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LXer Feature: 17-Oct-2010

In the Roundup this week we have news of IBM deciding to back Oracle's OpenJDK instead of Harmony, Phoronix releases the 2010 Linux graphics survey results, 5 mistakes Linux newcomers make and lastly John E. Dunn gets the crazy idea to ditch Windows for Ubuntu. Enjoy!

Tiny Core Linux 3.2 is released. This release comes with many updates and improvements, Updated busybox, adding mouse "select for copy" to several GUIs, better internationalization suport, and improved Onboot and OnDemand handling.

The NEW PCLinuxOS Magazine staff is pleased to announce the release of the Command Line Interface Intro Special Edition of the PCLinuxOS Magazine.

You cannot convince me this wasn't gang related. I've seen the final police report. 19 people were interviewed because they were either neighbors or claimed to be outside in the courtyard when it happened. I've spent a lot of time in this neighborhood and I know who runs it. 19 people refused to give any information. 19 frightened or criminally-involved people refused to give any information.

While OpenShot and PiTiVi are the two currently most talked about open-source non-linear video editing systems for Linux, that's not all there is out there. There's also Kdenlive, Kino, an open-source Lightworks is coming soon, and then perhaps the most advanced open-source video editor of them all: Cinelerra.

With Internet Explorer 9 being acclaimed as the fastest ever browser client from Microsoft, DaniWeb decided to put it to the test against Chrome, Firefox, Opera and Safari and see just how quick it really is in a real world test of web browsing speed.

XKB and Xmodmap First, I must say that Linux (Unix) uses two approaches to configure the keyboard layout (they are both independent of each other): XKB and Xmodmap. XKB is an extension of X, many people say that it is better, but too robust and perhaps less understandable by beginners. Xmodmap is one of the oldest ways how to configure your keyboard layouts – a little easier approach, especially good for experimentation, but no only that.

Cloud services are the chief focus of Google's Chrome 8 version. Google this week rolled out the first development versions of Chrome 8, the latest vein of its development browser. The primary focus for Chrome 8 is on cloud-based services, probably with Google's Chrome OS imminent release in mind.

After some days with the latest Ubuntu Linux desktop release, I was planning to devote a few graphs to extolling its many virtues. This is not a hard exercise because Ubuntu 10.10 is exemplary, about as good as it gets at doing the main things desktop operating systems were originally invented to do. It’s refined, uncluttered, comes with plenty of apps for most people and, most of all, it’s stable and fast. It runs happily in 1GB of RAM, something no version of Windows has done since the obsolete XP. There’s even a netbook edition with larger icons.

In Linux, setting an image as the desktop wallpaper is not a difficult task, but getting it to change automatically at a certain interval is. If you have a good collection of wallpapers and want to see them in action on your desktop, there are some nice wallpaper changer software, i’ll try to give you an overview of some of them: Desktop Drapes, Webilder, wallpaper-tray, desktopnova, wally

QEMU, the processor emulator that can be used alone for running unmodified guest operating systems and can optionally take advantage of KVM (the Kernel-based Virtual Machine) for greater virtualization performance with Intel and AMD hardware, has finally reached version 0.13 after suffering from a few delays. As was reported by us back in January of this year, QEMU 0.13 would focus on bringing new features and with this release they have achieved introducing several new features.

"So we've probably all seen the mock-ups for Firefox 4.0 by now, but has any of it been implemented? In the Windows version, yes. On the GNU+Linux version, partially. And it looks like it's going to stay that way. I'm going to show you what's different in the current development version (nightly 4.0b8pre) from 3.6."

You have all heard the jokes that the end of the Mayan calender on December 21st 2012 might bring about "the end of the world" in some type of cataclysmic event. Regardless of whether or not this is necessarily true, there have been more than a few technology releases/announcements in the past couple years that many of us thought would never happen.

A software synthesizer, also known as a softsynth, is computer software which creates digital audio. Computer software that generates music is not a recent arrival. However, with processors that offer multiple cores and faster clock speeds, software synthesizers can complete tasks that previously needed dedicated hardware.

I firmly believe that systems should be self maintaining. In my career as a Linux Architect, I am always deep in thought; thinking of new ways to improve the environments that I am responsible for managing. These thoughts typically lead to the development of new methods to improve service delivery which reduce operations and maintenance costs, and ultimately improve the product that I deliver to my customers (consumers of my delivered services). In my mind, a Linux server is just a tool used to deliver a service. When the tool fails, the provided service fails and ultimately; I fail.

Wine 1.2.1 arrived last week as a bug-fix release for Wine 1.2 that was introduced back in July, but for those living with the bi-weekly development snapshots to leverage new features already in Wine 1.3 like ARM support for winelib, Wine 1.3.5 is out with more feature activity.

Thanks to the relatively simultaneous development of smaller and cheaper laptops and advances in open-source computing, schools that could not afford 1-to-1 computing programs a few years ago are finding ways to adopt them today.

At the start of September we reported on Unigine's OilRush game, which will have a native Linux client and really be the first title to make its debut that's powered by this advanced OpenGL (and DirectX) engine (after Primal Carnage abandoned Unigine) that up until now has just really been seen by gamers and consumers with some amazing tech demos. The OilRush game is still expected to be released this quarter, but some new screenshots for now are available.

Naev is a 2D space trading and combat game similar to Escape Velocity, many of you may have played before. Escape Velocity which have a huge fan following, inspired many games and NAEV is one of them. Naev can be played on many Linux distros and is tested on Ubuntu, Gentoo, Fedora and Arch Linux.

If you spend much time with any open source project, you're probably going to be spending time in IRC. If you want to make sure you don't miss a minute of your project's conversations, you'll want to check out Smuxi.