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As an open source enthusiast, there are thousands of great tools available to me. However, some things in Linux are harder than they need to be. The world of open source has come a long way, but keeping an eye on what is going on outside of the open source arena can show that there are still areas where we need to improve. Here are three tools from IBM and Apple that I would love to see incorporated into the next great Linux distribution.

In two reports filed from this week's OSCON conference, The Register says that Google will open Android's internal development kit to contributors, and that Linux maintainers are holding tough in negotiating with the search giant regarding Android's readmission to the kernel. Meanwhile, Linux 2.6.35 RC6 was released, featuring enhancements to network scalability, memory management, and sleep-wait detection.

Want to learn more about open source? Download some books for free. It doesn't matter if you're new to open source or a long-time user, there is always more to learn about. We scoured the Web for the best open source books. All of these are free books that can be downloaded and shared.

These are 5 amazing GNOME themes which are either new or recently updated. Some of them come as complete theme packs with icons, wallpapers and so on.

VLC 1.1.1 is released. And as ever, C-Korn has updated his PPA to include the latest release of VLC. This is primarily a bug fix release.

Google announced today via the Chromium Blog that it plans to release new stable versions of Chrome every six weeks. Though the team has managed to ship five major revisions in less than two years, the new accelerated pace means we could see Chrome 9.0 by the end of this year.

At the OSCON 2010 open source convention taking place in Portland, Oregon, O'Reilly Media's Edd Dumbill has announced the winners of this years O'Reilly Open Source Awards. The awards have been presented each year since 2005 to individuals for their "dedication, innovation, leadership and outstanding contribution to open source".

At Akademy, we ran in to many interesting people, including "random motorcycle adventurer" Henri Bergius, who is also a board member for Akademy co-organizers COSS among his many other free software related activities. Read on for the full conversation. read more

In this article series by John Ward, we will be looking at a practical example of building a reporting site. In this part of the article, we will be looking at a scenario where we have a Bugzilla instance setup with a series of bugs related to BIRT. We will look at a series of requirements and build the reports necessary to fulfil those requirements.

This guide explains how to set up mod_chroot with Apache2 on a CentOS 5.4 system. With mod_chroot, you can run Apache2 in a secure chroot environment and make your server less vulnerable to break-in attempts that try to exploit vulnerabilities in Apache2 or your installed web applications.

Canola is a open source media center application which was primarily built for smart phones and netbook devices. To be frank, I had never heard about Canola before and so I decided to give Canola Media Center a spin in my laptop powered by Ubuntu 10.04 'Lucid Lynx'.

The Zbox attempts to take GPU acceleration to the next level with the powerful next-gen ION behind it. Russell Barnes puts it through its paces...

I've already covered tar and all the wonderful ways to use it, but it's not the only tool at your disposal. Another popular backup tool is afio. Depending on your distribution, it already may be installed.

Several patches submitted by a Google developer will enable the kernel to push considerably more data through network cables on multi-core systems. Some of the LAN and Wi-Fi drivers also promise greater throughput, or to use less power, due to various driver enhancements.

The Western Digital 320 GB Scorpio Black hard drive I bought from NewEgg.com more than a month ago (and which I only recently got around to breaking out of the box and installing) is dying. This is the drive from which I've been running Fedora 13. Those annoying clicks when the drive first boots (and occasionally thereafter) are not normal. The smartctl utility hasn't provided much help, nor has the diagnostic image that WD offers on their Web site (which runs with Dr. DOS — who remembers Dr. DOS??)

India's Human Resource Development Minister Kapil Sibal this week unveiled the low-cost computing device that is designed for students, saying his department had started talks with global manufacturers to start mass production. Sibal said the Linux based computing device was expected to be introduced to higher education institutions from 2011 but the aim was to drop the price further to $20 and ultimately to $10.

The government of India has unveiled a prototype of a touchscreen, tablet computer which it expects to sell for $35 initially... The Indian prototype is impressive--especially at a $35 price point. The device runs on a variation of Linux.

A short while ago "Ty W" posted an interesting question on StackOverflow. Apparently, most graphics software cannot scale images the right way. Usually it's hard to notice the flaw but the linked article does a great job of explaining the problem. PHP's GD library suffers from the same issue, but Ty discovered that the sample PHP program provided with the article did not work on partially transparent images. After a couple of hours of fiddling I managed to get a working solution. Apparently, the imagegammacorrect() function in PHP deals badly with images that have an alpha channel. I suspect that it tries to apply the same calculation to the alpha channel that it applies to the red, green and blue channels. To work around this, my solution splits the aplha channel from the original image. The alpha channel is resampled regularly while the red, green and blue channels are resampled using gamma correction.

FB4Linux is an Eclipse plugin that provides Flash development capabilities in Linux. Getting it installed can be tricky though, as there are a few undocumented steps you'll have to complete. This article takes a look at how FB4Linux can be installed in Eclipse 3.5.2.

Whenever I make a major jump to a new computer and/or operating system, there's usually quite a bit of distro-hopping instability as I try to figure out what works best for my hardware, my work and my moods. After I had Fedora 13 x86_64 with Xfce firmly planted on my new Lenovo G555 laptop, I (presumptively) attributed problems (on which I'll elaborate in a future post) with a couple of applications to either Fedora 13 or the Fedora-packaged applications, deciding to wipe F13 Xfce and try a couple other things.