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What's happened to innovation for KDE and GNOME? Would the developers prefer that we use the command line?

A few members of the GNOME Foundation have submitted a petition to the board, asking for a referendum to be held on making the Foundation's mailing list archives private and limited to its members only.

User interfaces are the last great Linux problem. What really makes Linux user-friendly-- is it limited options and loads of eye candy? What about functionality, and depths of riches to explore?

It is much less expensive for hardware vendors to support Linux. If you want to build a device driver, a great place to start is by looking at existing shipping device drivers, an opportunity that Linux offers to everyone. A proprietary “Device Driver Toolkit” with its sample code is never as good as production code. Those expensive kits contain documentation, but not source code — so you sometimes have to guess at what is happening down below.

This document describes how to install Ailurus on Fedora 10, 11 or 12. Ailurus is an application which aims at making Linux easier to use. It provides these features: install some software which is not provided in official repository; enable/disable some third-party repositories; change some system settings; help you study Linux skills.

Dell no longer has desktop systems available on their Linux system page. Only laptop and netbook systems are now available. This is the second time in the past few months that Dell has dropped Linux desktop systems. Attempts to contact Dell to ask about the status of desktop Linux systems have so far been unsuccessful.

Firefox 3.6 final is out in the wild and yet again, most Ubuntu users are not able to upgrade their resident Firefox 3.5 to this latest release. Let's cut the chase. All you need to do is to get the latest version of Ubuntuzilla, a python script which pretty much gets the job done without any hassles.

(English summary by hkwint:)

Quick stats for period between July / Dec '09:
IE loses the most in Ireland (7%), Greece, UK and the Czech Republic.
FF still around 30%, Chrome from 2 to 4%, Opera stable at ~2%, Safari from 4 to 5%.
Follow the link 'Full story' to see the full report.

English translation of the entire article will probably follow later.

Skype for Linux 2.1.0.81 Beta 2 is released. This popular instant message & voice/video-chat software makes it possible to communicate with a wide variety of platforms (including MS Windows & Apple OSX).

The WhisperingWulf is a fully functional totally quiet personal HPC cluster. This project was originally started as a quest for a small and silent HTPC (Home Theater Personal Computer).

X@FOSDEM 2011? Forget about it. It is to much disappointment that we have to report this evening that the X@FOSDEM DevRoom will be ending this year, after the X.Org project has consistently held a development room at Europe's largest free software event for years. Two days ago we reported on the sad state of this year's X@FOSDEM schedule. Only half the schedule is filled and there is just two weeks left until the Free Open-Source Developers' European Meeting.

Schools should be looking to open source for students, both for lower cost and far greater learning potential, and there are a number of excellent education-oriented Linux distributions. Paul Ferrill takes openSUSE For Schools (Linux For Education) for a spin.

The third day of talks at Camp KDE was somewhat shorter, due to the afternoon Cmake training provided by Marcus Hanwell of Kitware. However, in order to provide complete coverage of the talks for the readers of the dot, summaries of the third day's technical talks are provided within.

Around 75 per cent of Linux developers raked in cash from their code crunching in the past year. It's a figure that in many ways comes as little surprise, given that Linux usage has become so widespread across industries, government and the public sector in recent years.

A month after NVIDIA launched the GeForce GT 220 graphics card they rolled out the GeForce GT 240, to further fill the performance void between the GT216-based GT 220 and the GeForce GTS 250 that had been around since March. The $100 GeForce GT 240 has received some praise for its low-power consumption while delivering a decent level of performance for being a mid-range graphics card, but of course, those reviews have been when tested under Microsoft Windows. We finally have our hands on a GeForce GT 240 graphics card from the folks over at ECS Elitegroup to see how this GT215 graphics card performs under Linux.

Oracle CEO Larry Ellison is pretty darn confident the European Union will soon approve Oracle’s takeover of Sun Microsystems and MySQL. Still skeptical? Ellison is planning a big announcement on January 27. Here are the details.

Bob Sutor, who has served at IBM in one position or another since 1982 but currently holds the title of VP of Open Source and Linux after serving as the VP of Open Source and Standards, has decided to share his thoughts on Linux gaming. Dr. Sutor had drove IBM's adoption of the ODF document format and has many other open-source wins for the company, but on his blog he now begs the question will video games make desktop Linux into a killer consumer platform?

FFidelity Information Services Free/Open Source GT.M Mumps database is gaining traction outside of private-sector Veterans Affairs VistA Electronic Health Record while Veterans Affairs VistA development in the private sector is proceeding at a furious rate. Companies such as M/Gateway, Astronaut (owned by the same conspiracy that owns Linux Medical News) Medsphere, DSS and others are making announcement after announcement of new development in the Veterans Affairs VistA Electronic Health Record or closely related space.

Red Hat is rattled. Sure, it remains the world's biggest Linux company by revenue market share. But it's beginning to feel that it's under pressure - and that it must respond. That pressure is coming not from Microsoft, but from fellow Linux vendors. Individually, they aren't causing too much trouble, but collectively, they could be creating an environment in which customers are starting to question why they should pay Red Hat to support their Linux at all.

Even with its slowly growing popularity, Linux is still a largely unknown thing to many people. Why should Average Joe care about Linux? This alternative operating system doesn't affect his life at all - or does it? The truth of the matter is this: Almost every adult who uses technology in today's world uses or has used something that is Linux powered.