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Ubunutu 10.04 TLS Lucid Lynx has been released today, here it is a screenshot tour of the new beta release .

When other mailers aren’t doing the trick, it’s time to break out Claws: An extremely configurable and extensible GUI mailer that gives you all the control you’d ever want over your mail without sacrificing ease of use.

Almost exactly one year ago, LWN examined the problem of 4K-sector drives and the reasons for their existence. In short, going to 4KB physical sectors allows drive manufacturers to increase storage density, always welcome in that competitive market. Recently, there have been a number of reports that Linux is not ready to work with these drives; kernel developer Tejun Heo even posted an extensive, worth-reading summary stating that "4 KiB logical sector support is broken in both the kernel and partitioners." As the subsequent discussion revealed, though, the truth of the matter is that we're not quite that badly prepared.

According to this press release, Marvell is announcing the $99 Moby Tablet for Education. You’ve seen my video of Marvell’s 4.3? Tablet prototype shown at CES based on the Marvell Armada 600 processor. The Moby tablet is based on the same Armada 600 platform but comes with a larger screen (probably 10?). Marvell’s Moby Tablet may be the first prototype of the OLPC XO 3.0.

Florian Schießl, deputy head of Munich's LiMux project for migrating the city's public administration to Linux, has, for the first time, explained why migrating the city's computing landscape to open source software has taken longer than originally planned. On his blog, the IT expert admits that "We were naïve," and confesses to a "miscalculation". Following approval of the project in 2003, LiMux was conceived as the sole Linux client, which "fits into every different environment inside the IT units." This may have been "theoretically possible", but, according to Schießl, would have meant failing to unify the existing patchwork of IT applications and essentially continuing to muddle through.

The Open Video Alliance (OVA), a group that seeks to promote adoption of standards-based open video technologies, has launched a new campaign encouraging users to upload videos to the Wikipedia website. The goals behind this new campaign are to visually enrich the online encyclopedia and promote awareness of the value that open video technologies can bring to the Web.

Open source application developers are switching their efforts to Android, according to a new study. Google's Android mobile phone operating system is winning many fans. And now it appears to be winning the hearts of open source developers as well. Which is good news for users looking for more applications, and good news for the future health of the Android ecosphere.

Over the last couple of years a number of different open source business strategies have evolved. According to the 451 Group, it's an evolution that includes the broader adoption and usage of open source overall by both open source and proprietary software vendors.

This tutorial shows how to set up a high-availability storage with two storage servers (CentOS 5.4) that use GlusterFS. Each storage server will be a mirror of the other storage server, and files will be replicated automatically across both storage servers. 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 week we featured a review on two MSI WindBox Atom 330 NetTops that we had purchased to add to our testing farm, which as you may now know went into our Phoromatic Ubuntu Tracker setup that is monitoring the performance of the latest Ubuntu development packages on a daily basis. Before devoting this hardware to the farm, we ran a few benchmarks comparing the performance of NVIDIA's ION GeForce 9400M graphics processor to the ATI Radeon HD 4330 graphics processor found on the MSI 6667BB-004US and several other Atom-powered devices.

"We've read the article at Webupd8.org with Mark Shuttleworth, and here is our opinion on the matter." ... "You have a kernel team because you think you need one, you feel the need to change the kernel. How many serious security flaws have there been in Ubuntu? And how many were specific to Ubuntu?"

Were happy to announce a new open source project called Almost Native Graphics Layer Engine, or ANGLE for short. The goal of ANGLE is to layer WebGLs subset of the OpenGL ES 2.0 API over DirectX 9.0c API calls.

LXer Feature: 19-Mar-2010

Apart from Apple, some other companies are bringing some interesting tablets. In contrary to the iTab, those other tablets do run Linux. Some are already available, such as the TouchBook from Always Innovating (AI), and some have supposedly better screens, like the Notion Ink Adam tablet. From the info available from Sola's blog on the Notion Ink tablet, from the Wikipedia-info on the iPad and AI Touchbook and from the website of the AI touchbook I made a feature table so you can compare features. Apart from that, let's take a look at the future: What technologies are coming to this market?

As an election looms in the UK, copyright, intellectual property and Open Source, are making an appearance on the political stage, both at home and internationally.

This article is a quick installation reference for Drupal, the required Drupal modules, and Ubercart. Ubercart is not a standalone e-commerce application, but it comes as a Drupal module. That means you have to first install Drupal and all the required Drupal modules on a server with the minimum requirements, before installing Ubercart.

Part 1 of this series introduced arpeggiators in general and profiled the QMidiArp application. This week we conclude our survey with a look at two more arpeggiators for Linux musicians: Hypercyclic and Arpage.

Snapping a quick screenshot is a capability you get out of the box with most current Linux distributions. Hit the Print Screen function key, and you should see a dialog box pop up with a capture of your entire screen. For GNOME users this typically launches gnome-screenshot while Kde will bring up Ksnapshot. Both tools are similar in functionality and get the basic job accomplished.

I am on a quest to rid the android market of certain apps. For the past year I have seen the Android Market fill up with apps of lascivious and copyrighted content. You can search the Android Market for the following keywords and see quite a bit of content that I feel shouldn't be available to customers, and definitely not to children: nude, sex, porn, 18+, adults only, boobs, the android market seems to be turning into a porn hub. I am also seeing developers release apps which are entire books, fashion photos and videos which are surely copyrighted. These apps also violate the Android Market Content Policy for Developers available here.

Taking legal action against *all* companies producing software stacks for smartphones would allow Microsoft to claim with some semblance of plausibility that it was not specifically targeting Linux this time (unlike its previous sabre-rattling statements about patent infringement that were specifically aimed at Linux). But the net effect would be that Linux would be the chief victim of such an approach, since any companies using it in their smartphones are likely to end up doing deals with Microsoft - and hence implicitly accepting its claims - whatever the open source community might think or want. It would be like Novell's pact with Microsoft, writ large and much worse.

Some of us are still waiting for the year of the Linux desktop. Some think it’s already here. One thing is certain however, Linux does not have a majority desktop market share. By the time we get there, perhaps the entire idea of what a Desktop is will have been re-defined, thanks to “The Cloud”.