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ver 20 sessions from LinuxCon 2010, held Aug. 10-12 in Boston, are now available for free online viewing courtesy of the Linux Foundation.

You will notice that a "printer queue" refers to the number of persons waiting before their print jobs have finished and if it doesn't that's because the device in question is either out of paper or simply jammed beyond repair. So wouldn't it be nice if you could simply put all these documents on your Ben Nanonote and carry them along? Sure it would.

Google developers have announced that Chromium, the open source browser on which the company builds the Chrome browser, is getting a GPU graphics overhaul. The development has been driven by the work on developing WebGL and 3D CSS transform support. It involves incorporating a new GPU process into the browser's many-process model which processes rendering requests from other Chromium processes through OpenGL or Direct3D using ANGLE (Almost Native Graphics Layer Engine)$.

Think you all knew this already, the c-korn/vlc ppa has been removed by the author himself. You can't live without PPAs in Ubuntu especially for most downloaded apps like VLC. Guys at LFFL have made a dedicated PPA for VLC. I just gave it a try and it worked awesome.

Last week we reported that a native ZFS implementation for Linux is soon being released that is based upon the work by Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory to bring Sun's ZFS file-system to Linux as a CDDL-licensed kernel module. As said though in that article, there is already a ZFS module for FUSE (File-system in User-space) that is already available and with it not living in the GPL-land of the Linux kernel, it is legally allowed, but it does not come without some performance overhead. Over the weekend though there's been some discussions in the related forum thread and elsewhere about the dependability of ZFS-FUSE and what the level of impact on using FUSE really amounts to in real-world usage. We have tested the ZFS-FUSE -- both the latest stable and Git snapshots -- and have compared this alternate ZFS Linux implementation to that of the native EXT4 and Btrfs.

The Software Freedom Law Center plans to create a new branch in New Dehli India to further expand their coverage of FLOSS and legal defense of free software. Mishi Choudhary will oversee the SFLC's New Dehli office.

The Linux Mint team has released the final version of Linux Mint 9 ("Isadora"), based on Ubuntu 10.04. Linux Mint 9 features a new software manager with 30,000 packages, a new backup tool, and menu and interface improvements, says the team.

For years, decades, the big companies didn't tend to wage patent wars on each other. The reason is simple. Major patent holders don't tend to target other major patent holders because of MAD (mutually assured destruction). Or, in other words, if you sue me, I sue you, and we can both burn potentially hundreds of millions per year in legal costs just to conduct a business fight. Well that was the case until Oracle went after Google and now Allen is suing the world.

"Your mother was right, it's better to share", that's the tagline of one of those awesome RedHat commercials that we featured some time ago. The idea of sharing is infectious and is fast spreading. Take Apertus for example, a project aimed at building an Cinema Camera based on the idea of sharing and mutual respect(read Open Source).

So, do you hate software patents yet, now that you've read about Paul Allen's patent infringement lawsuit against the world and his dog? I think it ought to inspire you, reading Allen's complaint, that it might get you to the tipping point, or at least help you to understand why most engineers do hate software patents, because they are a drain on the economy and a hindrance to innovation. So we did Allen's complaint as text, sort of as Exhibit A, shall we say, illustrating the point. But if you can figure out precisely what this litigation is about from this complaint, what the defendants are alleged to have done wrong, you are doing better than I am. It's unbelievably vague.

In around 15 minutes, the time it takes to install Ubuntu Server Edition, you can have a LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP) server up and ready to go. This feature, exclusive to Ubuntu Server Edition, is available at the time of installation.The LAMP option means you don’t have to install and integrate each of the four separate LAMP components.

Lens distortion is a fact of life. You can mitigate this problem, but you can’t avoid it completely (unless you are willing to invest in seriously expensive professional-grade lenses, that is). Fortunately, digiKam provides a set of tools that can help you to fix lens distortion with relative ease.

At home, you use Linux. At work, you use Windows. How do you share files between them? If you said, “USB drives” or “CDs” or “DVDs” there is a better way: Dropbox. Dropbox provides you with the ability to sync files between computers via a daemon. Additionally, they’re available on the web for those times when you don’t have physical proximity to one of your computers but you still need access to your files.

I haven't run the AbiWord word processor in an age. I barely ever run OpenOffice, or MS Office, or any office software outside of Google Docs. I decided to fire it up, and while I was looking for the word-wrap settings (still don't know if these exist ...) instead learned that AbiWord now offers SMART QUOTES. Now if you read entries from this blog in 2007, you could glean that I was somewhat obsessed with smart quotes in word-processing documents.

If you recall, Novell's former best friend for SUSE Linux was Microsoft. Microsoft and Novell have a partnership where the two parties had certificates that indemnified SUSE users from any intellectual property liability. In addition, Microsoft officially recommended SUSE Linux Enterprise for hybrid Windows/Linux shops. Microsoft also distributed coupons for maintenance and support for Novell's SUSE Linux Enterprise Server. The Microsoft-Novell partnership dates back to 2006.

Ubuntu Tweak 0.5.6 released, this new version comes with a major feature called - Desktop recovery, "Desktop Recovery is the tool integrated into Ubuntu Tweak to help people safely tweak with desktop settings, and never worry about how to go back. It has three basic actions: Backup: backup the current settings, keep as many as backups you want; Recover: recover to the backup; Reset: even you don’t have any backup, you can also reset to the default settings.

I whipped up a couple of t-shirt designs on the topic of Oracle's commitment to releasing Java. If you're attending JavaOne or OpenWorld, I'd appreciate it if you'd wear one, just to let Larry know that you care. Or if you just happen to be wandering the neighborhood (I know that there are lots of Java hackers who work within just a few blocks of Moscone). Or if you will be spending quality time with an Oracle salesperson. Or in any other situation where the spirit moves you. It's a gentle but clear way to express your feelings (well.... the last design on the page isn't all that gentle - but it's more fun).

This Bruce Byfield piece from Linux Magazine looks like it's going to go negative but instead offers a reasoned argument for why Debian GNU/Linux remains relevant and useful in the Ubuntu era.

LXer Feature: 29-Aug-2010

The big stories this week include still more fallout from the Oracle-Google lawsuit, 10 differences between Linux and BSD, the joys of determining Linux market share, Microsoft says they love Open Source..again, and last but not least Paul Allen decides to sue just about everybody for patent infringement. Enjoy!

I've had a serial terminal connected to my Linux box for as long as I can remember. Unfortunately, my old Wyse 25 is slowly giving up. Then I got my Ben Nanonote. The Ben features an Ethernet-over-USB gadget, which I could use to connect it to my OpenSuSE machine. So, my Ben Nanonote became a console. If my Wyse 25 finally goes to that big computer center in the sky, the only thing I have to do is to order another Ben Nanonote and hook it up.