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Recently, we have seen two projects come under considerable criticism for the development directions that they have taken. Clearly, the development space that a project chooses to explore says a lot about what its developers' interests are and where they see their opportunities in the future. These decisions also have considerable impact on users. But, your editor would contend, it's time to give these projects a break. There is both room and need for different approaches to free software development.

A new version of "What to do after installing Ubuntu? Run this script!" has been released. The script now has an actual name: "Ubuntu 10.04 Start".

Ms. Z. Arsenault is an IT consultant working in the depths of a large North American energy company. She's one of those brave souls who works away in the background, keeping the servers running, making sure all the pieces fall properly into place so when the employees wander in each morning their applications run as expected. It's often a busy job just keeping things on a steady path. But Ms. Arsenault and her team aren't just maintaining the status quo, they're also trying to improve performance and cut costs while maintaining a stable environment for the end user. This week I had the opportunity to talk with Ms. Arsenault about what's she's been up to in the depths of corporate IT.

Moving all of your apps and information in the cloud has been adopted by a great number of people. However, there are also a large number who still prefer having a desktop application. Pretty much everyone like free. I am typically use Google Docs for my word processing and spreadsheets, but do on occasion tinker with OpenOffice. I tend to use OpenOffice if I am on my netbook and not connected to the internet. I can use the word processor to write and not be tempted to go on Twitter or use Stumbleupon to find random sites. At first, I didn’t realize you could use extensions; once I found that out, I was hooked. One of my favorites was covered in a previous post about OpenOffice extensions. It allows you to import, export and update documents you create in OpenOffice with Google Docs and other cloud office apps.

he Debian developers have announced that Stefano Zacchiroli achieved victory in the Debian Project Leader (DPL) elections held between the 2nd and the 15th of April. Zacchiroli succeeds Steve McIntyre who held the position the two previous years. There were three other candidates apart from Zacchiroli. Before the election, the Debian community had the opportunity to ask questions of the candidates and follow the discussions on the Debian Vote mailing list. 886 Debian developers were eligible to vote, and the election turnout was more than 50 per-cent.

Nothing brings Linux gotchas into sharp focus like coaching a non-geeky computer user. My wonderful significantotherperson, Terry, has done more to teach me about usability than the smartest Linux gurus. Terry is smart and willing to dig in and learn. She uses her PC for complex tasks like college coursework, audio recording and production, and digital photography. Like a lot of computer users, she learns better from a live teacher and visual aids than from text howtos.

Speed Dreams 1.4.0 is finally released. the new version of this game comes with many new features like 3 amazing fine tuned and balanced new car sets, 3 exciting new tracks and many visually improved ones,

"We are all members of the software industry, because we all use software every day. More than 200,000 software patents have been issued by the US Patent Office and they have a backlog of 1 million applications uninspected, many of them software patents."

Main news: How Microsoft is working on OpenDocument, an ODF viewer for Android, handling of application-specific features and making ODF books out of wikis.

"Let’s define what I mean by the term “hacker” first. There is so much FUD out there around this term. Large controlling institutions want you to fear hackers, want you to think the hacker mindset is dangerous. This could not be farther from the truth. Hackers are simply empowered individuals that want to figure things out for themselves." ... "1. Hackers are not consumer lemmings – As large institutions continue to brainwash American citizens into becoming slaves to the systems they’ve created"...

The simplified / elementary Nautilus idea firstly begun with the 100 paper cuts for Ubuntu Karmic and it stated that the menu and columns are too big and take away space for the really important stuff. Unfortunately, a fix was never released. Here is where Nautilus Elementary comes in: a Nautilus patched for simplicity. Nautilus Elementary 2.30 for Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid Lynx comes with some nice new features, such as an option to set the toolbar either as vertical or horizontal, a new view_switcher mini widget and also some extra options you can set from within Nautilus (and of course, the features that were in Karmic too).

In this howto, I’ll show how to create and install ringtones on your iPhone. There are a bunch of howtos around the internets on how to do this using Windows, and possibly on Linux with jailbroken phones. However, I haven’t seen one showing how to do it using just Linux, without having to jailbreak your phone. So here goes.

There is no denying the huge selection of open source games available for Linux. Playing through all of these games would entertain many gamers for years. Nevertheless, there is still a massive market for commercial games. If Linux is ever going to usurp the desktop market, it needs a regular source of native high quality games that rival commercial games available on Windows.

The Wine development release 1.1.43 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.

What do you get when you mix Python and C? According to Google, it’s Go – a new programming language developed in-house and later open sourced. Go was created by a small team inside Google, including the well known Ken Thompson, co-inventor of Unix and major influence on C. It was created out of a lack of satisfaction with existing languages, mainly the excessively (in the minds of Go’s developers) long compile times needed for other languages. With Go, even a very large and complex application can compile in a few seconds, often less. Additionally, Go has built in concurrency support, so you can code for multiple CPUs without resorting to outside libraries of unknown quality. While we don’t usually cover much programming here at MakeTechEasier, Go is such an interesting language that we just had to dip in a bit, and where better to start than by covering the system setup needed to get Go up and running on your Linux box.

After its recent acquisition of Sun, enterprise software vendor Oracle began making some significant changes to Solaris licensing policies. Solaris 10, the latest stable version of Sun's UNIX operating system, was previously available for free without official support. Oracle changed the license last month, however, limiting it to a 90-day trial. The new license is relatively clear, but left a number of questions unanswered.

The developers behind Google Chrome OS, the forthcoming cloud-enabled operating system from the internet giant, have explained how they are dealing with a key need for any computer - how well it plays with the printer. With Chrome OS on course for arrival at the end of 2010, the details of how the operating system, which is all about cloud computing, will do familiar computing tasks are an increasingly important factor. The Chrome OS developers are mindful of the interest and the latest blog post from Mike Jazayeri, group product manager for Chrome OS, explains the detail.

Part of my job is finding and testing open sourced solutions for already prominent commercially available software. The concept is simple: If it's open sourced, it can be customized, be platform independent, and it can be free. In the business world, this poses two key benefits. Having software that can be customized means fewer problems and more functionality. Getting it for free means lower cost for the services we provide to our customers, and having more money to spend on employees and infrastructure. As simple as this sounds, finding the right fit can be a laborious task of trial and error. Part of my job is minimizing the trial and error.

Dell is reversing its position on 3rd party drives. I don’t think I bothered to complain here but I sure sent my fair share of nasty grams. In fact Dell became one of my four letter words after I heard they were firmware locking Gen11 servers to only dell drives. Of course it was a mistake but I loved to unashamedly repeat the famous quote from Howard Shoobe.

I've been writing about such cockle-warming subjects as how Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid Lynx beta 2 and its 2.6.32 kernel handles such things as turning off kernel mode setting for Intel video that can't deal with said mode-setting, as well as the ever-moving buttons on application windows, and how the new gthumb is the best damn Linux/Unix photo-editing program for journalists. But I haven't said much about exactly how well Ubuntu Lucid runs on my old hardware. Pretty darn well.