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The goal of Terminator is to produce a useful tool for arranging terminals. It is inspired by programs such as gnome-multi-term, quadkonsole, etc. in that the main focus is arranging terminals in grids (tabs is the most common default method, which Terminator also supports).

Netfilter maintainer Patrick McHardy recently announced a first alpha-release of nftables, slated to eventually replace iptables as the standard Linux packet filtering engine. Nftables aims to simplify the kernel ABI, reduce code duplication, improve error reporting, and provide more efficient execution, storage and updates of filtering rules. Patrick began with a high level overview of the three pieces that comprise the firewall, "the kernel provides a netlink configuration interface, as well as runtime ruleset evaluation using a small classification language interpreter. libnl contains the low-level functions for communicating with the kernel, the nftables frontend is what the user interacts with." An insightful overview can be found on lwn.net.

The drivetrain is swappable, allowing racers to mix-and-match packs and motors to suit the circuit and their riding style. The software controlling it all runs on Linux — Hussain says it boots up in less than three seconds — and the system bus for power and data features a USB port.

The open source desktop world got a boost this week with the release of GNOME 2.30 -- the latest incarnation of one of the leading open source desktop GUIs that's a part of nearly every major Linux distribution. With GNOME 2.30, the open source effort is adding new features that aim to make it easier to connect to online services, such as social networking giant Facebook. The new release also includes preview technology in the form of the GNOME Shell, which will become a standard component in GNOME 3, the next major release due in six months.

Mark Shuttleworth announced seconds ago that the Metacity window controls will [...]

Those who followed the ODF-OOXML Standards War will remember that Alex Brown, the Convener of the Geneva Ballot Resolution Meeting that approved OOXML, helped broker the final approval of OOXML as a formal, global standard. He's defended his actions and OOXML ever since - until now.

KDE has enjoyed great success over the years and today marks another important step in the evolution of our growing community. Many years ago when KDE was just beginning we had a small user base and similar expectations of how the software should work. But with growth and success also comes new users and new expectations. As an effort to meet the growing demands of our user community KDE has identified 3 key areas in which we would like to better cater to users' needs. In order to achieve this it has been determined that there will be, going forward, 3 separate releases of each Software Compilation tailored to these areas.

IBM has announced the launch of a new Atom-based netbook from Simmtronics that will ship with Lotus collaboration software and the Ubuntu Netbook Remix. The device, which is largely aimed at small businesses in emerging markets, will sell for $190. It is currently available in South Africa and will be expanding to other regions in the future.

Until Nautilus actually implements this trashed files deleted date and original location, there is a very small plugin you can use to see this info.

Technology is wonderful, until it stops working as expected. Computers have a nasty habit of developing glitches or just going belly up altogether at the worst possible times. There's nothing that can prevent that, but a couple of open source tools can help mitigate disaster and maybe even save the day altogether. With Clonezilla you can create a perfect copy of your system. Using the System Rescue CD, you'll have all the tools you need to recover from many system crashes.

This tutorial shows how to combine four single storage servers (running CentOS 5.4) to one large storage server (distributed storage) with GlusterFS. The client system (CentOS 5.4 as well) will be able to access the storage as if it was a local filesystem. GlusterFS is a clustered file-system capable of scaling to several peta-bytes. It aggregates various storage bricks over Infiniband RDMA or TCP/IP interconnect into one large parallel network file system. Storage bricks can be made of any commodity hardware such as x86_64 servers with SATA-II RAID and Infiniband HBA.

Last month's release of the KDE 4.4 desktop environment restored the faith of many after what has been something of a roller coaster two years. Even the most loyal KDEians found that loyalty stretched by the debut of version 4.0 in 2008. Reassessing, and with hindsight, I think it's fair to characterize the whole saga as both a cautionary tale and an admirable example. Admirable, because the KDE team has displayed a quality that is so often lacking in open source software development: leadership.

Did you think Linux is something for geeks? Think again: This is the Mavizen electrical superbike, and it runs a custom Linux operating system!

The MeeGo community has "opened the repositories" on early code for the netbook-oriented Linux platform, which combines Intel's Moblin and Nokia's Maemo. Images are available for the MeeGo distribution infrastructure and OS base "from the Linux kernel to the OS infrastructure up to the middleware layer."

One of the most important tasks for a Linux administrator to achieve in shell scripting is to test for information you need to know. Conditions is a way to test for one thing and if that is true then take one action and if it is not true take a different action. This tutorial, with illustrations, will help you start writing conditions to test for the information you need.

Arnd Bergmann noted that he's working on removing the BKL from the Linux kernel, "I've spent some time continuing the work of the people on Cc and many others to remove the big kernel lock from Linux and I now have [a] bkl-removal branch in my git tree". He went on to explain that his branch is working, and lets him run the Linux kernel, "on [a] quad-core machine with the only users of the BKL being mostly obscure device driver modules." Arnd noted that this effort has a long history, "the oldest patch in this series is roughly eight years old and is Willy's patch to remove the BKL from fs/locks.c, and I took a series of patches from Jan that removes it from most of the VFS."

The GNOME Project is proud to announce GNOME 2.30, the latest stable release of the popular Free Software desktop environment and applications suite. GNOME 2.30 builds on previous GNOME releases and brings hundreds of improvements for users and developers, including enhancements for user management, Web browsing, support for Facebook chat, and new productivity features.

Another month, another kernel release. Last month saw what is hopefully the final RC (release candidate) 2.6.33 kernel, and so it should have been released by the time you read this.

The Linux Foundation, on behalf of its members, would like to register its serious objections to the current BBC/OFCOM proposal, which would impose content management controls on new free-to-air high definition channels. The plan, which involves restrictively licensing the Huffman codes used in the electronic programme guide, would have a negative effect on open source applications and would distort the markets which have built up around those applications.

My son’s hand-me-down motherboard recently gave up the ghost, and I decided that was a good excuse for an upgrade. Shopping around, I found that multi-core CPUs were finally in my price range, so I decided to build him a quad-core system. This build worked out extremely well, with almost no configuration problems, not even for accelerated 3D graphics or ALSA sound — all using the latest Debian GNU/Linux (which means it’ll also work with Ubuntu or other derivatives). This one has that “classic” feel — everything just clicked into place. So I wanted to document it here. This also serves as a technology update to my earlier article on selecting hardware for a free-software-friendly system. Read the full howto at Freesoftware Magazine.