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Nokia is ramping up development of its Qt open source user interface and application framework with a new release this week. Among the big new additions to Qt 4.6 is support for the widespread Symbian mobile phone operating system. Nokia is one of the biggest supporters of Symbian, with the vast majority of its devices using the OS. In 2008, it purchased Symbian and has since set on its own open source path. As a result, bumping Qt to version 4.6 -- its second update this year -- signals an acceleration of Nokia's developer efforts.

"This is not a democracy, it's a meritocracy." The statement comes from the Ubuntu Governance page, but you can find similar statements in the Fedora Release Notes, the Why Debian For Developers page, and just about anywhere else were free and open source software (FOSS) projects discuss their core values. The idea that FOSS is a meritocracy is equivalent to the idea that America is the land of opportunity, or that scientists are objective. For members of the FOSS community, the idea that hard work is rewarded with recognition and the opportunity for more responsibility is central to their belief system and their sense of who they are.

Version 9.12 is the first public release since the project changed its name from Hiweed Linux, and after five internal alpha tests the first beta version has just been announced. Linux Deepin is a Chinese distribution consisting of elaborately selected software applications and configurations, with the goal of being easy and convenient to use. Linux Deepin 9.12 Beta 1 Screenshots at My SEO Company.

I don't know whether or not it's just me that Ubuntu and/or Xorg is trying to kill, but my latest Intel-graphics honeymoon is most definitely over.

David Airlie, the Linux kernel DRM maintainer and the Red Hat employee responsible for a good portion of the open-source ATI Linux driver work, has announced changes in how he will be handling his DRM kernel branches and the addition of some new branches for ATI customers wishing to experiment with the latest Radeon driver code. Under this new plan David will be controlling the drm-core-next, drm-radeon-next, drm-next, and drm-radeon-testing. Descriptions of these Git branches for the Direct Rendering Manager code can be found on the dri-devel mailing list. The important branches for desktop users wishing to experiment with the latest code is drm-next and drm-radeon-testing...

I couldn't resist...

If you watched the video and wondered what the JavaScript code was for my "Move Junk" button in Thunderbird, then read on. If you haven't watched the video, this article describes how to add custom toolbar buttons to Thunderbird using the Custom Buttons addon.

At the KOffice meeting in Oslo the Krita team had a meeting to put the finishing touches to an ambitious plan. On hearing about it the Dot managed to lure two of the Krita developers in a separate room to question them and find out what was going on. Nobody got seriously hurt in the process. We spoke with Krita developers Boudewijn Rempt and Lukáš Tvrdý.

I just received our first word on the hearing in Utah on SCO v. Novell from one of our reporters. "looking for a march 8th trial date, to run 3 weeks" is the report. I'm sure there will be more info on the way as soon as they can type it up. We had several eyewitnesses in attendance. So stay tuned for updates.

For years the mobile development experience has been a game of “my widgets are cooler than your widgets.” Or “My development environment is faster than yours”. The truth is that quality applications often take a lot of time and energy to write well. Sure, the first 90 percent may go quickly enough using — particularly if you are using the latest tool or framework — whichever it is — it doesn’t reall matter. It’s the “second 90 percent” that takes time and talent.

Best known for its monitors, ViewSonic has announced two 17-inch touchscreen PCs designed for medical applications. The MPC1700 and MPC1701 include anti-bacterial coating, Intel Core 2 Duo processors, bootable CompactFlash slots and 2.5-inch drive bays, plus PCI, PCMCIA, and Mini-PCI expansion slots, according to the company.

Recently Ubuntu celebrated it's five-year anniversary. Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic Koala marks five years since the initial release, 4.10 Warty Warthog. This article outlines some of the things Ubuntu has brought to the Linux world, and what a major impact it has had in such a short amount of time.

If the buyout fails, MySQL has been reasonably independent, but Sun's other businesses would either have to find ways to go forward independently or find another buyer, said Florian Mueller, an early investor in MySQL.

When Google first announced its Chrome OS project, many commentators assumed that the Internet giant was challenging the dominance of Microsoft Windows. The truth is, Chrome is not a threat to Windows, OS X, or any distribution of Linux--nor is it meant to be.

Some projects make it easy for Linux distros to package their software, others not so much. Google Chrome, or rather its Chromium project, is one of those projects that is emphatically not easy for Linux distros to re-package and ship. Tom Callaway of the Fedora project explained this week why he's packaging Chromium for Fedora users, but not as an official Fedora package. The rationale is interesting in the specific instance of Google Chromium, but also a good lesson for other projects and companies that are doing open source development.

Google has announced that it will be focussing its web development plans on HTML5 and that, as a result, development on Google Gears is to slowly wind down. Gears was introduced by Google in 2007 as a browser plug-in to support local browser databases and geolocation functionality. Since then, many of the functions of Gears have been incorporated into the emerging HTML5 specification which is being implmented by Mozilla's Firefox, Apple's Safari and Google's own Chrome web browser. This has left Gears looking more like a non-standard extension, even though it pioneered the ideas of offline databases and caches.

One thing that I've always been curious about, is why Red Hat itself doesn't go after CentOS users in an effort to convert them to paid Red Hat support. Today, I got an answer on that question from Red Hat's Marco Bill-Peter, vp Global Support Services. "We are not actively chasing users of CentOS, but rather find that enterprises are naturally turning to Red Hat for the value of the Red Hat subscription model and support," Bill-Peter said. I personally find that a little 'interesting' especially in light of the comments made by Red Hat's CEO and CFO during recent quarterly investor conference calls. As an overall sales strategy, Red Hat is pursuing the free-to-paid opportunity.

LAMP is short for Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP. This tutorial shows how you can install an Apache2 webserver on an OpenSUSE 11.2 server with PHP5 support (mod_php) and MySQL support.

Blog entry "OpenSolaris 2008.11 guest domain on a Linux dom0" was written by John Levon and supposed to help community users to install OSOL 2008-11 DomU at Xen 3.1 Dom0 on top of Fedora 8. It’s core technique utilizes virsh , so is supposed to be applicable to current release of Libvirt as well. However , /usr/bin/xenstore-read fails to obtain IP address for OSOL DomU via XenStore at Xen 3.4.2 Dom0. Posting bellow fixes this issue and provide an option to build via virsh the most recent OSOL PV DomU at Xen 3.4.2 Dom0 & Libvirt 0.7.1-15 on Fedora 12.

Learn why UNIX has thrived greatly over the years. The systems world will shortly be celebrating a major anniversary milestone. UNIX is turning 40 years old! Most of us know the story of how UNIX was born, but what about why? Was it born strictly because its founders wanted to play a computer game on a different platform? And why does UNIX continue to thrive 15 years after an (in)famous Byte Magazine article that asked, "Is UNIX dead?" How has AIX (the only UNIX flavor that has increased its market share through the years) been a part of the evolution of UNIX and what are the current trends today in the UNIX arena? These are just some of the topics this article explores.