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The Linux World is rarely dull, but last week was an emotional roller coaster for users of openSUSE and Ubuntu. First Novell was sold to Microsoft and Attachmate with no mention of the fate of openSUSE. Then Ubuntu founder Shuttleworth told reporters that Ubuntu may switch from the six-month release cycle to daily updates. Both items garnered lots of speculation, elation, and worry until both parent companies finally addressed them.

The progress made by the LibreOffice folks so far is impressive, at least when it comes to attracting contributors. The third beta was released on November 18th, and seems to have impressive momentum. The release notes list 118 contributors who’ve helped with the development just between beta 2 and beta 3. How’s it looking so far? Don’t expect miracles, but it’s shaping up nicely.

The Supreme Court has agreed to hear a case that may have a significant effect on the threshold under which patents can be invalidated in the US. In Microsoft Corp v i4i Limited Partnership, the court will look at the standard of proof by which patents can be declared invalid. In most civil cases in the US, the standard is "preponderance of the evidence", but in patent invalidity cases the Court of Appeal for the Federal Circuit has stated that the test should be "clear and convincing" evidence - which is a much higher threshold to achieve. If the Supreme Court decides this standard should be revised it could be of significant benefit to defendants claiming that patents being asserted against them are invalid.

Recently, Mark Shuttleworth, founder of Ubuntu shocked the Ubuntu Linux world when he announced that the next release of the popular Linux, Ubuntu 11.04, would use Unity instead of GNOME as its default desktop interface. Why move from pure GNOME to Unity? As Shuttleworth explained to the Ubuntu developers, "Lots of people are already committed to Unity -- the community, desktop users, developers, and platform and hardware vendors." In particular, he noted, "Original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) favor Unity. They're happy to ship it."

To those that missed it in our Phoronix Forums where it was discovered, NVIDIA two days ago uploaded a new binary Linux (x86/x86_64) driver to their FTP server. This NVIDIA graphics driver is marked as the 260.19.26 beta, but they have yet to officially announce this new release or even provide a change-log.

In Linux, a lot of design makeover starts with a mockup. We have already experienced it first hand with the clever redesign of Nautilus called Nautilus Elementary. The following Evolution mockups are so impressive that I really hope someday these changes will be implemented in Evolution partially at least.

For the past eighteen months, KDE has been my primary desktop. I use it about two-thirds of the time, with the rest of my desktop usage divided between GNOME, Xfce, and occasionally other desktops like LXDE. You could call me a generally happy user -- but, as with any desktop not designed for me personally, KDE has one or two quirks or deficiencies that make my computing less than ideal. To be sure, KDE has made many improvements since the last time I complained about its shortcomings, in 2008.

The graphics capabilities of modern computers are truly amazing. Whether you're viewing an animated Mandelbrot fractal, watching a DVD, designing a highly-detailed 3D image in a CAD program, or just playing a contemporary game, impressive graphics are the rule. Until recently the creation of stunning displays depended on deep familiarity with programs and coding environments that seemed to require a Master's degree in digital image processing and an arcane knowledge of video hardware. In fact, the old ways of creating complex graphics really were almost that demanding. But the old ways are always steadily morphing into the new ways, and the new ways are bringing greater capabilities to the normal user, even in specialized fields such as computer graphics and digital signal processing.

Apple makes some great hardware, but their closed eco system is far from Linux-friendly. Thankfully it can be done – here’s how you can use your iPad, iPhone and iPod with your Ubuntu Linux computer…

FOSDEM is one of the largest gatherings of Free Software contributors in the world and happens each February in Brussels. We are now inviting proposals for talks on KDE, KDE software and general desktop topics to take place in the Cross Desktop devroom. This is a unique opportunity to show the novel ideas of KDE to a wide audience of developers.

Add-ons are useful if you want to add new functionality to Thunderbird or change its appearance. Today i have chosed some nice add-ons that hope will be useful for you.

Learn to manage file ownership and permissions on your Linux® filesystems. Learn about access modes such as suid, sgid, and the sticky bit and how to use them to enhance security. You can use the material in this article to study for the LPI 101 exam for Linux system administrator certification, or just to learn about file ownership, permissions, and security.

This tutorial shows how to set up an Ubuntu Jeos based server as a spamfilter in gateway mode. In the end, you will have a SpamSnake Gateway which will relay clean emails to your MTA. You will also be able to view your incoming queue, train your SpamSnake and carry out a few more advanced operations via Baruwa.

Lightweight Portable Security is a LiveCD distro designed by the US Department of Defense to function as a secure end node, in other words, a safe environment from which to access the web or a remote desktop host. The focus is on security, and for this reason, it boots from a CD and executes from RAM, providing a web browser, a file manager and a few other small tools.

Review of ten popular applications as replacements for applications which ship by default with Ubuntu Desktop CD.

Red Hat has acquired Makara, which develops software for managing applications in the cloud. The move could strengthen Red Hat’s Cloud Foundations, platform as a service (PaaS) and virtualization strategies. And yes, there are some key implications for channel partners as well. Here's why.

VLC 1.1.5 is the latest and fifth bugfix release of the VLC 1.1.x branch. Latest VLC comes with a number of important bug fixes and other security related improvements. Here is how you install latest VLC 1.1.5 in Ubuntu Maverick, Lucid using PPA.

If you've ever paid attention to the market share statistics for desktop operating systems you probably know that Linux is most frequently pegged at about one percent. That's a dramatic underrepresentation, of course, due largely to the fact that Linux is free. Whereas Microsoft, for example, keeps careful count of each and every copy of Windows it distributes, in the case of Linux there's typically no vendor keeping count. Rather, users simply download, share, and enjoy the open source operating system to their heart's content without any official monitoring.

Never memorize what you can look up. This is one of the essential rules of system administration, and it applies very well to creating crontab entries. If you're not an expert on cron, don't worry -- just use the Corntab site or iPhone app. Generally speaking, cron syntax is not hard to remember. You have five fields to specify the minute, hour, day of the month, month of the year, and/or day of the week that you want to run a job automatically. It seems straightforward, but plenty of users and admins get it wrong -- not because it's really difficult, but just because it's not something they do often enough to memorize the correct syntax for oddball times.

A Quake-style terminal is a drop-down terminal which can be shown/hidden just like the console in Quake (and most of the first-person shooter games out there), using the press of a key (~ in Quake). Guake is a terminal application written in GTK which uses the F12 keyboard shortcut by default to show or hide it.