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Much attention goes toward mainline kernel releases, but relatively few users are actually running those kernels. Instead, they run kernels provided by their distributors, and those kernels, in turn, are based off the stable kernel series. The practice of releasing stable kernels has been going for well over five years now, so perhaps it's time to look back at how it has been going.

FSF has issued a statement about Oracle's patent infringement lawsuit against Google over Android. While Google could have avoided all this by using the GPL'd IcedTea and they have yet to take a stand against software patents, still nothing, FSF writes, can excuse Oracle's patent aggression. "Oracle is wrong to use its patents to attack Android," FSF concludes.

"... [in The Social Network]'s official trailer, you can see what appears to be an old version of the KDE Desktop Environment. This particular still image is from a scene in the movie taking place in 2003, so KDE 3 would be an accurate version for the year." ... "It is unlikely that all of these things would be combined exactly like they are on KDE 3 based distributions and the Desktop Environment not be KDE 3."

In the Autumn of 2004, I was searching the net and came across this new Linux distribution called Ubuntu Linux. It was based on Debian and was supposedly easy to use. It promoted these seemingly humanitarian concepts and touted itself as shipping with over 1000 pieces of software. Overtime, the colors of the site remained odd, and the default color scheme of the desktop did as well. The word "Linux" was made less and less a part of the website through the few years I followed it closely. By 2009, Linux was only one word in relatively small font size as part of the description of Ubuntu. One of the coolest things about Ubuntu was that you could the install discs for free via snail mail. This also stopped. Over the 6 years of life that Ubuntu has had so far, it has changed drastically. At first, it was just a quick and convenient way for me to install Debian. It started becoming more and more popular, and then was like a tidal wave through the Linux community. Today, it is the world's third most popular operating system. Windows, OSX, Ubuntu, then everything else. There is, however, an untold story.

Ubuntu 10.10 Installer is going through massive changes. Canonical is leaving no stones unturned and now even the installer slideshow is getting fair amount of attention. Installer slideshow was introduced during the Ubuntu Lucid release and Canonical aims to bring more polish and simplicity to the slideshow feature.

Man pages have been the primary source for UN*x documentation for a long time. Whenever I create a script that's going to be around for a while, I create documentation in the form of a section 1 man page. This stops my cell phone from ringing on the weekends when the junior sysadmins are looking for my notes.

For those using our Phoronix Test Suite for performance benchmarking, regression monitoring, or running other automated tests atop our open-source platform/framework, the 2.8.1 update to "Torsken" is out this morning. There's just a couple of small bug-fixes since the 2.8 release less than two weeks ago.

Get on your tuxedo’s - MyGaming pays respect to our oft-forgotten PC gaming brother, the Linux user. MyGaming thought it was high time to do another Linux compatible gaming round-up. A lot of these games support multiple platforms, and not just Linux, because Linux programmers are cool like that.

MirrorBrain is an open source framework to run a content delivery network using mirror servers. It solves a challenge that many popular open source projects face - a flood of download requests, often magnitudes more than a single site could practically handle.

Ubuntu Unity is a bold step for Ubuntu caretaker Canonical and its Ubuntu 10.10 Netbook remix. It offers a completely new user interface built on the backbone of key features due in GNOME 3 including Mutter and Zeitgeist. Russell Barnes tests it to breaking point (and found that it did. Regularly.)…

To activate the fullscreen mode in a virtualbox machine, we need to install Guest additions in the guest OS. If you are testing Ubuntu 10.10 Maverick meerkat in virtualBox , you may notice that guest additions are not working, it seems that the problem is the new xserver they put in ubuntu10.10, the modules are not build against this new version (See screenshot). To fix this issue, try this solution, this methode consist on installing a new xserver display packages which works well.

With Android already on millions of devices, the upcoming Google Music service will have a waiting audience, but is Google prepared to run a commercial music service?

People are resistant to change. This is a fact and it is not going to change any time soon. Because of this they will not want their entire computer to change on them all at once. An important fact that a lot Linux Advocates miss is that the conversion to Linux starts on Windows or OSX.

Eben Moglen's LinuxCon keynote was met with a standing ovation. Watch this to hear what he says it will take to defend FOSS against patents and how to protect freedom.

Launching a mobile application could be considered the latest get-rich-quick scheme. And I suppose for some it might be their best chance at riches and fame. Reality indicates that most developers don’t make back their investment by publishing an application to the App Store or Android Market. In fact, when you view some of the comments posted for a particular application it can be a bit depressing.

Wind River announced a series of Wind River Linux-ready development kits developed in partnership with eight different embedded board vendors. Embedded Development Kits are now available from Emerson Network Power, Eurotech, and Kontron, with more kits due in the fourth quarter from Advantech, Adlink, Curtiss-Wright, GE Intelligent Platforms, and RadiSys, says Wind River.

The Linux Foundation rolled out it's speaker lineup for its invitation-only 2010 End User Summit slated to be held October 12-12, 2010 in New Jersey. The event is designed to bring CTOs and other business executives together with high-level maintainers and developers in the Linux community to discuss critical issues surrounding using Linux in the enterprise. Presenters at this year's summit include IBM's Gerrit Huizenga talking about public and private clouds, a panel of key Linux kernel developers discussing storage and filesytems, and a keynote from British Telecom’s Chief Scientist JP Rangaswami on "Why the Cloud Rocks." Of course, Jim Zemlin, executive director at The Linux Foundation will be giving a keynote at the event as well. We caught up with him this week to hear what he has to say about the upcoming Summit, what message attendees will take away, and what he'll be talking about onstage this year.

Linux Mint based on Debian Testing has been released yesterday. Besides being based on Debian and not Ubuntu, there's something else very special about the new Linux Mint Debian: it's a rolling release distribution!

Avant Window Navigator is an application for Linux that emulates the newer task bars included in Windows and MacOS. It can be freely downloaded from the Ubuntu repositories.

It's been long time since I tried Linux Mint for the 1st time and loved it. Only problem is that it was Ubuntu based. Well, I love Ubuntu, but it's not 100%, and after my upgrade from 8.04 to 8.10 without a full reinstall that didn't went well, it came down a few points in my consideration. I had one bad night, since i needed the pc fully operational next day (its a work PC). So I tried everything else on market, but can't handle with anything else than Debian based OS