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Canonical makes another small yet significant change in Ubuntu 10.10. Downloaded DEB packages will no longer open with GDebi package installer by default, instead it opens with Ubuntu Software Center!

Yesterday on the mailing list for GCC is was brought up if Apple's Objective-C 2.0 patches for the GNU Compiler Collection could be merged back into the upstream GCC code-base as maintained by the Free Software Foundation. Even though Apple's modified GCC sources still reflect the FSF as the copyright holder and are licensed under the GNU GPLv2+, it doesn't look like Apple wants their compiler work going back upstream any longer.

Various changes improve the performance and functionality of drivers for graphics chips in the latest Intel mobile processors. Nouveau now supports the Fermi chips used on recent GeForce graphics cards. The Radeon driver in 2.6.36 adds support for underscan, HyperZ and tiling. Extensions for the KDB debugger and Intel's KMS driver allow new debugging functionality.

In this week's Behind KDE interview, we talk with one of the unknown powers behind the sysadmin team, David Solbach. David is the maintainer of reviewboard.kde.org. However, there's much more to David than code review and contributing to KDE. He can also design and develop diagnostic blood analyzers and tell you what it was like to take a hit from the bursting of the dot-com bubble.

Global wireless chip leader Broadcom has released an open source WiFi driver for Linux with the intention to float the driver into the mainline kernel once it's been thoroughly evaluated. The first Linux distro to make use of the driver will be Ubuntu 10.10. A kernel developer at Canonical also said there are tentative plans to retroactively add driver support to 10.04.

I came across Chakra Linux on distrowatch's feed late last week. The Chakra project started off as a derivative of Arch Linux. It was a modular KDE Live CD with some extra tool sets to make setting up and using Arch Linux less of a hassle. Notice the careful usage of the word was in my last sentence...

This guide will help you easily set up an email server on Ubuntu using Qmail as MTA, OpenLDAP as a back-end for users, and Courier IMAP for IMAP server.

In this months kernel column John Masters discusses another eventful kernel cycle, not to mention the latest round of Linus Torvald's (justified?) rants, the Kernel Summit 2010 and some pretty intense penguin-on-penguin action…

Yet another important project is going open source. This time, it is the popular robotic software platform called Urbi. Widely popular robotic projects like Segway RMP, Lego Mindstorm, Aldebaran Nao etc. runs on Urbi robotic software platform.

In 2005 I dedicated an issue of Standards Today to the future of the Semantic Web. The centerpiece was a very detailed interview (over 5,700 words) with the inventor of both the Web and the Semantic Web, Tim Berners-Lee. It's now five years later, and the Semantic Web may - finally - be ready to take off. Better hope it does.

Since we’re at it – we not only took the new Mono garbage col­lec­tor through it’s paces regard­ing lin­ear scal­ing but we also made some inter­est­ing mea­sure­ments when it comes to query per­for­mance on the two .NET plat­form alternatives.

Gartner has released a report predicting that by 2014, Android will be second only to Symbian in mobile operating system marketshare worldwide, with the two platforms accounting for nearly 60 percent of the mobile OS market within the next four years. The news follows numerous recent bullish reports on the state of Android in the U.S.

Recently I purchased a MacBook Pro. Principally because I like the hardware, and can put Linux on it. However, it has also given me the opportunity to use OSX. In fact I’ve been using OSX quite a lot – given I’ve paid for it, I want to really see how it works. However, in the course of using it, I’ve come across a number of features of Linux and the KDE desktop that I greatly miss.

If you love using macros in spreadsheets, OpenOffice's macros might suit all of your needs

T-Mobile USA announced an HTC-manufactured heir to its original G1 Android phone, touted as the first handset to support the company's new 4G-like HSPA+ network. The T-Mobile G2 runs Android 2.2 on a new 800MHz Qualcomm Snapdragon MSM7230 processor, and offers 4GB internal and 8GB external flash, dual cameras, and a 3.7-inch screen with a hinge-slider QWERTY keyboard.

Software developer Applidium have developed a version of the VLC open source media player for Apple's line of iOS-enabled devices. The app, which is built entirely on open source code, was submitted to Apple's approval board today. The developers are confident that the player will be available as soon as next week.

Last October, after my third Sylvania netbook failed, I took the refund I had received and bought an HP Mini 110 netbook as a replacement. I ordered directly from HP and customized the little machine to my needs, choosing a 16GB SSD over the 160GB conventional hard drive. I also chose to upgrade the machine to 2GB RAM but did it myself with after market RAM rather than pay HP's rather inflated price for memory. My system came preloaded with Ubuntu 8.04 (Hardy Heron) and HP's now defunct Mi interface. I've now had the machine for just short of 11 months and I am still completely pleased with it.

The Linux Foundation (LF) announced speakers for The Linux Foundation End User Summit, scheduled for Oct. 12-13 in Jersey City, New Jersey. The invitation-only event for end users and top Linux developers features keynotes from the LF's Jim Zemlin and British Telecom Chief Scientist JP Rangaswami.

Recently at work we installed a biometric access control system. I was not in charge of this buy, but I tried the Windows software that is responsible for data handling and connects to biometric terminals. Today, we were doing a few more work in our office, and drilling a hole to basement, the worker made bullseye on power cable for biometrics terminals. So I had the chance to watch one of the biometrics terminal boot. What was my surprise when I see on the small LCD a Penguin and the word LINUX.

Manage your TCP connections with Keep-Alive settings on a Postfix mail server for better performance or increased reliability with client connections.