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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.

January 31st will be my last day with Novell. I've given it a great deal of thought, and decided that it's time to move on. With the openSUSE Conference wrapped up, 11.2 launched, the major projects I've been working on are completed and I feel like this is a good parting point. It wasn't an easy decision, but I had some time to refocus over the holidays and I know that it is time to move on. One of the most important responsibilities any employee has -- especially a community manager -- is to know when to move on, and not remain in a role just for the sake of having a job.

Android will trail only Symbian in mobile phone market share by 2013, according to IDC. Android phones such as the pictured Sony Ericsson Xperia X10, which is now heading for NTT DoCoMo, will grow 150.4 percent to 68.0 million units by 2013, but other Linux-based phones will struggle, says IDC.

Today, Python is one of the most popular programming languages in the open source space. It's a vast language and there are many gems to discover - here are ten tips for new users to get the ball rolling…

News that 75% of kernel hackers are now paid for their work has led some to suggest that they've sold out. That's not the case: here's why.

Microsoft takes 3 months to patch the latest headline vulnerability in its 'safe' browser only for a security researcher to reveal another huge hole as the patch is being released. Nice. When will the hoi polloi realize it is time to dump this pile of steaming code?

Lighttpd is a secure, fast, standards-compliant web server designed for speed-critical environments. This tutorial shows how you can install Lighttpd on a CentOS 5.4 server with PHP5 support (through FastCGI) and MySQL support.

Last week we published the first Debian GNU/kFreeBSD benchmarks that compared the 32-bit and 64-bit performance of this Debian port -- that straps the FreeBSD kernel underneath a Debian GNU user-land -- to Debian GNU/Linux. We have now extended that comparison to put many other operating systems in a direct performance comparison to these Debian GNU/Linux and Debian GNU/kFreeBSD snapshots of 6.0 Squeeze to Fedora 12, FreeBSD 7.2, FreeBSD 8.0, OpenBSD 4.6, and OpenSolaris 2009.06.

Those familiar with Linux will be able to tweak settings, add and remove apps and customise the menu, toolbars and other desktop elements. Incredibly, those are about all the skills you need to create your very own Linux distro. We're going to take a look at some scripts that'll help you customise different distros.

Samba developer and open source legend Andrew Tridgell says the open source community is poor at fighting patent attacks, but says things could improve with some changes in strategy. He offered his tips for effectively fighting patent holders making claims against open source projects at the recent Linux.conf.au.

This week there was the release of QEMU 0.12.2 (and the subsequent release of KVM-QEMU 0.12.2) with support for block migration, but this point release was mostly made up of small fixes and tweaks. IBM's Anthony Liguori though has begun making plans for the next major release of this open-source processor emulator. QEMU 0.13 will be the next big release and Anthony is hoping it will be completed by June and boast a large number of new features.

Carla Schroder wrote an editorial piece this week on Linux Today (a website I enjoy and frequent daily via their RSS feeds) entitled Editor's Note: What is User-friendly, Really?. In it, Carla claims to be "90% satisfied" with KDE3 and "60% satisfied" with KDE SC 4.3. Why? "KDE 4 sacrifices customizability and efficiency for glitz. [...] There is a trend to dumb Linux down in a fruitless attempt to appeal to Jane and Joe Sixpack. Which is wasted effort, because in doing so computer-savvy users are being ignored and frustrated, and Jane and Joe Sixpack don't care anyway."

Guess why Microsoft suddenly decided it wanted to be more interoperable? It's so it can get customers to quit using Linux and switch to Windows & .NET. Remember when Microsoft told us it was interested in greater interoperability with Linux because their customers were demanding it? That part is true, as I'll show you. But the purpose of developing greater interoperability at the request of Intel, according to this exhibit, was so that Microsoft could get Intel to switch its development environment from Linux to Windows. Intel's Paul Otellini had reportedly asked his people to figure out how to do that.

["..and at Intel, the developer crowd was raised on Unix/Linux. They just don’t WANT to move."..I Love It! - Scott]

Continuing the theme of "KDE Everywhere", recently it was announced by the folks over at TiltOS that KDE applications are now available for download and use. TiltOS provides a repository and an easy to use application manager for the Haiku operating system, which is in turn aims to be an open source implementation of the BeOS operating system.

The second alpha of Lubuntu Lucid Lynx has been released. Based on Ubuntu Lucid alpha, it is of course not stable, but everyone willing to test it can download the new Lubuntu Alpha 2 .iso. In case you don't know, Lubuntu uses LXDE, a very lightweight and minimal desktop environment using the openbox window manager, the PcManFM file manager, and a very select list of default applications. It is compatible with basic freedesktop standards and all needed parts are already packaged in Ubuntu today.

For most users, Firefox doesn't use an abnormally large amount of memory. For others, however, Firefox's memory consumption is a major problem, in some cases memory usage in Firefox is due to other sources, like number of plug-ins, themes and extensions

Window List is a Gnome Panel applet - the default way to view the list of all windows that are currently running in Gnome. Here is a package which will modify this and will add a behavior similar to the Google Chrome "Pin Tab" feature (which is also available as an extension for Firefox by the way), meaning that the "pinned" windows are all grouped to the left and only their icons are displayed, while the unpinned windows are displayed on the right of the pinned windows, and both the icon and the window title are displayed: