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Steve Jobs has apparently weighed into the debate over Apple's decision to deprecate Java on the Mac, and his terse explanation was promptly deprecated by Java founder James Gosling. According to MacRumors.com, a concerned Java developer emailed the Apple cult leader on Thursday to ask about Apple's plans for the platform, and as he's been known to do from time to time, Jobs responded.

It's a bit of irony, I guess, that there's no easily invoked option to encrypt the /home partition in the OpenBSD installer. I call it irony because the project is all about security and encryption, yet the developers seem to have a reason why encrypted user data isn't an option in the installer itself.

When I started covering digiKam on my Scribbles and Snaps blog, I did it mostly to document features I personally found useful for my photographic needs. Surprisingly, the blog articles turned out to be rather popular with other digiKam users, so I kept covering digiKam's nifty features as I discovered them.

Unfortunately there are no Gnome Shell daily builds in the Ricotz testing PPA anymore (for any Ubuntu version) and even though Ubuntu 10.10 has just been released, the Gnome Shell version in the official Ubuntu repositories is quite old so if you want to run the latest version of Gnome Shell (from GIT), you'll have to compile it. Fortunately, this is not as hard a I initially imagined.

It seems to me that hardly a week goes by when I don't see a release about yet another vendor joining the Linux Foundation. This week, the vendor is OpenLogic, an open source support and services vendor that I've covered for many years. It struck me as odd that OpenLogic is just joining the Linux Foundation now.

When it comes to dowloading photos from a storage card and organizing them in the process, Rapid Photo Downloader is just the ticket. But if you prefer to do that from the command line, here is a simple Bash script cobbled together by yours truly.

While users of Ubuntu 10.10 "Maverick Meerkat" have had access to an early release of the Catalyst 10.10 Linux driver that AMD had sent over to Canonical in advance in order to provide X.Org Server 1.9 support, the rest of the Linux-using public now finally has access to the official Catalyst 10.10 build. Those that have already used Catalyst 10.10 in the Ubuntu Maverick release have been rather excited for its changes.

Although the Oracle – Google Java lawsuit looks ugly, there is a possibility that something good comes out of it: full Java SE appications running on Android.

The organizers of a Linux presentation inside a shopping center asked me to prepare a short list of questions to hand out to all the visitors of that shopping center, that is to people that probably have no interest at all in software as such. Since it may be useful in any other FOSS advocacy event, I have put online an English version of those questions.

Ray Ozzie, Microsoft's chief software architect, is leaving the company. There are a couple of moments in Microsoft's long history that will be remembered as when the company changed forever. One of those is, naturally, when Bill Gates handed over the reins. The other will be the day that Ray Ozzie, Microsoft's chief software architect, leaves the building.

Apache HTTP Server is one of the most iconic open source projects in human history. It’s also the world’s most used and respected web server. In this tutorial you’ll learn how to add your own features to it…

Lighting techniques are highly dependent on the location of the scene at hand. The approaches to lighting an outdoor scene are radically different from the techniques used to light an indoor scene. Knowing these differences and when to use each is important when aiming for a believable result.

Back in July, Rackspace and NASA announced an effort to create sophisticated open source cloud computing infrastructure that could compete with proprietary offerings. Dubbed the OpenStack project, it's targeted to manage both software-centric and storage-centric aspects of cloud computing, focusing on clusters that can leverage distributed resources. The platform is now available under an Apache license, and NASA and Rackspace have discussed plans to switch their current cloud computing infrastructures to OpenStack, in an effort to leverage a more scaleable platform. OpenStack has substantial resources behind it, and is yet another sign that open source cloud efforts are to be taken seriously.

Even though I'm actively testing Ubuntu 10.10 (installed to a 4 GB USB flash drive) and find it extremely compatible with my current hardware (Lenovo G555), I expect I'll be sticking with Fedora 13 for at least the next few months. Everything's working too well to upset this particular apple cart.

This is a tutorial for installing OpenQRM 4.7 with LXC containers in Debian Lenny which can further be used for installing ISPConfig3 at the container level. OpenQRM 4.7 was released on September 30, 2010 with LXC support. Wonderful product. I hope that this information is useful to those who are interested. And thanks to Matt and OpenQRM developers for the hard work!

Microsoft has withdrawn from the development of IronPython and IronRuby and has handed over responsibility to the open source community. For many, the decision was hardly surprising: Shortly after leaving Microsoft early last August, the chief developer of IronPython, Jimmy Schementi, had already expressed his disappointment about his team having been reduced to half its size within a year. The developer said that this was the reason why the team needed so long to complete the Visual Studio support for IronPython. It was probably also the reason why IDE support was long unavailable in Visual Studio for IronRuby. A related prototype was only announced by Jason Zander, who was responsible for the implementation development of the two script languages, in a blog posting which also explains the changes affecting the two projects.

While the Linux 2.6.36 kernel was released yesterday, we already have our eyes towards the Linux 2.6.37 kernel to see what new features this next kernel will bring, any performance changes that may come as a result (we continue to benchmark the kernel everyday), and this will likely be the kernel version used by Ubuntu 11.04 and other early 2011 Linux distributions. While we have already reported on some of the features that should be merged into the Linux 2.6.37 kernel, there's at least three major features we have been looking forward to that will be sadly missing from this kernel.

Wildfire Games has announced the release of "0 A.D. Alpha 2 Bellerophon", the second alpha version of 0 A.D., a free, open-source game of ancient warfare. This release comes with victory conditions, fog of war, formations, a new in-game GUI and many other features that make 0 A.D. feel more like a real RTS than ever before.

Nokia has announced some new plans to refine its mobile platform strategy. The company says that the current Symbian versioning scheme will be dropped in favor of a more rapid and incremental approach to development. The company also affirmed its commitment to the open source Qt development toolkit, which will become the "sole focus" of Nokia's application development efforts across both Symbian and the Linux-based MeeGo platform.

Now under VMware's wing, Zimbra has released Zimbra Desktop 2.0 productivity client. Zimbra Desktop 2.0's main feature is email, so we decided to see how it stacks up against Gmail. The verdict? Google probably isn't too worried.