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If you open nautilus and browse to the root filesystem, you’ll see something that looks like the image to the left. This is the default layout of the filesystem in Ubuntu 10.10, and is a peek into the ancient (by computer science standards) history and genealogy of Linux. The directories listed above are holdouts from one of the oldest standards, the Filesystem Hierarchal Standard, FHS. FHS is the system that defines what belongs where.

Video fanatics were thrilled when an iOS version of VLC made its way to the App Store recently. Finally, users could watch all manner of videos in a number of codecs from their iPhones or iPads, just like they do with the (ever-popular) VLC desktop clients. That may not last forever, though: a wrench has now been thrown into the mix by one of the many VLC code contributors, leading to a complex dispute over VLC's GNU Public License (GPL) and whether an app released through the App Store—or any mobile OS store, for that matter—violates that license.

Last week was the Ubuntu 11.04 Developer Summit in Orlando, Florida of the United States where a variety of topics were discussed. Aside from the very surprising announcement that Ubuntu 11.04 will use the Unity Desktop rather than GNOME's interface, most of the coverage on Phoronix was focused around the X.Org / graphics side of things, such as the xorg-server and Mesa to be used by Ubuntu 11.04 and the other discussions. Of course, other things were discussed too at this Ubuntu Developer Summit, and here's some of the other major happenings from the event.

Salix KDE edition is released. This is the very first official release of Salix KDE. this release includes the elegant KDE 4.4.3 accompanied by a very rich collection of KDE centric software, all in the size of a CD-ROM sized image. Salix OS is a Slackware-based Linux distribution that is simple, fast, easy to use and compatible with Slackware Linux.

I like Fedora, Red Hat's community Linux distribution, a lot. But, let me warn you right now, that it's not a Linux for beginners. That's not to say that the newest version of Fedora, Fedora 14 Laughlin, is hard to use. It's not. But, if you need a lot of handholding as you explore Linux, I think you'll be better off with Ubuntu.

Ever since Microsoft’s horrible 2009 fiscal year, which saw its first-ever revenue decline and layoffs of more than 5,000 employees, the company has been much more rigorous about shutting down failing products... With that in mind, here are the next 10 Microsoft products with targets on their backs.

[Another article confirming their 'end of life' cycle. - Scott]

Fresh off of an $8.5 million round of funding that was announced earlier today, Acquia co-founder Dries Buytaert is feeling pretty good about the open source business model. The company that he co-founded in 2007 sells software and products that leverage Drupal, the open source project he started in 2000. Drupal has grown from Buytaert’s experiment with new technologies into a worldwide group project that includes thousands of programmers. The White House, Harvard and MTV all use Drupal to run their sites. Acquia is just one of many companies profiting from the volunteer project.

Usually I work only with the software, I’m not an expert of the hardware, but the excellent presentation by Riccardo Lemmi made me want to read a bit of material on the world of open hardware in general and Arduino in particular. Open source hardware ( OSHW ) consists of physical artifacts of technology designed and offered in the same manner as free and open source software (FOSS). Open source hardware is part of the open source culture movement and applies a like concept to a variety of components. The term usually means that information about the hardware is easily discerned. Hardware design (i.e.schematics, bill of materials and PCB layout data) in addition to the software that drives the hardware are all released with the FOSS approach .

Over the passed few months there has been a lot of chatter about former Sun Microsystems' projects. Many have been lamenting Oracle's decisions on how best to steward these projects, and forks have surfaced. I used many of the products in question when they were maintained by Sun, and I find myself looking into a future that seems better rather than worse.

Samsung and Google are planning to announce a "Nexus Two" heir to the Galaxy S smartphone on Nov. 8 based on Android 2.3, says industry reports. Another report says the Nexus Two will go on sale exclusively in the U.K. for the holiday season.

Those who remember a time before Ubuntu will undoubtedly also remember that GNOME, although probably the second most popular desktop manager, didn't hold too much share of the Linux desktop market. KDE was king, and GNOME was a distant second. Then Ubuntu appeared and not only climbed its way to the top of the distribution game, but brought GNOME with it. Polls over the last few years have shown its use increasing to the point that it is oftentimes equalling or out-ranking KDE. But what will happen to GNOME now that Ubuntu 11.04 is going to ship with Unity?

Following the fork in the open office suite development and the foundation of The Document Foundation, the dispute with main sponsor Oracle appears to have come to a head. More than 30 leading figures in the German-language section who have previously donated their time to the OpenOffice.org project have announced their resignations. They include almost all of the core figures in the German-language branch of the project, which now finds itself without leadership.

The Worldwide Web Consortium has released the results of its first HTML5 conformance tests, and according to this initial rundown, the browser that most closely adheres to the latest set of web standards is...Microsoft Internet Explorer 9. Yes, the HTML5 spec has yet to finalized. And yes, these tests cover only a portion of the spec. But we can still marvel at just how much Microsoft's browser philosophy has changed in recent months.

Our Web browsers do everything these days, and they're also the #1 malware vector. Eric Geier reviews four excellent Web browsers for Linux, Mac, and Windows users that are safer, friendlier, and better than Internet Explorer. Just about all the mainstream web browsers today are available for download in Linux. Since most of your computing time is likely spent in front of the browser, you shouldn't just settle with the one that came preinstalled with your distribution. We'll review four different browsers you can use in Linux, where you can pick the one that's best for you.

Sponsored by openQRM Enterprise, the openQRM project has released a new Hybrid Cloud Computing plugin.

As anticipated, the 2.6.37 merge window closed yesterday and the first release candidate for the Linux 2.6.37 kernel is now available. Major changes that were pushed into the Linux 2.6.37 kernel include support for building the kernel without the Big Kernel Lock (BKL), many graphics DRM improvements, and more of the responsiveness patches.

Acquia, a company that sells products and services for popular open source content management system Drupal, has announced an $8.5 million round of funding led by by North Bridge Venture Partners.

The non-profit One Laptop Per Child has engineered laptops for the world's computerless masses. Given that billions of people don't have electricity, OLPC has designed laptops that can operate off-the-grid, perfect for Rwandan cities, aboriginal Canadian settlements -- and Amish colonies.

Hopefully this brief how-to will help others, this issue has been bugging me for years. I want the same capability in Fedora that exists in most recent versions of Windows -- disable the touchpad on my laptop if an external mouse is plugged in. Note that my how-to is a little hardware-specific regarding the actual disabling of the touchpad; I'll discuss that more at the end of the guide.

As Oracle's acquisition of Sun demonstrates, FOSS licenses alone aren't enough to protect developers. Luckily, there are other well-tested legal tools available. So why don't developers use them?