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Many have criticized syslog-ng, a replacement for the syslog logging daemon with many additional features, for not being open enough. Syslog-ng has a closed-source commercial version and keeps the entire code base under a single copyright by requiring copyright transfer for contributions, which has been a sore spot in the eyes of many people. This may be part of the cause for syslog-ng failing to become the default system-logging daemon of modern Linux distributions. Now the project seeks to relieve these concerns and attract a wider contributor base with a new licensing model.

GREYC's Magic Image Converter (G'MIC) is a image retouching tool which has been made available as a GIMP plugin. It comes with a large number of pre-defined image filters and effects (more than 190!) and works on Windows, Linux and Mac OSX.

As you guys should know already, Shotwell is now the default photo manager for Ubuntu 10.10 instead of F-Spot. Yorba has released Shotwell 0.7.2 with a number of bug fixes and improvements. The latest update is available via ppa for Ubuntu Lucid and Maverick.

Have you ever thought about measuring the Internet in terms if malware per minute? Me neither, but someone has and it makes for uncomfortable reading if you are a Microsoft Windows user.

[Not exactly FOSS related but of interest to our readers I think. - Scott]

Acer founder Stan Shih, in a talks with reporters on September 8, commented that Apple's strong popularity is mainly due to its products such as iPad and iPhone, and these products are like mutant viruses, which are difficult to find a cure for in the short-term, but he believes that PC vendors will eventually find a way to isolate Apple and become immune. Shih noted that Google's Android operating system is already attracting a lot PC brands to develop related products and this is one of the factors that proves that PC brands will eventually be able to isolate Apple.

First some definitions. In this post let’s define an “open standard” as one that is: 1) freely available, 2) developed in an open process and 3) freely implementable, e.g., is royalty free. I freely acknowledge that there are interests out there that attempt to soften these criteria, but that only demonstrates the competitive power presented by truly open standards. We see similar “dumbing down” pressures on other popular marks of distinction, such as the constant pressure by “big agriculture” to allow more permissive use of pesticides in organic/biologique food. It is almost a law of nature that any item of relative scarcity and value will be counterfeited. Dumbing down definitions is just one way to counterfeit an open standard.

Well, well, well, guess who's back! It's been over seven months since i last published an article here at TuxArena, but now we're back on track and kicking! The series of reviews continues today with an article about one of the most popular audio player out there (and why not admit it, even controversial). I'm talking Amarok here.

A how-to on using FFmpeg to copy audio and video streams from one container to another without re-encoding them. Downloading a video from YouTube is pretty easy these days thanks to various browser extensions; and if the downloaded video is in a .mp4 container, I don’t have do anything since just about any video player, including my 1st generation PopcornHour reads them just fine. But some videos on YouTube are stuffed into .flv containers. So for those videos in .flv format, I want to convert them into .mp4 files at least, or something better. Additionally, for music videos I sometimes want just the audio; so I can play it in my car or with my desktop audio player. So an additional task is to extract just the audio into an audio container. On top of that, I would rather not re-encode the video or audio, I just want to extract it and stick it into a different container.

Nearly 6 years ago when we first started thinking about doing project hosting on code.google.com we noticed something particular about the other open source project hosting sites. They either accepted all Open Source Initiative (OSI) approved licenses, like Sourceforge, or they only accepted one, like the Free Software Foundation's Savannah project, which only accepted GPL'd projects.

Nautilus Terminal is a Nautilus extension which embeds the terminal into the Nautilus window. And just like it is with Dolphin, when you navigate to a different folder, the terminal also "cd"s into that folder.

In the Netherlands virtually every single company uses Windows. Windows is not a very secure Operating System, so everything is bolted down. I cannot install new programs, I cannot kill system processes, I cannot add any buttons or change the menu. The whole thing usually boots from the network. During the day, these are some of the annoyances I have to deal with.

Parrot S.A. is shipping a hackable $300 "quadrocopter" flying drone that runs Linux on a 468MHz ARM9 processor and may be remotely controlled by an iPhone. The AR Drone uses Wi-Fi to receive navigation instructions and transmit video from one of its dual cameras, and it ships with an SDK for developing multiplayer augmented reality games.

Google's Android mobile operating system was designed for smartphones, but it is increasingly being adopted by consumer electronics companies to power a range of new devices, including tablets and e-book readers. As we discovered when we looked at some of the upcoming Android tablet products a few months ago, the platform isn't natively suited for the tablet form factor and will need some refinement in order to deliver a top-notch user experience on devices that aren't smartphones.

On Thurday, September 2 two leading Linux distributions released milestone developmental versions on the road to their next releases. OpenSUSE released Milestone 1 of 11.4 and Ubuntu released a beta of their upcoming 10.10, codenamed Maverick Meerkat, for developers and community testers.

Damn Vulnerable Linux – The most vulnerable and exploitable operating system ever! Damn Vulnerable Linux is the most complete training environment for IT security with over 500.000 downloads. It includes all tools you need ready to go. Additionally tons of training material and exercises are included. Damn Vulnerable Linux works fine under Windows, Linux and Mac OSX using any virtual machine such as VMware, Qemu or KVM. You can let it run installed natively on a standard PC or even boot it from USB.

Canonical makes another small yet significant change in Ubuntu 10.10. Downloaded DEB packages will no longer open with GDebi package installer by default, instead it opens with Ubuntu Software Center!

Yesterday on the mailing list for GCC is was brought up if Apple's Objective-C 2.0 patches for the GNU Compiler Collection could be merged back into the upstream GCC code-base as maintained by the Free Software Foundation. Even though Apple's modified GCC sources still reflect the FSF as the copyright holder and are licensed under the GNU GPLv2+, it doesn't look like Apple wants their compiler work going back upstream any longer.

Various changes improve the performance and functionality of drivers for graphics chips in the latest Intel mobile processors. Nouveau now supports the Fermi chips used on recent GeForce graphics cards. The Radeon driver in 2.6.36 adds support for underscan, HyperZ and tiling. Extensions for the KDB debugger and Intel's KMS driver allow new debugging functionality.

In this week's Behind KDE interview, we talk with one of the unknown powers behind the sysadmin team, David Solbach. David is the maintainer of reviewboard.kde.org. However, there's much more to David than code review and contributing to KDE. He can also design and develop diagnostic blood analyzers and tell you what it was like to take a hit from the bursting of the dot-com bubble.

Global wireless chip leader Broadcom has released an open source WiFi driver for Linux with the intention to float the driver into the mainline kernel once it's been thoroughly evaluated. The first Linux distro to make use of the driver will be Ubuntu 10.10. A kernel developer at Canonical also said there are tentative plans to retroactively add driver support to 10.04.