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The Ubuntu 10.10 Maverick Meerkat Linux distribution is set to debut on Sunday (fittingly: 10/10/10), and with it will come a renewed vision for the idea of the personal cloud. In contrast to the public cloud, where applications are served, the personal cloud is all about user data, content and synchronization. With Ubuntu 10.10, the Maverick Linux distribution will also take aim at improving the way users view their desktops and acquire new software.

A tag editor (or tagger) is an application which allows users to edit metadata of multimedia files. Metadata is the data about the audio data. It lets information about the audio file such as the title, artist, conductor, album, track length, lyrics, embedded images, and other information be stored in the audio file itself.

Oracle has lost a MySQL veteran who helped the plucky database start-up sink permanent roots in the developer and services communities. Kaj Arnö has left Oracle quietly, having submitted his resignation in June two days before Sun Microsystems' legal entity in Germany ceased to operate. Arnö was based in Munich.

Sacramento, CA, USA: September 7, 2010) The Linux Professional Institute (LPI), the world's premier Linux certification organization (http://www.lpi.org), announced with its affiliate organization LPI-Spain (http://www.lpi.org.es/) that a program in public schools in Spain to promote Linux education and certification has achieved successful results in its first six months of operation. This public education initiative with Proyecto Universidad Empresa (PUE) has recruited close to 20 training partners. PUE is Spain's leading agency in the development of IT training and certification and provides academic programs for such major IT organizations as Microsoft, Cisco and Sun.

The Firefox 4 search toolbar will offer Microsoft Bing as an alternative to Google, as Mozilla takes another step towards its traditional nemesis — and apparently hedges its bets against its traditional sugar daddy. As Mozilla announced this morning with a blog post, the latest English-language version of Mozilla's open source browser — due for release in November — will retain Google as the default search engine. But for the first time, Bing will be listed in the pull-down that lets you change the default. Google will be first on the menu. Yahoo! — now powered by Bing — will be second. And Bing will be third.

While companies from Google to Apple to Microsoft voice their ardent support for HTML5 and developers rush to show off the fun tricks it can do, those who actually oversee HTML5 are telling the world to cool their britches.

For the third time in a row, Worldforge participated in Google Summer of Code, with three students completing the program this year. Worldforge is the original open-source Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game (MMORPG) project, so it’s great at getting students who are interested in games into open source.

The world is awash in data. This fact is putting more and more pressure on file systems to efficiently scale to handle increasingly large amounts of data. Recently, Ric Wheeler from Redhat experimented with putting 1 Billion files in a single file system to understand what problems/issues the Linux community might face in the future. Let’s see what happened…

As the chairman and CEO of America Online, Steve Case helped connect mainstream America to the Internet for the first time. He orchestrated AOL’s $165 billion acquisition of Time Warner in 2001, which remains the largest merger in U.S. history, and he led the since-regretted combined company — which included Warner Bros. Studios, Time Inc. and CNN — for two years before stepping down as chairman in 2003. He left the board altogether in 2005, but with his private holding company Revolution and his philanthropic venture, the Case Foundation, he has remained active in shaping the way businesses and people use the Internet.

[Not FOSS related but I thought would be of interest to our readers. - Scott]

This guide explains how to set up an NFS server and an NFS client on Ubuntu 10.04. NFS stands for Network File System; through NFS, a client can access (read, write) a remote share on an NFS server as if it was on the local hard disk.

Command line weather app is example of why the cli is good. The command line is a great place to get weather information. Here, I discuss one cli-app for current conditions and forecasts, in the larger context of why you would ever want to use the command line anyway. There are several ways to use your computer to check the weather. One is to use the Nakob Weather Rock method. Suspend the computer using a rope from a tripod of sticks. If the computer is swaying, that means it is windy. If the computer is wet, that means it is raining.

Ok, I recognize and greatly appreciate the tremendous contributions of open source software. I really do. I use it every day, and have done so for many years. I’m a Linux person from the word go. But, I work for a Windows Shop. All Windows, All The Time. So, to fill out my time sheet in order to get paid, or to follow all the Track Changes in a Microsoft 2007 proposal document, I have to run Windows, because the company I work for uses 100% Windows software to run their business.

Gaming on the Linux platform is alive and well, thank you very much. In fact, there are more quality games available for Linux today than ever before. If you're using a recently released version of a distro, like Ubuntu, you'll find a wide range of game categories available right from the install menu. The options increase if you're not opposed to spending a little coin.

The Wall Street Journal reported yesterday that the Verizon iPhone was all but a done deal. But what would this phone look like and what would it mean to Verizon's Android sales?

Besides Linux drivers for gaming peripherals (like mice and other things) being an area where Linux tends to struggle compared to the level of support and functionality offered under Windows, enthusiast-oriented programs for being able to overclock your CPU and RAM is another area where Linux really provides no suitable alternatives to the plethora of Windows utilities. There is though a new open-source program for manipulating certain AMD CPUs under Linux.

A Mini Review of Xubuntu 10.10 RC1. I downloaded Xubuntu 10.10 RC 1 just after it was announced, and I saved the ISO image on my external USB disk drive. Shortly thereafter I ran the image from Virtualbox OSE and I was very pleased with it. I figured that I would wait a little closer to release time, then install this software on one of my systems and upgrade it. Soon this will become released software. My initial impressions were that this was a fast, clean, reasonable balance between a full general purpose system and a light general purpose system. It is not the lightest, nor the fastest, nor the most complete, but it strikes a very good balance between all of these extremes. Moreover, it is just as easy in every way to install and use as its parent, Ubuntu, but instead of using GNOME on the desktop, it uses Xfce, and it provides a somewhat different set of default applications than Ubuntu.

People forget that the central purpose of patents is to encourage real innovation, not simply reward people for being the first to file for even obvious ideas with over-stretched patent offices that set incredibly low bars. The world of patents has become perverted in recent years: patents are seen as valuable things in themselves – the more the merrier – irrespective of whether they do, truly, promote innovation. Worse: in the world of software, they are actually brakes on that innovation, particularly as they begin to interact and form impenetrable patent thickets.

One of the most controversial freedoms of free software is the right to simply take the code and go make your own competing project — what is popularly called a “fork”. It’s controversial because it seems like a betrayal of the original developer; because it distributes resources into competing groups, which may waste effort; and because it may create confusion in the marketplace of ideas that is free software distribution. But it is a critical freedom to have, and the recent fork of LibreOffice from OpenOffice.org, like the fork of X.org from Xfree86 years ago, shows why it’s so important. Read the full article at Free Software Magazine.

When reviewing a lightweight distribution, the term Swiss Army knife is sometimes employed to indicate that it's packed with features despite a diminutive size. However, at 11MB for the ISO, Tiny Core is more of a blank-slate distribution, as when booted from a CDROM or a USB stick, it presents the user with a simple desktop consisting merely of a task launcher and a package manager. It contains some good ideas and it's already perfectly usable, but I think it needs a few more refinements in order to become great.

The Desktop Summit is a co-located event which features the yearly contributor conferences of the GNOME and KDE communities, GUADEC and Akademy. Next year the conference will take place from 6 to 12 August, 2011 in the city center of Berlin at the Humboldt University, Unter den Linden. The event will feature keynotes, talks, workshops and team building events.