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In a post to his personal blog Thursday morning, ten-year Mozilla vet Asa Dotzler quoted Schmidt in full before indicating that he's not too happy with the Googler's haughty take on data retention. "That was Eric Schmidt, the CEO of Google, telling you exactly what he thinks about your privacy," Dotzler says, after quoting the Google boss. "There is no ambiguity, no 'out of context' here." Then he pointed Firefox users to an add-on that inserts Bing into the browser's built-in list of search engines. "Here's how you can easily switch Firefox's search from Google to Bing. (Yes, Bing does have a better privacy policy than Google)," Dotzler said. The links are his.

When it comes to the mainstream desktop Linux market, Red Hat has mostly sat on the sidelines — letting folks like Canonical (Ubuntu) and Google (Chrome OS) pursue the spotlight. But now, Red Hat is making some serious desktop moves. But not in a traditional way. Here’s the strategy.

"The Book of Inkscape" by Dmitry Kirsanov (No Starch Press) calls itself "the definitive guide to the free graphics editor." Inkscape is a professional-level vector graphics editor, and if you don't know what that means this book tells you right away, in nice understandable real-people English.

Hindsight, they say, is 20-20. Well here's a little hindsight for you for 2010. Take a virtual trip down memory lane--a year from now.

In many minds, the Fedora 12 release is likely to remain forever associated with the project's ill-advised decision to allow any local user to install packages without the root password. That mistake is now in the past and, in any case, there is far more to Fedora 12 than this particular problem. In this article, your editor looks at the quality of the Fedora 12 release and ponders what Fedora 13 may bring.

Welcome to Lucid Lynx Alpha 1, which will in time become Ubuntu 10.04 LTS. New features: updated packages, Linux kernel 2.6.32, KDE 4.4 beta 1, HAL removal Alpha 1 is the first in a series of milestone CD images that will be released throughout the Lucid development cycle. Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid Lynx Alpha 1 Screen Shots at SEO Expert Consultants Inc.

(Sacramento, USA: December 10, 2009) The Linux Professional Institute (LPI), the world's premier Linux certification organization, announced that it had expanded its training partner program to include 44 nations--up from 33 a year ago. In addition the organization has increased the number of LPI-Approved Training Partners (LPI-ATP) and LPI-Approved Academic Partners (LPI-AAP) to a total of 242 partners -- up 10% from this time last year.

Sugar Labs has announced the availability of Sugar on a Stick version 2, a major update of its Linux-based operating system for education that was originally developed for the One Laptop Per Child project. The new version introduces an ebook reader and a number of other important features.

Recently via email we were asked to run a comparison of the different anti-aliasing and image rendering options between the ATI/AMD and NVIDIA Linux drivers and hardware. Well, we have now run a few quantitative and qualitative tests at different anti-aliasing levels under Linux. For those that want to run the tests themselves with their own drivers and hardware, we also have provided instructions on how you can easily do so using the Phoronix Test Suite 2.4 "Lenvik" development build -- it is irresistibly easy.

Red Hat has open sourced a virtual desktop protocol, called the Simple Protocol for Independent Computing Environment (SPICE), in the hope of fostering its wider adoption.

Raptor is a cross platform chess interface and pgn viewer that currently supports FICS and BICS.

Canonical, and the Ubuntu developers, have announced the availability of the first alpha release of Ubuntu 10.04 LTS, code named "Lucid Lynx". The first development milestone is the first of three planned alpha releases.

Red Hat actually opened up the SPICE protocol yesterday during their Virtual Experience 2009 event. Somehow I missed that. Have a look at the press release if you are interested... as well as their site to house the new open source project - spice-space.org. This seems to have caused some buzz in certain corners of the virtualization websphere (does anyone still use that word?) but so far no one has said what it could mean for us run-of-the-mill Linux users looking for a good, fast remote desktop protocol. I asked a couple of questions on the fedora-virt mailing list and received some informative replies.

You have probably heard of Nepomuk, the semantic desktop technology we've been shipping for a while as part of the KDE Platform. However, so far, you may not have noticed it really doing very much useful for you. So what is this thing called Nepomuk, what can it do for us now and what will it bring us in the future? We asked two of the driving forces behind Nepomuk, Stéphane Laurière and Sebastian Trüg of Mandriva, to tell us about the real Nepomuk features that are already available in KDE software and those that have been introduced with Mandriva Linux 2010.

Dell announced new Ubuntu Linux-ready OptiPlex desktops, including a power-efficient model claimed to be the "world's smallest fully-functional commercial desktop." In addition to the 9.4 x 2.6 x 9.3-inch, Intel Core 2 Duo-ready OptiPlex 780 USFF desktop, Dell announced a 13-inch Vostro V13 laptop that also offers Ubuntu.

NiVi Games (www.nivigames.com) announced that BentBend is now available for Linux. BentBend is a new brain teaser puzzle game. Connect colored cubes two by two to get a rich bonus. Your connections must not cross. BentBend has good music and nice graphics letting you enjoy the game for hours. Go through all the 100 increasingly challenging levels, become a winner and set a new record at high scores.

I have been using GNU/Linux for two years so far, and I'm using Ubuntu (GNOME). Over this period, I have tested a lot of download manager applications; unfortunately, I can't find the one that suits best for me, because what I have in mind was a program which more or less is simple, lightweight and practical. I don't want a download manager which is crowded with features nor a primitive one and certainly I don't want one that works via a command line/terminal!

This tutorial shows how to set up a Mandriva 2010.0 Free (x86_64) server that offers all services needed by ISPs and hosters: Apache web server (SSL-capable), Postfix mail server with SMTP-AUTH and TLS, BIND DNS server, Proftpd FTP server, MySQL server, Dovecot POP3/IMAP, Quota, Firewall, etc. In the end you should have a system that works reliably, and if you like you can install the free webhosting control panel ISPConfig 2 (i.e., ISPConfig runs on it out of the box). This tutorial is written for the 64-bit version of Mandriva 2010.0.

It's the holiday season! Regardless of which holidays you celebrate, it's a good time to connect with relatives and absent friends. GIMP is a great tool for creating your own custom holiday cards; Akkana Peck shows how to do this using your own images.

The computing world is always very unpredictable. That must be why there is a small number of people who make large amounts of money from it: they are in the right (unpredictable) place, at the right (unpredictable) time. Who would have ever guessed that Javascript, a simple scripting language initially thought as a simple means to make web pages “cooler”, would become… drum roll… the world’s new CPU? Read the full article at Free Software Magazine.