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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.

What if you want one user to run a command as an another system user without exchanging passwords. For example, you may want an user john to run a find command or custom bash shell script as an user greg or even as a user root ( superuser ) without password exchange. In this case a sudo utility with its /etc/sudoers configuration file will be your friend. The sudo utility is very widely used but at the same time very little understood by Linux users of all levels. This short article describes some basic of sudo usage and explains a format of /etc/sudoers configuration file.

This tutorial will hopefully help inspire you to create your own custom wallpapers and produce a great results in the GIMP.

Usually when we talk about programs for editing images we think to graphic programs such as The Gimp or photoshop, but they are not the only alternative. ImageMagick is a suite of programs that you can use from command line to change and transform images, may seem more uncomfortable but it is actually a very powerful option to process many images in a short time or include image processing programs in web or bash scripts.

Earlier this month we delivered benchmarks comparing the ZFS, EXT4, and Btrfs file-systems from both solid-state drives and hard drives. The EXT4 file-system was the clear winner in terms of the overall disk performance while Btrfs came in second followed by Sun's ZFS in FreeBSD 8.2. It was a surprise that in our most recent testing the EXT4 file-system turned around and did better than the next-generation Btrfs file-system, but it turns out that Btrfs regressed hard in Linux 2.6.35 as to be found in Ubuntu 10.10 and other soon-to-be-released distributions. However, regardless of where Btrfs is performing, its speed can be boosted by enabling its transparent zlib compression support.

Former Microsoft executive and billionaire Paul Allen sued several major Internet companies and three large retailers for patent infringement today, asserting that four patents originating at Interval Research, Allen's dot-com era think tank, cover basic web browsing and e-commerce technologies. A Wired magazine profile of Interval Research suggests that by 1999, the institute was struggling, with Allen having spent upwards of $100 million on research and not much to show for it. "Interval always had a special buzz and a collection of talent that, even in the annals of technological genius, stands out."

Just shy of a month ago was when NVIDIA last released a proprietary Linux driver, at which point they also released a second driver that was their OpenGL 4.1 preview driver. This Saturday though NVIDIA has provided a new driver release, which is tagged as the 256.52 pre-release. This new Linux driver release isn't overly exciting, but it does carry some prominent fixes that will please some NVIDIA customers.

Many electrons have been expended in the discussion of Oracle's recently-filed lawsuit against Google alleging patent and copyright infringements in the Android platform. Your editor is somewhat reluctant to contribute to the flood; at this point, the amount of real information which is available is minimal while the amount of speculation is high. This will be an important case, though; the world will be watching to see how it turns out. So here are a few thoughts to add to the pile.

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.

VLC 1.1.4 is released, this is the fourth bugfix release of the VLC 1.1.x branch. This release comes especially to fix important security issue that was discovered in most windows application, Linux in general is not affected by this security bug.

In the second episode of the new Behind KDE series of interviews with KDE sysadmins, we meet KDE's "identity expert", Ben Cooksley - the guy behind the new identity.kde.org, which will be launched next week. Ben is one of the leaders involved in setting up key parts of the new git infrastructure. Normally he's quiet and avoids publicity - another reason to put him in the spotlight. This interview even contains one of the rare pictures that are available of Ben.

If you ever went to a cyber cafe, you probably noticed that any changes you make to their system: create or delete files, settings and so on, are reseted when you restart the computer. That's what the Deep Freeze program does. Ofris is a Deep Freeze like application for Linux that is very easy to use - once you install it, you can "deep freeze" your Linux computer in a matter of seconds.

Ubuntu Software Center is something we all overlooked for long. Even while writing tutorials about installing different applications in this blog, I prefer to provide command line instructions only. But a lot of Ubuntu users are new comers and Software Center means a lot to them. Ubuntu is gradually waking up to this fact and have finally started focusing on bringing a lot of polish and usability to Software Center.

You may think that the last thing on earth that could happen to your company would be that your business might be sued because it used a particular software program. You’d be wrong. In the aftermath of the Bilski Supreme Court decision, the Supreme Court did nothing to stop software or business method patents. As a result, not only software development companies but all businesses are now in more danger from patent lawsuits than ever before.

I've been using (and abusing) my Ben Nanonote daily now for several weeks, simply to find out whether this little machine is just a little gadget or really a useful device. There is no word processing package available for the Nanonote. Just a few editors. However, while looking for a "curses" based word processor I stumbled upon "txt2tags", a formatting program written in Python - which is supported by the Nanonote.

If you have not yet noticed, I am a nerd. Not just your garden variety, everyday, commonplace nerd, but a big nerd. With that cleared up, I could not help but purchase an ARTiGO. Over the past month (maybe longer), I have been testing different operating systems on it, and I think I can confidently declare a winner for best fit, and another for best performance. I did not have the Wifi Kit or the SD card reader installed for the tests. I am using 2GB of Crucial DDR2 800mHz RAM, and a 500GB 7200 RPM 2.5" SATA for the HDD.

Even before the first Oracle-driven JavaOne conference has seen the light of day, an alternative Java conference is being planned for those not thrilled with Oracle. Media company Software & Support Media (S&S) plans to offer a U.S.-based version of its JAX (Java Apache XML) conference, which the company has been conducting in Germany for several years. "A lot of the Java community has been a little upset about how the JavaOne conference is being [run] by Oracle," said a source familiar with S&S plans.

Like many of you, every year we look forward to the workshops, conferences and events related to open source software. In our view, these are among the best ways we can engage the community, by sharing our experiences and learning from yours. So we're sad to announce that we won't be able to present at JavaOne this year. We wish that we could, but Oracle's recent lawsuit against Google and open source has made it impossible for us to freely share our thoughts about the future of Java and open source generally. This is a painful realization for us, as we've participated in every JavaOne since 2004, and I personally have spoken at all but the first in 1996.