panel elementary theme variant. Elementary 2.5 feels a lot more snappier too.

The open source Asterisk project started off as an effort to be an on-premise IP-PBX. Over the years, demand for increasingly scalable and modular approaches for voice communications has grown, which is why a new Asterisk project is being announced this week. The Asterisk Scalable Communications Framework (SCF) is a new project sponsored by Digium that aims to build an open source VoIP system for large-scale deployments.

ITTIA DB SQL version 3.3 introduces new tools for software developers, in the form of a custom memory allocator and graphical database editing utility. This makes ITTIA DB SQL even more suitable for embedded relational data storage in device applications.

This article describes installation and usage of Google Chrome web browser in conjunction with Ubuntu Linux. The article also touches on some privacy concerns in regard to Google Chrome and its restrictive license. Although, Google Chrome web browser is a multi-platform application this article will be focused solely on Google Chrome and i386 Ubuntu Linux.

Server provisioning is a set of actions to prepare a server, taking it from bare metal to a functioning system complete with an operating system, data and software.

The new European e-reader was just released and while it features a webbrowser, audio player, web store next to the book reading and everything with a touch screen, everything is also slightly buggy:

Oracle has updated its patent infringement suit against Google. Now the enterprise software corporation has point-blank accused the ad broker of directly copying its Java code, according to reports. According to InfoWorld, the originally vague suit now includes specific examples of code that Oracle claims Google had filched to use in Android, with examples thoughtfully attached. These include class libraries and documentation.

You've been using GIMP for cleaning up your photos -- but now you have a picture of a kitten or a bird or your new smartphone that you want to paste into another picture. It's one of the most common questions the GIMP community fields -- how do you take one part of a photo and make it ready to paste somewhere else? The answer is, "It depends." There are lots of different methods. Here are four of the most useful I've found.

Nautilus Elementary simplified Nautilus extensively. If you are wondering how Nautilus can be improved any further, DanRabbit has an answer every single time. Following mockups deals with integrating paths with search/edit entries in the Nautilus location bar.