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Last week, the KDE Community had their yearly Americas event, this year in sunny San Diego. Despite California not living up to its sunny reputation, the attendees certainly had a good time. The first three days featured talks about a variety of topics (day 1, day 2 and day 3), there were CMake and Qt development courses and of course several small meetings and work to be done. However there was more than sitting in the conference room at UCSD. We had a great time at Banana Bungalows on the beach, went out for a variety of food, had a few dragons and babies visit us and risked our lives getting to and from the university. Read on for some general impressions on the event, and for some motivation to attend Camp KDE 2011 next January, at a location still to be determined.

"rooting" or "jail-breaking" phones. Odds are you have heard at least one of these terms before. Neither of these processes is very difficult to accomplish with a small bit of know-how and it's your phone so you should be able to do with it as you please. Right? Yes and no.

The Ohio LinuxFest announces the 2010 keynote speakers: Stormy Peters, Executive Director of the GNOME Foundation, and Christopher "Monty" Montgomery, Open Source multimedia advocate and developer.

Launched in 2007, Red Hat Exchange sounded promising. But over time, Red Hat gradually rethought the online marketplace. Visit the original site now (http://rhx.redhat.com) and Red Hat Exchange seems non-responsive. Does it still exist? Here are thoughts from The VAR Guy.

Firefox downloads boosted by new release and Internet Explorer security scare. Mozilla's open source browser experienced a healthy boost in popularity last week on the back of a new release and security concerns about Microsoft's Internet Explorer.

Linux needs Microsoft and Microsoft needs Linux. Both are better because of the other. Do you agree?

Remember XGI Technology? The company that was spun out of SiS and Trident back in 2003 and for a while had some interesting low-end GPU hopes along with a few graphics cards that actually made it out to the market. There really hasn't been much talk about XGI in years and ATI had bought up one of their alliance companies in 2006 that further diminished this company. Their Linux drivers were not the best back in 2005 and things really never changed for the company that had hoped to compete with ATI and NVIDIA on some level.

Open source software company Inverse released the version 1.2.0 of SOGo. SOGo provides a rich AJAX-based Web interface and supports multiple native clients through the use of standard protocols such as CalDAV, CardDAV and GroupDAV. It features a very tight integration with Mozilla Thunderbird and Lightning and enable mobile devices synchronization through the use of the Funambol middleware.

There are a number of popular choices for Linux enterprise level servers including CentOS, Ubuntu, Debian, Slackware and others including Red Hat Enterprise. What is important to recognize in this evaluation is that how you view advantages and disadvantages are dependent upon the expertise of your Linux administrators and the level of support you need to maintain your servers.

The Linux world has everything, if you know where to find it, including an in-between option to the command-line interface, and a full-blown X Window System environment. Juliet Kemp talks about ncurses, the excellent graphical environment for the console.

Over the last 12 months, netbook and mobile Linux has made massive advances in features and install base. This is primarily thanks to two netbook distributions – Moblin and Canonical's Ubuntu Netbook Remix (UNR). Both have built on the massive potential that was unlocked by the Asus Eee PC but led nowhere, as its operating system failed to inspire a new generation of Linux users. There's a new breed of netbook distro that's aiming to change this perception and take the fight for the perfect mobile platform back to the manufacturers.

Familiarity undoubtedly ranks among the largest barriers to open source adoption — software, like so many other things, is habit-forming. Much of that familiarity, at least among younger users, comes from the prevalence of proprietary applications in education, an area awash with government regulations, competitive bidding, and its own habit-induced hangups. Enter Albany Senior High School, an Auckland, New Zealand-based unorthodox enclave of education. The school, which opened its doors in 2009, takes a different approach to learning, utilizing open principles that include open spaces, open interaction, open opportunities — and open source.

Red Hat has launched opensource.com as a community site for open source. The Drupal powered site has been created by Red Hat but Jim Whitehurst, Red Hat's President and CEO, says "This will not be a site for Red Hat, about Red Hat. Instead this will be a site for open source, about the future". He added that "this site is one of the ways in which Red Hat gives something back to the open source community"

KDE’s default web browser is Konqueror, and many users love it for its speed, integration with KDE, and its host of features. Nevertheless, some sites do not perform as well as they do in Mozilla Firefox, and some users prefer the large number of available Firefox add-ons. Furthermore, users who move from Windows to Linux might prefer Firefox for its familiarity. Regardless of their reasons, there are plenty of KDE users who want or need Firefox. Unfortunately, Firefox uses GTK themes for its visual appearance, which ruins the visual continuity that KDE users have come to expect. But fear not, there is a way to make Firefox look and partially feel like a real KDE app. Using four Firefox add-ons and one GTK theme, you can give Firefox an extreme makeover.

Frank wondered how long his phone had been buzzing.  He was about to turn it off when he saw that it was his daughter Marla calling.

My excitement quickly turned to concern when I learned why Mozilla is not supporting this new streaming video format in their Firefox browser.

Emery Fletcher muses on how a rank Linux beginner can figure out how to install the latest Firefox release, even when professional tech journalists can't.

LXer Feature: 25-Jan-2010

Large ongoing cost savings because they do not need to keep buying patches.

In our previous tutorial we showed how you to access the iPhone OS 3.x filesystem and read/write to its music database using iFuse and by compiling our own libgpod4. Then we had to create a file on the iPhone, manually mount the phone each time and so on. Maybe a bit complicated for an average user. However, there is now a lot easier way using GVFS which will automount your iPhone for syncing with Rhythmbox, for example. And you don't need to compile anything anymore.