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When Nokia announced that it was launching the Symbian Foundation to great fanfare, it had within its grasp that rarest of opportunities to move swiftly and become the dominant open source mobile platform. Alas, just one and a half years later, they have seemingly ceded that position to Android. Instead of recognizing the threat from Android and making strategic changes to counter, they instead criticized Google's closed-door development of Android before releasing a line of code themselves. When criticizing competitors, it helps to have your own house in order first.

Like a number of Asian countries, Japan has, in the past, had a reputation for being a great consumer of Linux: Japanese companies have been happy to make use of it when it suited them, but contributions back to Linux have been relatively scarce. The situation has changed over the years, and Japanese developers are now a significant part of our community. We get a lot of code from Japan, and, increasingly, ideas and leadership as well. Japan is pulling its weight, and, possibly, more than that.

Semiconductor firm Cavium Networks announced it has signed a definitive agreement to acquire embedded Linux pioneer MontaVista Software for $50 million. After the acquisition wraps up in December, MontaVista will run as a separate operating unit, retain its own brand name, and support multiple architectures, MontaVista execs Jim Ready and Dan Cauchy told LinuxDevices.

Photos, slide stacks, and huge documents can take up a lot of file space and we frequently need to distribute those files out to colleagues working on a project. When everybody is working in the office, you might have the luxury of being able to put your stuff on an Alfresco (Linux) or Sharepoint (Microsoft) server. The situation gets problematic when your team is working at a virtual office at the coffee shop downtown or off-site in some client conference room somewhere.

Another week, another round of tinkering and messing around with Linux doodads. The Ubuntu Koala text installer has a years-old bug, and Fedora 11 LiveCD has a showstopping installer bug. Never a dull moment in computer-land!

Microsoft has pulled the Windows 7 USB/DVD Download Tool from the Microsoft Store website after a report indicating that the tool incorporated open source code in a way that violated the GNU's General Public License (GPL).

Setup xvm per Sun the most recent instructions. As appears latter Virt-Manager is broken in 126 ( vs 124), but this is not the worst thing supposed to happen. Virt-install rejects to install Fedora12 PV DomU which is not yet in the dictionary in meantime. XML startup file for f12 allows to avoid this restriction mostly connected i believe with xVM version unable to handle ext4 FS for boot partition of Linux DomU

Is MySQL free in a free-market? With the European Commission's ongoing investigation, a debate over what makes free software free has emerged, ironically, centred on how money is made from free software.

Desktop developers are starting to understand that netbooks need different interfaces than workstations -- or even notebooks. The smaller screens on netbooks are a usability challenge, comparable to designing a business card when you're used to creating full-page ads. A case in point is KDE's Plasma Netbook interface, now available in a preview in Kubuntu 9.10. Scheduled for official release in January 2010 with KDE 4.4, the interface is still in development. But it's advanced enough to show the developers struggling with the screen size limitation, sometimes overlooking it but at other times showing enough promise that the main KDE desktop could learn a thing or two from it.

The idea of Microsoft releasing Visual Studio for Unix and Linux was once - quite literally - a joke. Not only was Visual Studio only built for Windows, but Microsoft's licensing had prevented people using its premier development environment with non-Windows platforms. Now, there's a little less to laugh about. Microsoft partner Novell has delivered a plug-in designed to help Visual Studio developers easily build, debug, test, and port applications built using C# in Visual Studio 2005 to Linux, Unix, and OS X. The plug-in has Microsoft's full blessing.

Linux lies at the heart of yet another big takeover deal in silicon valley. Chip makers love Linux. That was why, in part, Intel bought Wind River. And it is very definitely the main reason behind Cavium Networks acquisition of MontaVista Software. A truism of today's processor industry is that embedded Linux is the operating system of choice for developers.

The MythTV hard disk recorder software is available in a new version that is based on Qt4 and supports new hardware and the VDPAU decoder.

In past articles we have delivered plenty of file-system benchmarks from testing out EXT4 to Btrfs to NILFS2. We have also delivered benchmarks from traditional hard drives to solid-state drives. One area though where we have not published any file-system benchmarks is for USB flash drives. Most users end up staying with the default FAT32 file-system for flash drives, but are there any performance advantages to using EXT3, EXT4, XFS, Btrfs, or ReiserFS? We have the benchmarks today to share atop the latest Linux 2.6.32 kernel build.

Remote Linux PC access over the Internet requires extra security precautions. Today we lock down the OpenSSH server more tightly, get through a firewall without opening the LAN to the world, and decide if we want password authentication or certificate authentication.

Lordy, lordy, lordy. They have no shame. It appears that Microsoft has just patented sudo, a personalized version of it. Here it is, patent number7617530. Thanks, USPTO, for giving Microsoft, which is already a monopoly, a monopoly on something that's been in use since 1980 and wasn't invented by Microsoft. Here's Wikipedia's description of sudo, which you can meaningfully compare to Microsoft's description of its "invention". This is why what the US Supreme Court does about software patents means so much. Hopefully they will address the topic in their decision on Bilski. Sudo is an integral part of the functioning of GNU/Linux systems, and you use it in Mac OSX also. Maybe the Supreme Court doesn't know that, and maybe the USPTO didn't realize it. But do you believe Microsoft knows it?

SAP's CTO has recently called for Java to be run by "an authentically open body". But that's a deeply hypocritical position to take for a company that has written what amounts to a love-letter to software patents, submitted as an amicus curiae brief to the European Patent Office. Software patents and "authentic" openness just don't mix: SAP needs to choose which side it is on.

Google has launched Go, a new systems programming language born with concurrency, simplicity, and performance in mind. Go is open source and its syntax is similar to C, C++ and Python. It uses an expressive language with pointer but no pointer arithmetic. It is type safe and memory safe.

Amarok is a great music player for linux. In the current release of Kubuntu 9.10 Karmic also the current stable version of Amarok was introduced into the repositories. However Amarok is under heavy development and updates won't be included in the official repos. If you want to be up-to-date and have the latest Amarok version available, you'll need to compile it yourself. Compiling Amarok isn't really hard but there are a few dependencies that it needs and a few things to look out for.

There are many secrets about Nautilus normal users might not familiar with them; therefore, in this article, I will try to shed light on some of them. Although I am using Nautilus on Ubuntu 9.10 in this tutorial, everything mentioned will be valid also on most of other distributions like Fedora, Mandriva or OpenSUSE.

In my last article, Teaching with Tux, I wrote about teaching children with the Tux Educational programs. Today, I'm going to discuss the Gcompris education suite. Gcompris is meant for younger children from 2 to 10 years old, though it seems to focus on the younger part of this range.