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MariaDB 5.1.42, a new branch of the MySQL database which includes all major open source storage engines, myriad bug fixes, and many community patches, has been released. We are very proud to have made our first final release, and we encourage you to test it out and use it on your systems.

The polls are closed and the results for the 2009 LinuxQuestions.org Members Choice Awards are in. Ubuntu, Debian, MySQL, Firefox, Wordpress, VirtualBox and Gnome are among the winners. The Members Choice Awards allow members of the Linux community to choose their favorite products in a variety of categories including Server Distribution of the Year, Desktop Distribution of the Year, Office Suite of the Year and Web Browser of the Year. The total number of categories this year was 27.

Today KDE announces the immediate availability of the KDE Software Compilation 4.4, "Caikaku", bringing an innovative collection of applications to Free Software users. Major new technologies have been introduced, including social networking and online collaboration features, a new netbook-oriented interface and infrastructural innovations such as the KAuth authentication framework. According to KDE's bug-tracking system, 7293 bugs have been fixed and 1433 new feature requests were implemented. The KDE community would like to thank everybody who has helped to make this release possible.

Ksplice Inc. today officially launched its no-reboot patching service for Linux servers. The Cambridge, Mass., start-up has about 35 customers and several thousand servers using its paid Uptrack service, in which security and maintenance patches are automatically applied to Linux servers with minimal delay and no downtime, according to Chief Operating Officer Waseem Daher. "From a customer point of view, it's seamless," he said.

So for those who are wondering what these wallpaper clocks are all about, wallpaper clocks are wallpapers that show live date and time. And there are a number of good source for wallpaper clocks. But we will get to that later. First the basics. Read on.

Pranksters are using Google Maps to help Berliners track one of the camera-equipped vehicles Google has sent out to photograph Berlin's streets, after they attached a GPS device the car. So whose privacy is being violated?

Motions in limine are flying in Utah like snowflakes in a winter storm, filed by both parties in SCO v. Novell. But there are a lot more from Novell than from SCO. Novell has filed 19 more motions in limine, all filed on February 8, for a total of 20, as well as motions for a Daubert hearing to disqualify Dr. Christine A. Botosan, Dr. Gary Pisano, and G. Gervaise Davis III, three of SCO's experts. The Novell motions in limine are mainly to exclude testimony from certain witnesses of SCO's "for lack of personal knowledge," among other reasons. Like Ed Chatlos. Remember when Judge Dale Kimball was on the case, and Novell filed motions to disqualify that same testimony? Well, now they are raising it again.

At FOSDEM 2010 in Brussels, software that was declared dead was resurrected (Hurd), known combatants sat down at the same table (openSUSE, Fedora and Debian) and almost forgotten entities raised their hands again (openSUSE for PowerPC).

In this article by Carlos de la Guardia, author of Grok 1.0 Web Development, we will start with a quick demonstration of automatic forms. We'll briefly touch the concepts of interface and schema and show how they are used to generate forms automatically. Among other things, you'll learn how to filter fields and prevent them from appearing in a form, and how to change form templates and presentation.

Is Android at odds with Linux after the removal of Android device drivers from the Linux source code tree or is this business as usual for the Linux community and nothing new? The H looks at the issues.

As we alluded to last week, we have been in the process of benchmarking many Radeon HD 2000/3000/4000 series graphics cards using the open-source ATI Linux graphics stack with the Mesa R600/700 DRI driver. We have now carried out our first batch of R600/700 3D tests using this constantly evolving open-source driver to provide OpenGL acceleration and here are the results.

Two recent moves by Canonical and Novell, respectively, show promise as Ubuntu and SUSE Linux seek to compete more aggressively against Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Here are the details.

This tutorial describes how to set up database replication in MySQL using an SSL connection for encryption (to make it impossible for hackers to sniff out passwords and data transferred between the master and slave). MySQL replication allows you to have an exact copy of a database from a master server on another server (slave), and all updates to the database on the master server are immediately replicated to the database on the slave server so that both databases are in sync. This is not a backup policy because an accidentally issued DELETE command will also be carried out on the slave; but replication can help protect against hardware failures.

Welcome to part 3 of our overview of the KDE 4.3 System Settings panel, the replacement for the old control panel of KDE 3.5. Today we're going to look at the Computer Administration master section. This will be a key area for those wanting to administer their own section. So sit back, pay attention, and enjoy.

Readline is the library that handles your Linux command-line input (and input for some other applications). The various customizable options for it are set either system-wide in /etc/inputrc or per-user in ~/.inputrc. Most of the time the default settings will work perfectly well, but there are a few you may wish to try out that will make slight changes to the way that tab-completion behaves. Be sure to hit Ctrl-X, Ctrl-R after editing the file to re-read it and use the changes you've made.

With job losses rising and belts being tightened across the country, now is the perfect time to look once again at the benefits of using open source software aside from the reported $60 billion a year savings on offer.

The next major release of Firefox will not be compatible with Macs running Mac OS X 10.4, also known as Tiger. This comes from a mozilla.dev.planing discussion on Google Groups started by Josh Aas, a Mozilla-employed developer working on the project. The change will go into effect later this year when the browser's Gecko rendering engine makes the jump from 1.9.2 to 1.9.3.

Proprietary vendors are using "anti-features", features that no user would ever want, to protect intellectual property, Benjamin “Mako” Hill, from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, told the linux.conf.au open source conference last month. But IP protection is only one of several reasons vendors introduce such features into their products.

The problem itself appear to be in the kernel from version 6.06, 8.04, 8.10, 9.04 and 9.10. 7.xx versions are not affected . This is a serious problem because it could allow full system access among others.

I received quite a few comments this past week following the publishing of California IT Policy Letter 10-01 which formally establishes "the use of Open Source Software (OSS) in California state government as an acceptable practice." While many of my security colleagues offered words of caution following the announcement (and even a couple of "are you crazy" comments), most were pretty enthusiastic with remarks like, "Finally, enlightenment" and "It's about time government joined the 21st century." As a security guy, I've been on both sides of the OSS fence at different times but I've come to the conclusion that anyone who doesn't think OSS has a place in today's business or government simply hasn't been paying attention.