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Brian Proffitt recently tackled the topic of distro-hopping over on LinuxPlanet. Proffitt wonders whether the practice might be passe or something to be discouraged, but it's here to stay and should be encouraged rather than looked at askew. Distro-hopping, if you're not familiar with the term, is the practice of switching Linux distributions. While some users find a "home" and stick with one Linux distribution, others "hop" around and try out several distros. Sometimes in an effort to find the One True Distro, other times just because the variety between distros is something to be enjoyed and experienced. Whatever the reason, it's a good thing for the user and community when people have experience with more than one operating system.

A powerful US lobby group is trying to have pro-open source countries listed as being "anti-capitalism". Open source software is anti-capitalism and undermines intellectual property. It's not a new claim against free and open source software, but now a new report suggests that a pro-proprietary lobby group has not only been pushing this line around the globe but is also looking to get pro-open source countries listed on the US' Special 301 watchlist.

The BBC's iPlayer has long been a thorn in the side of the Open Source community. Since it entered public beta in mid-2007, the BBC has consistently flip-flopped between completely ignoring FOSS users, serving them third-rate pacifier versions, and begrudgingly granting access to what Windows users have had all along. And the flipping continues.

I'm not the type to run alpha software. Even beta is too cutting-edge for me. I'm a bit better about release candidates, but I tend to wait for the official release (or preferably a few months after that) before I put something into my production flow. Not so these days. I'm planning ahead to see where I'm going with my personal machines in the next few years, and I've been looking at the near futures of both Debian and Ubuntu.

Novell’s latest quarterly financial results, revealed today, were a mixed bag for the SUSE Linux provider. Novell made progress in some areas. But didn’t really thrive in others. Where does the company go from here? The answers will likely surface at the Novell BrainShare. Here are the details.

In Gartner's assessment of the server market in the fourth quarter of 2009, X64 servers and blades in particular were singled out as the growth engines. With IDC's similar, but different, report Thursday we learn that the Windows platform was the real beneficiary of the bump in sales. IDC tracks factory revenues by the server manufacturers, while Gartner tracks revenues that add vendor and reseller sales together. So their numbers are never quite the same. But they are similar, and they track. Gartner talks about sales by X64, RISC, and Itanium processors, while IDC looks at server sales by the primary operating system deployed on the boxes.

Rewind a year or so, and Unison Technologies made headlines with a free, advertising-based unified communications (UC) system that supported Ubuntu Linux desktops. Fast forward to the present, and Unison has changed its business strategy.

Emery Fletcher wonders if Microsoft has not emulated the IBM of old a bit too well, becoming a slow, bloated engine of intimidation, rather than a lean mean innovator.

Last Monday PC-BSD was released. PC BSD is based on FreeBSD and uses KDE as its default desktop environment. The 8.0 release of PC-BSD is based onFreeBSD Support for 3D acceleration with NVIDIA drivers on amd64 and improvements in the USB subsystem. PC-BSD is designed to make BSD mu ch easier for desktop use. See installation instructions and screenshots tour.

One of the most interesting Mozilla Labs projects has now stagnated. Is the project dead? Does it have a future? The Mozilla developer who led the project tells all.

For this release, Nouveau has been assigned as the default video driver for Nvidia graphics cards, instead of the old nv one, and the popular Mozilla Thunderbird 3 e-mail and rss/news client has been included in the default software repository, replacing the old 2.x release.

Sacramento, CA, USA - The Linux Professional Institute (LPI), the world's premier Linux certification organization announced that its partner organization LPI-Netherlands has signed a Memorandum of Understanding with ECABO, Netherlands's Center of Expertise on Vocational Education, Training and Labor Market to include LPI certifications in their curriculum. ECABO works for the entire range of vocational training in the Netherlands representing lower and senior secondary vocational education and higher vocational education. For example ECABO supports nearly 90,000 students in the senior secondary vocational education sector alone.

The BBC have activated a protection mechanism on the Flash based streaming system used by iPlayer, stopping open source media players from legally playing BBC content. The protection mechanism, known as SWF Verification, sends a "ping" message to the player software after one or two minutes of a stream being played. The player software is expected to identify the Flash version in use; if it does not, or if it's response doesn't match a list of authorised players on the server, then the stream is disconnected. Previously, iPlayer had not sent SWF Verification pings, and media players such as XBMC were able to include open source plug-ins which could play the content. Now, these plug-ins stop working after one or two minutes.

Recently my company had the opportunity to upgrade a server to Mandriva 2010 that was running an old version of the Mandriva GNU/Linux distribution. The system had been in place running along nicely for a few years and had not been upgraded to a new release in all that time except for some security patches. Then it started hanging mysteriously whenever under load from users opening Squirrelmail with large amounts of mail in the INBOX. Looking at logs, checking settings and system files revealed nothing. However, once the system was taken off-line, brought in-house to ERACC and the cover removed we discovered there were several popped capacitors on the old motherboard.

If people haven't started thinking about the current crop of smartphones as computers, maybe this will help: Quake III Arena (Q3A) ported to the Android platform. If a device can run a custom port of Id Software's legendary first person shooter, surely it qualifies as a computer more than a phone. That might sound silly, but think about it: When Quake III Arena was initially introduced, it took massive (at the time) processing power and a beefy (at the time) video card to run. We're now at the point where the computer in my pocket can run the greatest game of all time. The fact that smartphones also make phone calls is almost incidental. Phone calls are handled by just one program of many on the device.

Mozilla has officially ditched Firefox support for Apple Mac OS X 10.4 for upcoming versions of its browser, despite gripes from some web surfers. The open source group confirmed on Tuesday that, following heated discussion from the Mozilla community, it would only support Mac OS X 10.5 or later when it released the next iteration of its browser.

Boxee is a home theater PC software program that runs on Linux and has been designed to be used like an interactive TV, somewhat like the Xbox 360 interface. In fact it’s based on another program called XBMC which was originally created to run on the first Xbox consoles. These days, you can use Boxee to not only manage local music and videos, but stream audio, video, and image content from places all over the web. There are connections to popular media sites like Last.fm, Flickr and YouTube, and a custom web browser to get additional content without leaving the Boxee environment.

I've been thinking about building my own very small machine around the dual-core Intel Atom processor with Nvidia graphics. Yes, I know that Nvidia is freedom-hating and all, but I think that for the small form factors such as Mini-ITX, Intel and Nvidia are heading in the right direction when it comes to compactness, power consumption and graphical sophistication. I usually begin my search with my favorite Mini-ITX vendor, Logic Supply, but I have also begun looking at pre-assembled systems that ship with Linux.

This article by J.Ayen Green, author of Drupal 6 Attachment Views, gives us an introduction to Attachment Views in Drupal. Looking at just about anything worth doing, a question will often arise beginning with the words, "How do I." Often the challenge can seem daunting. Then, one finally intuits, discovers or otherwise stumbles upon the answer and simultaneously is offered several alternative opinions, each being offered as the best way to accomplish the same goal. This is the case whether planning a vacation route, taking a photograph, or creating part or all of an application.

A new kernel release makes its debut, with Nvidia and without Android, and top Red Hat and Novell kernel developers share their inside view.