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Back in 2008 there was the announcement from the Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit in Texas that VIA had joined the open-source driver bandwagon after having abandoned previous open-source attempts. However, for the past two years, this has largely been a media bluff. VIA Technologies did things like appoint an open-source liaison (Harald Welte, who is actually no longer contracted by VIA and didn't even do much for their efforts), launch a VIA Linux web-site (that is ill-maintained and two years later there are still portions of the site "under construction"), but they have done some things like put out some code and republishing old documentation. We're almost half-way through 2010 and it doesn't look like VIA will be doing much this year for their open-source graphics drivers.

Android continues its march towards the top of the smartphone market. We’re in the new economy where every two years we get a new phone, whether we need one or not. And every few months we get a new Android release. Android 2.1 is barely a few months old and it is already time for a new one. Last week at Google I/O the Android team unveiled the much-anticipated Froyo rendition of Android — now officially known as the 2.2 release

Chad Derwent sat alone in his office in Silicon Valley. Outside his open door, rows of empty, silent  It wasn't supposed to end like this.

Google has announced that it has released the source code for its My Tracks GPS application for Android powered devices. The My Tracks app allows users to record GPS coordinates and visualise the routes they take when, for example, hiking, running or biking. The app also features several live statistics, such as time, speed, distance and elevation, and data can be exported to other Google services like Google Spreadsheets or Google Maps.

Landscape 1.5 is being officially announced this week, providing users of Ubuntu Linux with new management and deployment capabilities. The new Landscape follows the debut of Ubuntu's most recent Long-Term Support (LTS) release, the latest edition of the open source Linux distro aimed at providing enterprises with the ability to maintain and upgrade their deployed Ubuntu distributions. Now with the Landscape 1.5 release, Canonical, the lead commercial sponsor behind the Ubuntu Linux operating system, is extending its management platform as it looks to further grow its enterprise business.

The Puppy Linux project has released version 5.0 of its fast, small-footprint Linux distro, based for the first time on Ubuntu. Puppy Linux 5.0 is built from Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid Lynx binary packages, and debuts a "Quickpet" application suite, choice of browsers, and a boot-to-desktop feature.

Does closed source software have the quality edge over open source? Michael Hall, former editor of Linux Today, pointed out a blog entry with an interesting take on the recent beating Apple has been taking in the press lately. (Heads up: colorful language ahead.) It was a posting that made me sit back and re-evaluate some of my own views.

Cassandra is a distributed database with a BigTable data model running on a Dynamo like infrastructure. It is column-oriented and allows for the storage of relatively structured data. It has a fully decentralized model; every node is identical and there is no single point of failure.

Most people in the hacking community are well aware that patents represent one of the most serious threats to free software. But the situation is actually even worse than it seems, thanks to the proliferation of what are called patent thickets. To understand why these are so bad, and why they represent a particular problem for software, it is necessary to go back to the beginning of patent law.

We help celebrate ten years of Linux on the mainframe with an exclusive interview with Novell’s senior vice president and general manager of open platform solutions, Markus Rex, discussing the technological and business transformation since it’s introduction…

Millennium Exchange, a Linux and Sun Solaris Unix-based platform, which uses Oracle databases, is being rolled out across all of the LSE’s electronic trading systems, replacing the slower TradElect platform, which is Microsoft .Net based. TradElect had suffered a series of high-profile outages and will be replaced by Millennium Exchange in stages from September.

This is an effort mainly concentrated towards listing the features/fixes that we have seen in Froyo that weren’t announced in Google I/O, announced things that work with nexus one, things that don’t and possible fixes/workarounds known, what the announced features actually feel like in real use etc. Will keep updating this post as I get more info, get more fixes, etc.

Since its inception in July of 2009, the Fedora Hall Monitor policy has had mixed reviews. The intent of the policy is to promote more civil discourse on various Fedora mailing lists—to embody the "be excellent to each other" motto that is supposed to govern project members' behavior. Questions were raised about the recent "hall monitoring" of a thread on fedora-devel, because, instead of the usual reasons for stopping a thread—personal attacks, profanity, threats of violence, and the like—it was stopped, essentially, for going on too long.

Welcome back again to the KDE Interview series. Last time we spoke with Thiago Macieira, one of the old timers in KDE development. Today we feature Thomas McGuire, the KMail maintainer. Italian readers may prefer the original interview.

As with most tasks in Linux, there are multiple ways to handle removable devices, but for removable media in particular, KDE’s primary tool is the Plasma Device Notifier Widget. It is activated by default on the KDE panel in all 4.x versions of the desktop environment. From it, you can manage all sorts of removable media, including hard drives, SD cards, USB flash drives, CDs, DVDs, cameras, and music players.

One of the biggest obstacles to personal email management is lack of user demand for Virtual Personal Email Server (VPES) software. In this article I describe what a VPES should be and look like: a Linux-based distribution that contains all and only the software needed for a VPES plus an integrated web-based interface to configure all its parts and could run on a home computer, in a datacenter Virtual Private Server, in a virtual machine or in the cloud.

We never like to see our co-workers leave. In most cases, though, we are are happy for them because they are going on to bigger and better things. But occasionally they are not leaving under their own power. And that is when things can get...well...messy. So before you are tasked with the job of putting it all back together, why not take a moment and prepare.

According to a report from DigiTimes Systems, Hewlett-Packard (HP) plans to bring a WebOS-based Internet tablet to the market by October of this year. The news comes just days after the official HP News Twitter account confirmed that customers should expect WebOS "slates and web-connected printers".

I'm a bit sad gThumb 2.11.x (photo manager) was removed from the Ubuntu 10.04 official repositories because the 2.11.x development branch is amazing! gThumb 2.11.x can now export your photos to PicasaWeb, Facebook, Flickr and a few days ago it also added Photobucket to the list.

Forget the browser wars, the operating system wars and the mobile phone wars. The one to watch now is the battle over video formats.