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Today I’d like to tell you about Firefox Mobile on the N900, running in conjunction with the new Mozilla Weave web service. I’ve been testing them out on my handset for about a month now since the beta release of Fennec (the codename for Firefox Mobile). The N900 is the first device to get Firefox Mobile but it should also appear on Google Android phones in the near future. There is talk from Mozilla of an iPhone version, but Apple are so draconian with 3rd party software I’m not sure that’ll actually happen. I just can’t see them allowing another browser on the iPhone to compete with Safari. Anyway, here’s my thoughts upon testing Firefox Mobile for some time.

Adobe's upcoming Flash Player 10.1 may bypass devices running Android versions prior to 2.0. The software will also require that phones have ARM Cortex-A8 processors, according to recent posts by Antonio Flores, identified as a Flash product manager on Adobe online forums. According to Adobe Systems, Flash Player 10.1 is a browser-based runtime that leverages the power of GPUs (graphics processing units), where present, providing "accelerated video and graphics while conserving battery life and minimizing resource utilization." New mobile-ready features are said to include support for multi-touch, mobile input models, accelerometers, and multiple screen orientations.

Lifehacker readers, you're in luck today; if you've ever wondered what a real life Macgvyer does for a living, I'm about to show you. I work with Limor at my "other" job designing educational electronics. It's a dream come true. Ladyada is perhaps the smartest person I've met on the planet. I've always called her "Lex Luthor smart" or "MacGyver clever", and most people seem to understand those analogies. She uses her smarts for mostly "good" and of course some mischief, which I would say is also good on a long enough timeline. That said, her work speaks for itself, so let's take a look and listen...

As part of a public consultation exercise, US industry association the International Intellectual Property Alliance (IIPA), whose members include lobbying organisations such as the Business Software Alliance, the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) and the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), has submitted recommendations to the US trade representative for revising the US' blacklist of copyright sinners. The 498 page submission lists a number of countries in which, in the opinion of the IIPA, intellectual property rights are poorly enforceable or inadequately protected. The submission expressly calls for a number of countries to be placed under special observation – in part in response to their support for open source software.

The ambitious volunteer-based OpenStreetMap has now mapped more than 120,000 km of South African roads. It's ambitious and time-consuming work to produce free maps of the whole of South Africa, but that is exactly what the OpenStreetMap (OSM) team is doing. Relying on a team of volunteers willing to hit the highways, streets and tracks of the country with their GPSes in their spare time, the OpenStreetMap SA team has now mapped more than 120,000 km of the country's roads. The resulting maps are licenced under a Creative Commons licence so that anyone can use the information.

The GNOME community's design and usability experts gathered for a week-long hackfest hosted by Canonical in the UK to shape the next major iteration of the GNOME desktop environment. GNOME 3, which is tentatively scheduled for release in September, will introduce new user interface paradigms and include an upgraded desktop shell environment.

In my previous article I already touched on the subject of the virtual file-system mounted on /proc As this is an important topic on the LPI exam (and it's also a very interesting subject), we are going to explore the /proc file-system today.

While visiting Craigslist today before signing in I noticed that I the picture they used to display cautionary directions about scam addresses is most likely an Ubuntu screenshot of Firefox.

Linux is the operating system of choice for devices with ARM processors. Unfortunately problems with graphics appear in most cases. Ubuntu wants to fix this with a new GUI.

Ranger has changed people's perceptions of Linux clusters as supercomputers. This month, the Ranger supercomputer at the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) celebrates two years of enabling groundbreaking computational science as a leading system for researchers in Texas and across the nation via the National Science Foundation's (NSF) TeraGrid initiative. At 579.4 teraflops, Ranger was the first system in the NSF "Path to Petascale" program and remains among the top 10 systems on the supercomputing "TOP500" list two years later because of its extraordinary scale. Ranger is also one of the top systems in the world in terms of total memory at 123 terabytes.

In yet another attack on open source software usage around the world, a copyright-focused organization is claiming that use of open source software promotes piracy. With a new 498-page report (PDF) that repeatedly defies logic, the International Intellectual Property Alliance (IIPA) argues that the office of the U.S. Trade Representative should "carefully monitor" government mandates to adopt open source, and place numerous countries on watchlists.

The unintended consequence of a surveillance state is the creation of a surveillance society. The nuance of the legal system provides anyone willing to spend the money on lawyers, litigation and the discovery process to effectively get all the information on anyone they want. Bottom line: Most general counsels' offices in most companies will NOT decline to give information requested by a court order, approved subpoena or discovery request, whether it is a criminal or civil matter. These are some reasons why Cryptome (a site that is run by John Young, a long time privacy, crypto and security activist) needs to continue and provide critical privacy-related information to the public. This is why the attempts of Microsoft and others to obfuscate the information they gather and provide on demand to court subpoenas is misguided.

I sent a formal complaint against my Chamber of Commerce to the regional Ombudsman! Why do they insists on forcing Businesses to buy proprietary software with their own money, even when the Open Source alternative work just fine and some of those proprietary software programs are sold by Companies who invoice abroad, in ways that redistribute almost none of those profits in our Country?

At the start of the month we talked about GPU switching coming to Linux in a crude form that allowed notebooks with dual GPUs (one being a low-power, low-performance integrated chip and the other being the more performance-oriented GPU that's power hungry) to be switched from without the need for a reboot in Linux. This initial work was just a collection of hacks by David Airlie and it required VT switching after killing the X Server, etc. It also didn't power down the unused GPU. However, as the days passed, this code did more and delayed GPU switching came too.

Initially, The VAR Guy wasn’t all that impressed with Novell’s latest financial results, announced Feb. 25. But our resident blogger overlooked one important fact: Novell’s SUSE Linux business is now break-even. That’s an important milestone — but what does it say about the broader open source industry’s march to profitability? Here are some clues.

The most important changes in Lubuntu Alpha 3 are 4 new default applications: Chromium for the browser, gnome-mplayer as the default media player, Wicd has been replaced with the Network Manager and Pcmanfm2, the rewrite of the file-manager. But a lot of important changes have been made to the visual area, Lubuntu getting new artwork, new default theme and a lot more!

LXer Feature: 26-Feb-2010

I was going to just cover the 2nd and 3rd days of SCALE 8x but after getting back home and sitting myself down in front of my favorite compy and started thinking about it, I figured I might as well go all out and give you a full recap of my road trip from Phoenix to Los Angeles for SCALE 8x and back. 

The Bordeaux Technology Group released Bordeaux 2.0.2 for Solaris today. Bordeaux 2.0.2 is a maintenance release that fixes a critical bug with sound support.

For starters, Ubuntu Studio is a multimedia enhanced version of your favorite linux distribution, Ubuntu. And I must say, the basic artwork in Ubuntu Studio that include themes, wallpapers and iconsets, are way better than that in the original Ubuntu itself. Here is a nice collection of 20 Ubuntu Studio Wallpapers you might want to check out.

The developers behind the Ubuntu One Music Store have put a FAQ online, which I’ve reproduced below. I’ve been beta testing the store out for a few days and have bought some singles and albums directly in Rhythmbox. In fact I think I was the first person to buy an album in the store :D It works really well, but clearly it’s not quite finished. There’s also a lot of rumour and misunderstanding around the store, so it’s great to see the developers putting this information out there.