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If you're looking for a solid drawing and image editing program for Gtk, have a look at Pinta. This week's point release brings several new improvements, a batch of new tools, and a facelift to the GUI. Modeled after Paint.NET, Pinta makes a great lightweight alternative to GIMP. It works on Linux, Mac OS X, and Windows, and has enough features to get all but the heaviest of editing jobs done. Pinta sports several drawing tools, including Pencil, Eraser, Shapes, and Paintbrush. It supports an unlimited number of layers and unlimited levels of Undo/Redo for those times when you realize you made an editing mistake several steps back.

Canonical, the company behind the Ubuntu Linux distribution, is undergoing significant changes in management. Founder Mark Shuttleworth has stepped down from his role as the CEO so that he can increase his involvement in the software design and development process. Jane Silber, who has long served as the company's chief operating officer, will be taking over as CEO. To fill the COO vacancy left by Silber's ascension, Canonical has recruited Matt Asay, the former vice president of business development at open source content management software company Alfresco.

The Debian project was given a new server from Thomas Krenn AG, Intel and Adaptec for its image building. With the Dual-Xeon computer the build process was reduced from 20 to two hours.

More than 100 candidates to Italian regional elections that will take place at the end of this month officially support Free Software and have committed to actively promote it if elected. Many of them are in smaller parties with smaller probability to get a seat, but for Italy it's a good result anyway.

Whether you think "search" is sexy or not, you probably can't live without it. In fact, according to the blurb on the book's back cover, "It (search) influences what we buy and where we go. It shapes how we learn and what we believe." That's a powerful statement, and probably more true than we realize (or we wish). While most of us experience search as users, Morville and Callender provide a practical guide that allows you to build your own search applications...but how good of a guide is it? I decided to find out (hence this review).

OpenOffice.org is the greatest open source alternative to Microsoft’s Office suite. Over the years OpenOffice has evolved to become much more than just an alternative to MS Office however. Let’s look at some hacks that will allow you to become more of a power user of OpenOffice, enabling you to be more productive with the software.

There may well be some of you out there who are currently thinking, “It’s not that bad…” to which my response is: in terms of user interface, there are much better file managers available for GNOME than GNOME’s default file manager (two, off the top of my head: Thunar, default for the Xfce Desktop Environment and PCMan File Manager, or PCManFM). Plus, if you’ve ever used a Mac with OS X, then what you’ll be looking at there is the King Of The File Managers. But we can make it better…

In lieu of today’s regular column, I’ve decided to present an edited transcript of a very informative interview of Nina Paley by Thomas Gideon of “The Commandline Podcast.” Paley has been doing a lot of interviews since her free-licensed release of “Sita Sings the Blues” and her subsequent work with QuestionCopyright.org (specifically her two “Minute Meme” animations: “Copying Is Not Theft” and “All Creative Work is Derivative”) — reading them all would be quite a bit of work. But this interview is possibly the best — covering all of the major issues she’s been talking about in what I thought was a very insightful way. So: kudos to Nina Paley and to her interviewer, Thomas Gideon, and I hope you find this text version interesting. Read the whole interview at freesoftware Magazine.

dpkg is pretty slow in Debian-based systems, usually because of the many files which are stored in the /var/lib/dpkg/info folder. To speed up things, Luca Bruno created a project called tdpkg which uses an sqlite3 or tokyocabinet database for loading the dpkg .list files in the /var/lib/dpkg/info folder which makes dpkg a lot faster.

Mark Shuttleworth had a dream: the big Linux distros should agree to have version numbers identical to those of kernel components and refresh them every two years. The dream now is more real than ever.

Microsoft's “Corporate Vice President and Deputy General Counsel” has written a piece entitled “Apple v. HTC: A Step Along the Path of Addressing IP Rights in Smartphones” that is basically a warning that the company is about to join in suing companies producing software for smartphones. Is this a veiled attack on Linux?

Open-Xchange, a provider of business-class open source collaboration software, today announced enhancements that give users telephone and fax integrated with e-mail, contacts, calendar and task information. By combining Open-Xchange (hosted and on-premise editions) with Unified Communications and Virtual PBX solutions, businesses can replace their traditional phone lines -- saving on phone bills. Presence and instant messaging services will be added in the coming software releases enabling users to communicate in real-time anytime, anywhere.

Industry standards and innovation took center stage at MIX10, as Microsoft Corp. made a series of announcements that underscore the company's commitment to interoperability and performance on the Web. [...] As part of Microsoft's broad engagement with open source communities, Corporate Vice President Scott Guthrie today announced that Microsoft is investing resources to contribute to the development of the jQuery JavaScript Library to help improve the development process of standards-based Web applications. Microsoft will also work to provide better interoperability between ASP.NET and the jQuery JavaScript Library by enhancing ASP.NET so .NET developers can better incorporate jQuery capabilities.

[I gather they want to be on the iPhone and iPad. And their definition of "interoperability" is you can use their stuff easier, which matches the goal Steve Ballmer set for "Open Source", that it all run on Windows instead of the Linux kernel. - Pamela Jones, Groklaw]

As the big Novell BrainShare conference gets set to start on March 21, Novell’s board of directors is considering an unsolicited offer for the company. But here’s the twist: More software developers seem to be flocking to Novell’s SUSE Linux platform — at a time when Novell’s ownership status could potentially change. Here’s why.

For the second time in recent weeks, hosted unified communications is earning some headlines. But this time, the news involves an open source initiative between Open-Xchange (an open source email company) and 4PSA (a VoIP and cloud unified communications specialist). Here 's the story.

New winetricks 20100316: new verbs steam, adobeair, 7zip, d3dxof and win7. Today's winetricks was brought to you by the letters W and S, and the number 7.

The KDE and GNOME communities are looking for a host for the Desktop Summit 2011, the combined annual conference featuring KDE's Akademy and GNOME's GUADEC events. Following up on the successful Gran Canaria Desktop Summit, the second edition of the combined event in 2011 will be the premier place to learn about, discuss, and work on free software on the desktop. The goal of the desktop summit will be to present and discuss the state of the art of free software for end users, do community building, enable cross-community collaboration, and enable partners from industry and other communities as well as individuals to get informed and involved.

It took me ages to learn bash redirection properly, and I still have to concentrate sometimes to keep my &s and my >s straight. Here's the lowdown in case you, too, have intermittent brain failure on this one. Bash has three standard file descriptors: stdin, stdout and stderr, which refer respectively to input, output and error output. By default, all of these are directed to the terminal, so all input comes from the terminal, and all output (regular and error) will go to the terminal.

LinuxCertified,Inc. a leading provider of Linux training, will offer weekend Linux system administration bootcamp on March 27th - 28th, 2010 in South Bay (CA). This workshop is designed for busy information technology professionals and is designed to cover the most important Linux administration areas.

Last week we delivered benchmarks of Fedora 13 Alpha and Ubuntu 10.04 (along with testing the Fedora 11 and 12 too), but today we have a new set of comparative benchmarks that are covering the latest development versions of Ubuntu 10.04, Mandriva 2010.1, PCLinuxOS 2010, and openSUSE 11.3. Here they are.