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Apple's iPad was hardly the first tablet to appear on the scene, but it is unquestionably responsible for the recent spike in tablet development. Now it looks as if Ubuntu — the Linux distro everybody loves to hate, but uses anyway — will be entering the field as well.

The Wine development release 1.2-rc4 is now available. The source is available now, Binary packages are in the process of being built, and will appear soon at their respective download locations.

Econometrics is the application of statistical or quantitative methods to understand economic issues and test theories, and models. It is the study of economic models, mathematical statistics, and economic data. It is also a set of tools which can verify or disprove economic theory using real-world data.

Element OS is a 32 bit Xubuntu based distro for HTPCs(Home Theatre PCs). It maintains compatibility with Ubuntu repositories. It uses the Advanced Packaging Tool(APT) with Element's own custom repositories and the Ubuntu repositories. Element OS also incorporates the AllMyApps software center to allow additional applications to be downloaded.

Dan Kegel released wisotool 20100618 today: 19 new verbs (blur, spore, photoshop cs5, ...), and 75 old ones.

Wisotool is a handy winetricks like script for automatically installing games from .iso or .mds files copied from your own dvds (or, if the game is freely downloadable, it will download it).

When you work with large amounts of photos, it can get tiresome to have to manually manage the file and directory structures. To help resolve this, many people use photo managers such as Picasa, DigiKam, and iPhoto. There are several options for Linux, so we’ve decided to check out each of the major photo management options for Linux to see exactly what each one offers. Today we’ll be comparing Picasa, F-Spot, Shotwell, DigiKam, and Geeqie.

Google has released version 6.0.437.1 of Chrome for Windows and Linux, and version 6.0.437.2 for Mac OS X into the WebKit-based browser's developer channel (a.k.a. the Dev channel). The latest update addresses a number of bugs found in the previous Dev update and integrates a PDF reader into the browser.

Eucalyptus Systems is set to gather reseller partners old and new in San Francisco on June 22. The reason: It’s time for Eucalyptus to lay out where their open-source cloud platform stands, along with potential channel partner opportunities. Here’s what to expect.

I can't say that Xfce spin is slower or faster than the LXDE spin of Fedora 13. The thing to remember about both of these Fedora spins is that it's easy enough to add any or all of the applications from one spin to another. I'm not sure exactly what the LXDE spin's policy on GTK 1/2 apps are, but on my hardware it looks like it'll come down to personal preference and not vast performance differences. The more I think about it, I'd be very happy to have both of these "spins" on one installation, and if there are metapackages for both the Xfce and LXDE spins (and I'm fairly sure there are), that's just what I might do.

Last week prior to heading over to Germany for LinuxTag, I had ran a new set of ATI R500 Gallium3D benchmarks with an ATI Radeon X1950PRO graphics card and comparing the latest Mesa/Gallium3D graphics driver performance in the Mesa 7.9-devel Git code with both the Gallium3D and classic Mesa DRI drivers to the older Mesa stack found in Ubuntu 10.04 LTS. The ATI "R300g" driver as its known continues to advance, and over the past week this driver has pushed forward even more. Here is another set of ATI Gallium3D tests.

Running Linux system inside a chroot environment allows a system admin to decrease an impact on a production server when the server gets compromised. Change root will change root directory to all current running processes and its children to a chroot jail. Testing of various package installations and server configuration in a chrooted environment can be another handy way how to utilize a chroot jail. This tutorial will provide a reader with step by step guide on how to install Debian with ssh daemon inside chroot environment using debootstrap.

At the second day of its Summercamp, the Dutch mobile messaging and collaboration specialist Zarafa launches an integration framework that will give the open source community and commercial integrations with Zarafa's Collaboration Platform a next big boost.

Google has added an experimental branch to the VP8 code tree, encouraging developers to begin work on the next incarnation of its newly open sourced video codec. Mountain View open sourced its $124.6 million VP8 codec less than a month ago in an effort to create a royalty free standard for web video, rolling it into a larger media format known as WebM, and WebM has already turned up in developer-build and beta browsers from Mozilla, Opera, and Google itself.

I recently came across Zorin, an Ubuntu based distro that focuses on easing a Windows user's transition to Linux by theming it's interface to look like Microsoft's operating system. Zorin 3 is built on top of the recently released Ubuntu 10.04 and by default it looks very close to Windows 7.

Moonlight, the de facto open-source implementation of Microsoft's Silverlight platform for Linux that leverages Mono, is nearing its 3.0 release. Moonlight 2.0 was just released a half-year ago, but Moonlight 3.0 Preview 7 was just released and it's offering up more features.

GoogleCL is a command line tool to manage all the Google services: you can upload photos to your PicasaWeb albums, post to your Blogger blog, modify Google Calendar events, add contacts, manage your Google Docs (upload, delete, and so on) and even upload videos to YouTube. Unfortunately it doesn't come with support for Gmail.

The Tor Project and the Electronic Frontier Foundation have released HTTPS Everywhere, a Firefox extension that activates SSL/TSL encryption on sites that support the security setting, but don't feature it as a default when visiting because of partial support, unsecured trackback links or other issues. To alleviate this problem, HTTPS Everywhere writes all requests in HTTPS.

I'm calling this the tip of the year because it's easy to do and dramatically improves the Web-browsing experience in Firefox for users of Fedora, Red Hat and CentOS. I wish I had figured it out years ago because it's a simple way to increase your scrolling speed in the browser.

Bluecherry released an open source driver for version 2 of its Linux-based compression card for MPEG-4 digital video recording. Redesigned around the Linux kernel's API for Video (Video4Linux) and Audio (ALSA), the GPL-licensed driver primarily targets the Bluecherry compression cards and related Ubuntu-based video surveillance software, but can be used for a variety of video applications.

If you believe that corporations would be willing to make a little less money in order not to put the nation -- their nation -- at risk, you should read Richard Clarke's excellent, just-issued book, Cyber War.