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Despite respectable download numbers from AppWorld and other markets, BlackBerry applications have been a second class citizen for some time. Hiding beyond the ubiquitous email, calendar, and contacts, the application environment sits — often unknown and unseen.

The study also doesn't shed much light on potential hybrid deployments where Linux is deployed alongside Windows and Unix. "We didn't ask that question exactly," McPherson said. "I bet you are correct that many would be hybrid, and that would be good to ask next time."

Before we get into it though, the topic of focus, the ASUS RT-N16, is a Gigabit and Wireless-N compatible router that uses a Linux kernel based firmware (essentially, the operating system) by default. The default firmware (or, operating system) on the router can be replaced with a different operating system (OS) such as TomatoUSB.

In the Free Software ecosystem, nearly everybody has heard about KDE. People associate us with a great desktop environment and some interesting applications. On other desktops there may be installations of KDE software, but those people may not know a single KDE application. This is why Torsten Rahn and Bastian Holst went to INTERGEO this year to present Marble.

From my perspective, IBM's move to the OpenJDK is long overdue. When I asked IBM yesterday why it took them so long, I was told it was just a question of having a dialogue with Oracle, whereas there wasn't one with Sun. To me, that's the primary reason why Oracle will continue to be successful with Java. Oracle is a sales driven company. Make no mistake about it, Oracle 'sold' IBM on the idea of joining the OpenJDK. Oracle closed the deal that Sun could not. http://blog.internetnews.com/skerner/2010/10/red-hat-hails-i...

Last month we carried out our fourth annual Linux Graphics Survey in which we sought feedback from the Linux community about the most common graphics drivers and hardware in use, what display/GPU-related features desktop users are most interested in, and collect other metrics to aide developers. Here are the results from this year's survey.

Skolelinux is often refered to as Debian Edu or the educational subset of the GNU/Linux distribution Debian. It is a Debian Pure Blend, a subset of Debianthat has been tailored to be used out-of-the-box in schools.

Alcatel-Lucent is taking aim at the enterprise with a new 10 Gigabit Ethernet switching platform that is the cornerstone of its new Application Fluent Networks strategy. The OmniSwitch 10K platform can scale up to 256 10GbE ports, delivering up to 5.12 TBS of total switching capacity. The new switching platform includes technologies from Alcatel-Lucent's experience with service providers. The OmniSwitch 10K is also the first enterprise platform from Alcatel-Lucent to leverage its new Linux-based AOS 7 network operating system.

As a member of the Apache Software Foundation, my views on open source tend to gravitate towards more liberal licenses, like the Apache License (v2.0), BSD, or MIT licenses. I strongly believe in enabling companies to take open source software and do whatever they wish to do with it, placing as little restrictions as feasible under current laws. I believe that better communities for software development are enabled by these liberal licensing situations. Rather than creating a single power with significantly more rights, as seen in the “open core” movement, liberal open source development encourages real, dedicated and sustainable contributions, made by companies with business models other than selling support and ‘enterprise features’.

How will GNOME 3 compare to KDE 4? The picture is still emerging, since GNOME 3's official release is still months away. However, with GNOME Shell available as a preview in the latest GNOME releases, a general outline is starting to be visible. Of course, some elements cannot be compared yet. It would be unfair, for instance, to compare panels in any detail, because in the previews GNOME Shell's panel has neither applets nor configurations. Nor, for that matter, can much be said yet about the upcoming KDE 4.6, which should be the latest version when GNOME 3.0 is released.

Docky is a simple light weight dock application for Linux. It's newbie friendly with a simple interface and easy to learn configurations. There are a number of default themes which more or less look like the same. Here are a few Docky themes that quite stand apart.

In an earlier article, we studied the fundamental aspects of shell scripting and covered topics such as redirection, variables, arithmetic expansions and control constructs. In this part, we will focus on more advanced concepts that are useful for system administrators and software developers…

There is now a legal publication with the goal of explaining FOSS issues to lawyers. It's the first peer-reviewed law review entirely devoted just to the legal issues of FOSS. It's called The International Free and Open Source Software Law Review, or IFOSSLR, and it's "a collaborative legal publication aiming to increase knowledge and understanding among lawyers about Free and Open Source Software issues," as they describe it. If this is an area of law that interests you, X marks the spot.

In this article by Jonathan Bennett, author of the book OpenStreetMap, we'll look at the tools and techniques used by the OpenStreetMap community to gather data using GPS, and upload it to the website.

Here's some fun news: "Gartner Says Android to Become No. 2 Worldwide Mobile Operating System in 2010 and Challenge Symbian for No. 1 Position by 2014." I moved to a smart phone within the last year. In the past I hadn't really needed one. When I went somewhere I typically had my laptop with me, so I usually hid behind that. However, as my role became more and more driven by general email and Internet access rather than specific proprietary programs I realized that I wanted to have more access and functionality without lugging the computer around all the time. If you know me at all, you know I'm a Linux nut, so I naturally gravitated toward an Android phone. I love it. The openness suits me and I get to use my curiosity and ability to tinker to my advantage.

The survey, entitled “Linux Adoption Trends: A Survey of Enterprise End Users” and published in partnership with Yeoman Technologies, asked nearly 2,000 selected users if they thought that the use of Linux within their organisations would increase within the next five years. Almost 80% of respondents said they felt it would. According to the survey, in the last two years, 66% of new Linux deployments have been green-field deployments, while 36.6% have been migrations from Microsoft Windows. Over 60% of respondents said that they would use Linux for more mission critical workloads within the next twelve months.

Policy group New America has written a scathing blog entry that criticizes the HTC G2 for including a "hardware rootkit" that prevents users from installing custom firmware on the device. The report appears, however, to be based on a misunderstanding of technical issues raised in an XDA discussion thread. The G2 isn't unique in blocking third-party firmware, and it doesn't come with anything that could correctly be described as a rootkit.

Linux server deployments are expected to take slightly more business from Microsoft than Unix in the next year, according to latest data. A Linux Foundation poll of major public and private sector organizations using Linux has found that 76.4 per cent plan to add more Linux servers during the next year, with just 41.2 per cent planning to add more Windows servers to their IT infrastructure's mix.

I finally became fed up with this one little idiosyncrasy that my KDE-based home entertainment center kept exhibiting -- it would not let me specify VLC as the action handler when I inserted a DVD in the drive. Instead, it was most insistent that I use the KDE default DragonPlayer, which had somehow gotten confused about where the drive was and could no longer start the DVD. That was all it took for me decide to to take the time to rebuild the home entertainment system last weekend. You may recall from a previous article, I discovered Linux Mint 9 not too long ago, and really liked it.

The Linux Foundation says Linux is poised for significant growth in the enterprise, some of it at the expense of Windows servers. 76.4% of companies surveyed are planning to add more Linux servers in the next twelve months. 41.2% are increasing their Windows servers, while 43.6% will decrease or stay the same. Over the next five years 79.4% of businesses surveyed plan to add more Linux servers compared to other operating systems, while only 21.3% plan to add more Windows servers.