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A perennial whinge is "Linux and FOSS have too many choices! It's confusing and scary!" So what's the answer, a single global dictator?

Today, Mark Shuttleworth’s blog was added into Planet Gnome after he made a request for it to be added. Why is this a controversy? Mainly because some people want blogs that are featured on Planet Gnome to be from authors that are active in the Gnome community and to actually blog about Gnome as a topic. If Canonical’s contributions to Gnome are being called into question (as evident from the links in closing thoughts below) then what results is a controversial decision for Mark’s blog to be added in.

PeaZip 3.3 is released, this release brings various fixes and an improved user interface focused in better integration with web search (optionally on multiple search engines at once) and in launching favorite applications, scripts or websites/web services from PeaZip.

We already introduced a beautiful collection of GIMP tutorials before, it's time for some more. But this time, they are a bunch of GIMP video tutorials and are solely meant for absolute beginners, those who only have the vaguest idea on what GIMP is and what it is capable of.

Dan Kegel released winetricks 20100917 today, new verbs crypt32, devenum, d3dx9_26, winhttp. Another fortnight, another Winetricks.

Canonical Ltd., the commercial sponsor of Ubuntu, unveiled the a list of provisional tracks for the Ubuntu Developer Summit (UDS) scheduled for October 25-29, 2010 in Orlando, Florida.

Chrome continues its upward climb. Can it eclipse Firefox? Google's Chrome browser is in the fast lane. And with the expected release of Chrome OS in the near future, there is every chance that the relative newcomer in the world of browsers could topple Firefox and become the second most popular browser.

The reason it caught my attention was not because I agree with him (I do), but because the idea of simple authentication, especially among disparate systems, has been the Holy Grail of IT, and every time we think we have it solved, the solution seems to fall apart in our hands. In fact, OpenID/OAUTH/OATH is only the most recent attempt at solving the authentication problem. The last attempt was a little standard called X.500, and Jan's tweet this morning reminded me, not only of x.500 and its promises, but how far the standard has failed, because of its complexity.

The Smart Book is an ultra-modular, ultra-mobile computing device, which integrates an IP phone, a tablet and a netbook into one, Linux based machine. Although, there is not enough information (yet) about the exact nature/working of the hardware/software components, the modularity of the device is stunning.

One of the first things to learn about programming is to check your ego at the door. It's a complicated craft, and even the most hardened pros are regularly amazed by what they don't know. "Programming is one of those things that humans are not quite smart enough to do," warned Slashdot blogger Thangodin.

iRedMail is a shell script that lets you quickly deploy a Open Source Mail Server solution in less than 2 minutes. This tutorial shows how to set up a mail server with Postfix, Dovecot, Amavisd, ClamAV, SpamAssassin, and RoundCube with the help of iRedMail on Ubuntu 10.04.

We reported last month that a native ZFS module was coming to Linux and would be released in mid-September. Rather than using ZFS-FUSE that runs the Sun/Oracle ZFS file-system under the FUSE module so that it lives outside the Linux kernel (and runs rather slowly as our benchmarks show), this new ZFS module is native to Linux and open-source but due to the CDDL license it's being distributed as a module and will not be included in the mainline Linux kernel. This module has now entered a closed beta testing process.

Google's open source Android operating system is not as free as it seems, Microsoft argues, because it infringes a number of patents. When asked whether open source models created problems for vendors with licensed software, the software giant went on the offensive. "It does infringe on a bunch of patents, and there's a cost associated with that," Tivanka Ellawala, Microsoft financial officer told MarketWatch. "So there's a... cost associated with Android that doesn't make it free."

[There is nothing like some good old fashion Microsoft FUD for your Friday afternoon. - Scott]

Watching Ubuntu and Fedora development is something like watching episodes of Iron Chef: Given roughly the same ingredients and the same amount of time, the two projects produce vastly different dishes. The Fedora 14 and Ubuntu 10.10 release cycle is particularly pronounced in this regard, with Ubuntu's focus largely on refining improvements from 10.04 and Fedora introducing major changes to the infrastructure.

Reviewing HPC hardware is not easy. You usually need to travel to a data center and look at a rack of servers while someone tells you where they landed on the Top500 list. One could review a server, but basically they are all pretty much the same inside. They are running Linux and use either AMD or Intel processors. In addition, testing a cluster takes time because running meaningful programs that exercise the whole system must be done carefully. And finally, clusters are not sitting on the “shelf” as they vary by customer due to possible packaging, interconnect, processor, and storage choices.

According to Wikipedia, IMAP (Internet Message Access Protocol), together with POP is one of the most popular protocols for email retrieval. In this short tutorial I will show you how to set up KMail (the default email client in KDE4 and also most - if not all - distributions which ship it, like Kubuntu) with a GMail account, using IMAP as a protocol.

A vulnerability in the 32-bit compatibility mode of the current Linux kernel (and previous versions) for 64-bit systems can be exploited to escalate privileges. For instance, attackers can break into a system and exploit a hole in the web server to get complete root (also known as superuser) rights or permissions for a victim's system.

One of the new applications introduced with KDE 4 was Okular. KDE 3 had a PDF viewer named KPDF, but Okular aims to be a complete document viewing solution, supporting many different file types. Okular is fast-loading and works in any operating system and desktop environment that can run KDE applications.

Our two prior articles have detailed the performance results from a new patch, bcache, that uses SSDs to cache hard drives. We’ve looked at the throughput and IOPS performance of bcache and — while it is still very new and under heavy development — have found that in some cases it can help performance. This article examines the metadata performance of bcache hoping to also find areas where it can further boost performance.

OpenOffice.org just finished their annual conference in Budapest, Hungary. One of the outcomes of the conference announced today is the need for developers to spend more time together to properly fix problems.