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I received an email overnight that has me re-evaluating what my smart phone will be. But the email also raised a number of other questions in my mind that are more diverse and apply to more than just the decision of what smart phone to upgrade to.

Last month we reported on four indie games going open-source that were part of the pay-what-you-want "Humble Indie Bundle" after the developers experienced very favorable returns. The source-code to Aquaria has now been published with the source-code to the three other titles (Lugaru, Gish, and Penumbra Overture) already being available.

I've run across ten new Linux distributions inspired by current news stories. Some, of course, are better than others and a few just have no practical use or purpose whatsoever but still are worth a mention. These ten distributions are in no particular order of my preference or relevance. Maybe you've run across some of them too in your Internet travels.

The ARM platform has historically been superspecialized and hence fragmented - multiple different ARM-based CPU's from multiple different ARM silicon partners all behaved differently enough that one needed to develop different software for each of them. Boot loaders, toolchains, kernels, drivers and middleware are all fragmented today, and of course there's additional fragmentation associated with Android vs mainline on ARM, but Linaro will go a long way towards cleaning this up and making it possible to deliver a consistent platform experience across all of the major ARM hardware providers.

Google has added the newly open-sourced VP8 video codec to the latest developer-channel build of its Chrome browser. The codec is already part of developer builds from Mozilla and Opera, and it was rolled into Chromium, the open source incarnation of Chrome, in late May. But this marks its debut in Chrome itself. Version 6.0.422.0, available in the developer channel here, also includes various bug fixes.

At this year's COSSFEST in Calgary, I (Marcel Gagne) took part in a lively panel discussion titled "The Death of the Desktop", essentially a free-for-all discussion on whether 'the cloud' will kill off our beloved desktop. My fellow panelists included Aaron Seigo, Brad "Renderman" Haines, Adam McDaniel, and Craig McLean. The whole thing was taped and later edited (wonderfully, I might add) to create the video you see below. Warning! A few 'bad words' do occasionally slip in.

It's rather strange, this thing called Linux. We hear of Linux powered devices proliferating the market while the users are completely unaware of what they are using. What a success. An operating system that is so simple people simply are unaware of what they are using. It's an overwhelming success story. Phones, tablets, eReaders, netbooks, DVRs, and so on are everywhere, and Linux powers many of them. On the desktop, things are a little different. Most people use Windows, and fewer but many use Macintosh, and then are those lunatic Linux people. I often wonder why Linux hasn't taken off and I personally believe that much of it is due to a lack of marketing. So, what is this post about? Distributions.

When will Amazon release a Kindle application for Linux? Amazon’s Kindle applications are one of the most popular ways to read ebooks. Oh sure, some people actually own a Kindle reader but quite a lot of people don’t. They simply use the Amazon Kindle application for their particular hardware.

Salix 13.1 has been released! Available in both 32-bit and 64-bit architectures, Salix 13.1 is fully backwards compatible with Slackware 13.1. Salix 13.1 is built on top of a Slackware 13.1 base and offers a streamlined XFCE desktop environment with selected applications following the "one application per task" philosophy. Salix 13.1, can be installed using three different installation modes, "core", "basic" and "full".

This guide explains how to install Alfresco Community 3.3 on Ubuntu Server 10.04 (Lucid Lynx). Alfresco is the Open Source Alternative for Enterprise Content Management (ECM), providing Document Management, Collaboration, Records Management, Knowledge Management, Web Content Management and Imaging.

Yesterday, Stephen Kelly wrote on the dot about the successful KDE PIM sprint. Today, you can read more about him and his role as KJots maintainer in this interview by Giovanni from our Italian KDE community. This continues a trend of recent interviews talking to members of the KDE PIM team - last time we heard from Thomas McGuire of KMail. For our Italian readers, there is also the original interview.

This how-to should show the steps required to record whatever audio is playing on your computer, similar to recording “stereo mix” in windows. This makes recording audio played by any application, including flash videos, possible.

DockBarX 0.39.1 was just released, bringing a new preview system (ported from vanilla dockbar) that has live previews instead of stills. The new DockBarX 0.39.1 also brings support for Avant Window Navigator 0.4.1 which results in something simply amazing. Read on!

Deluge is a feature rich bit torrent client, which is really popular among Linux users. Deluge is cross platform and works in OS X, Unix and Windows platforms as well. Though I would rate KDE's KTorrent over Deluge, Deluge is definitely well integrated into the Ubuntu's Gnome desktop. Deluge recently released the first release candidate of Deluge 1.3 series packed with a lot of new features and bug fixes.

Sometimes we need to create an intelligent document containing a form for a client to fill out. This form is shared either by email or by downloading from a web location. A lot of people will use a word processor, most often Microsoft Word, to create such a document. Not us…

Parsix 3.5 “Frankie” is a Debian-based Linux distribution designed to complete everyday desktop tasks. This release syncs with Debian testing repositories as of April 7, 2010. and features many improvements worth noting.

A small but useful HTML function for emacs text editor. An elisp function that, when invoked with a key combination, asks the user for the root of an HTML pair (such as 'em' or 'strong' or 'blockquote'), and then wraps the selected text or the word the cursor (point) is on in the code.

This afternoon, the government introduced the Copyright Modernization Act (or Bill C-32), the long-awaited copyright reform bill [the bill is not yet online, but I attended the media lockup in Montreal]. It is nearly two years since C-61 was introduced and nearly a year since the national copyright consultation, yet discouragingly some things have not changed. The digital lock provisions are by far the biggest flaw in the bill. There will undoubtedly be attacks on the fair dealing reforms and pressure to repeal them, along with the U.S. and the copyright lobby demanding that their digital lock provisions be left untouched. If Canadians stay quiet, both are distinct possibilities. If they speak out, perhaps the bill can be fixed. [To fellow Canadian LXers: don't stay quiet -- let's rock and roll on this to get things changed, especially the Digital Lock provisions. Barbara].

The MeeGo Linux operating system for mobile devices gained software support at the Computex show this week in Taiwan. Novell and Linpus both announced MeeGo-based netbook distributions, Movial announced a "MeeGo Services" development suite, and Telefonica has weighed in with support for the open source platform.

Big Blue backs Linaro Does the Linux operating system need yet another distro? Apparently so, because a bunch of people interested in the ARM RISC processors used in mobile computers and netbooks — and hopefully someday soon inside of servers just to scare the hell out of Intel — are ganging up to create a distro called Linaro.…