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Seriously, it's 2010. Universal access and platform agnostic content delivery is not only possible, it's what's called a standard and any Web developer worth their hourly rate should be able to produce content that Firefox running under Linux, with the appropriate plugin (yes, I'm talking about Flash right now -- don't want to confuse things), can view.

Microsoft and Amazon.com have signed a wide-ranging patent cross-licensing agreement that provides each company with access to the other's patent portfolio. Specific terms of the agreement were not disclosed, but it was made clear that Amazon will be paying Microsoft an undisclosed amount of money as part of the arrangement. While Microsoft wouldn't say which of its products and technologies Amazon is interested in, Microsoft did mention that Amazon's Kindle, which employs open source and proprietary software components, as well as Amazon's use of Linux-based servers are covered.

Gnome Shell is the new core user interface for Gnome 3 which provides switching windows and applications but you've probably already heard of it by now so I'll skip the introduction. Gnome Shell 2.29.0 comes with many changes and improvements, which we will cover below (with screenshots). A very interesting change in the latest Gnome Shell is a new message tray showing notifications sliding into the bottom of the screen. It includes a status area for past notifications, and also pulls in "urgent window" handled in GNOME 2 by flashing the taskbar.

In an open letter to Google, the Free Software Foundation suggested that the software giant freely release the VP8 HD video compression format after having acquired the On2 video technology firm.

Since Oracle finished its acquisition of Sun Microsystems, there have been many changes to the open-source projects that were once supported under Sun now being discontinued by Oracle and significant changes being made to the remaining open-source products. One of the open-source projects that Oracle hasn't been too open about their intentions with has been OpenSolaris. Solaris Express Community Edition (SXCE) already closed up last month and there hasn't been too much information flowing out about the next OpenSolaris release, which is supposed to be known as OpenSolaris 2010.03 with a release date sometime in March.

Recently I wrote about controlling konsole with dbus. As I've begun to use that script for setting up my konsoles I, like others, have discovered that the tab title that you set with dbus doesn't stick. This short note shows you a workaround to make your tab titles stay put. Even though I wrote the original post a few weeks back I didn't realize that I had a problem until now because I just this weekend upgraded the system that I use most often. Plus, apparently, I already discovered the workaround on my other system and proceeded to immediately forget about it as it took me a fair amount of fiddling to figure it out (again) today.

Hewlett-Packard is launching a Google Android-based netbook. Shipping under the Compaq brand, HP calls it the AirLife 100. It will debut in the United Arab Emirates (no word on a U.S. launch). The big question: Is Android for netbooks a good computing solution? Here are some clues.

Ubuntu Artwork Pool is buzzing with activity. There is simply a number of wallpapers to choose from. Here is a nice collection of 15 wallpapers for Ubuntu Lucid Lynx from Ubuntu Artwork Pool.

Let’s avoid second-guessing and implication. There’s nothing to see here. We have real code to write.

[Mr. Zemlin is being a bit naive in dismissing Amazon paying a Linux patent tax to Microsoft, and further strengthening Microsoft's oft-repeated claims that Linux violates their patents, as "nothing to see." Want to write Linux code? Pay Microsoft first. - tuxchick]

I was about five years old when my father showed me my first computer. It was an old 8086, and it had 5.25 floppy drive, a shiny new 3.5 floppy drive, and a 10MB hard drive. When he gave it to me, it ran nothing but MSDOS. As a starter machine, I didn't really care. I was just stoked to have a computer, and when my father showed me how to get to video games, and how to type a text document, I was thrilled. In 1993, my father got himself a Pentium machine, and I received his 486. The 486 also had DOS on it, but when I tried to play my old games everything went by too quickly. I asked my dad what was wrong, and he said that the games I had been playing relied on the CPUs clockspeed. At this point, he gave me a thin orange book, Understanding Microprocessors, which was published by Motorola. He also showed me a book on his shelf that taught me a bit about electricity. A month after this encounter, I went back and asked him if there were any operating systems that would run in protected mode. He told me, yes.

Am I asking for too much here to want an equally easy install experience on Linux for FOSS software as I enjoy on Windows? If Linux is ever to gain any sort of real market share in the desktop market I feel this is some thing that must happen. But maybe I am wrong.

The browser maker moves the Dragonfly debugging toolkit to publicly hosted servers, setting up the BSD-licensed software as an open project.

Attention developers: This "improvement" you call kernel mode setting is pretty much a regression for users of my particular video chip, the Intel 830m, and could be equally useless for other Intel video hardware. Do you think that maybe figuring out why kernel mode setting doesn't work in these cases is the thing to do? And how about dropping in some code that automatically turns off kernel mode setting on hardware that doesn't like it until you deal with this show-stopping bug?

A few days back we reported on a new Mutter release, which is the window and compositing manager for GNOME 3.0, and now with the GNOME 2.29.91 beta release coming up on Wednesday there is also the release of another new GNOME 3.0 component. Perhaps the single biggest new component for the GNOME 3.x stack is the GNOME Shell and this is the package that just reached version 2.29.0. GNOME 2.29.0 brings a lot of improvements.

Hall agreed to serve pro bono publico (at no charge, for the public benefit), and asked the court for a declaratory judgment that the patent was unenforceable. Katzer responded by bringing a SLAPP suit against Jacobsen. SLAPP is a law that was meant to defend little folks sued by big rich companies, but is increasingly used in just the other direction. And the judge upheld this, which meant that Jacobsen would have to pay Katzer's lawyer's fees before the case was even decided. After some court argument, the unreasonable fees asked were reduced to $14,486.68 and $16,976.25, for two lawyers used by Katzer, and Bob Jacobsen paid them.

If you have been following my live tweets today you will know that day 1 of the "New Millenium Learners Conference 2010" taking place here in Vienna at the moment was really interesting. The opening session led by people from the Austrian Ministry of Education introduced some of the projects that the Ministry has been working on in Austria. Our small Austrian OLPC project in Graz was also mentioned but unfortunately due to time constraints the information on all the projects remained relatively superficial.

Microsoft and Amazon.com have reached an agreement that gives each company a license to the other's patent portfolio, in a way that could revive one of the Redmond company's longest-running controversies. That's because Microsoft says the deal grants Amazon patent-related "coverage" for its use of open-source and proprietary technologies in its Kindle e-reader, and for its use of Linux-based computer servers.

[You smell what I smell? Microsoft FUD.. - Scott]

Occasionally, your editor will be struck by a series of topics all associated with a common theme. The recent fuss about Android's presence (or the lack thereof) in the mainline kernel ties in well with a couple of other items of notice: the Nexus One phone and the role of free software on the Android platform in general.

In this article, which is the second article of the article series, we will cover how to install PHP-Nuke on a local machine running an Apache/MySQL/PHP (AMP) environment. We will not cover the installation of AMP here; you can find a walkthrough of installing the XAMPP package in Appendix A. This package includes PHP, MySQL, Apache, and much more, and is a quick way to get yourself a working AMP development environment.

Days later you receive an email from your reputable vendor that your RMA refund request has been denied, because you installed Linux on the laptop. You contact your vendor's customer service group, and are again told, "No refund. You installed Linux."