Fedora 13 Alpha was released yesterday with a plethora of new features and updated packages for this Red Hat Linux distribution. Aside from the features like Btrfs system rollback support and PolicyKit One support for Qt/KDE applications to excite end-users, each Fedora release always pulls in the very latest Linux graphics code. Fedora was the first distribution shipping with the Nouveau driver, then its KMS driver, and now with Fedora 13 it’s the first OS deploying Nouveau’s Gallium3D driver (there’s benchmarks behind that link). Fedora 13 is also carrying the latest packages for the unreleased X Server 1.8, DisplayPort monitor support for more graphics cards, the latest ATI driver code from the xf86-video-ati DDX to the in-development DRM, and then there is the very latest Intel work too. To get an idea for the direction that the Intel 3D support is heading in this release, we have carried out a few quick OpenGL benchmarks.

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Mozilla’s high-performance TraceMonkey JavaScript engine, which was first introduced in 2008, has lost a lot of its luster as competing browser vendors have stepped up their game to deliver superior performance. Firefox now lags behind Safari, Chrome, and Opera in common JavaScript benchmarks. In an effort to bring Firefox back to the front of the pack, Mozilla is building a new JavaScript engine called JägerMonkey.

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The casual view of open source software is that the code always comes first: releases are made when the code is ready, new contributors prove their chops by the quality of their code, and so forth. But in reality the FLOSS ecosystem relies on a complex legal framework in order to run smoothly and to stand up to proprietary software competition: the various software licenses, contribution agreements, copyright and other “intellectual property” law. Every once in a while, a good status check on the legal dimension is healthy for the typical developer, and SCALE 8x offered just that in a series of talks.

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Barely a day goes by when you switch on your computer, plug into the web and come across yet another deranged scheme to restrict freedom in the name of security, safety or morality. RIAA, DMCA, RIPA, Pallidium computing, the list almost seems to grow exponentially. So, some guys got together in a dark room, brainstormed and came up with yet another ruse to curtail access to and use of the internet. Relax, this one won’t fly. Trust me. But the sheer audacity of it! Even the bovine docility of Windows users wouldn’t stomach this one (or would they?)—and here’s the irony. Read the full article at Freesoftware Magazine.

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So the devil called me this afternoon and said they where having a snowstorm in hell. In other news Valve announced that their revolutionary “content delivery service” known as “Steam” is being ported to OSX and will be available as early as April 2010. No really its true, straight from the horse’s mouth. In addition the actual client and “Steam-works” being brought to Apple’s operating system Valve also plans to port all of the Source Engine games.

[Not directly FOSS related, but interesting since Windows is seen as the powerhouse of gaming. - Sander]

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A joint resolution on Transparency and State of Play of ACTA negotiations from virtually all party groups in the European Parliament was tabled earlier today. It will debated tonight and faces a vote on Wednesday. If approved, the resolution marks a major development in the fight over ACTA transparency. It calls for public access to negotiation texts and rules out further confidential negotiations. Moreover, the EP wants a ban on imposing a three-strikes model, assurances that ACTA will not result in personal searchers at the border, and an ACTA impact assessment on fundamental rights and data protection.

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Julien Lavergne has released the next Alpha 3 of lubuntu. lubuntu is a faster, more lightweight and energy saving variant of Ubuntu using LXDE, the Lightweight X11 Desktop Environment. The lubuntu team aims to earn official endorsement from Canonical. Lubuntu 10.04 Alpha 3 Screenshots at My SEO Company

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Ask any knowledgeable mobile user, and she will tell you that the best way to securely access the Internet in public places is through a VPN (virtual private network) connection.

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Case studies of open source success are always useful – especially when, like this one, they show how a UK government project that cost £100 million ($150 million) using traditional approaches but still didn’t work properly, was fixed for just £35,000 ($53,000) using free software.

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We’ve all seen countless articles, blog and forum posts explaining how to back up a server with rsync and other tools. While I’ve cringed when people talked about using non-scalable methods, there actually is a place for quick and dirty backup mechanisms. Small companies running just a few virtual machines in the cloud, or even enterprises with test instances, may wish for a quick and effective backup.

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Nautilus image converter is a nautilus extension to mass resize or rotate images. if installed an additional menu entry will appear when you right click the mouse inside nautilus. It is a convenient utility which can save you lot of effort.

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Parallels, the virtualization and cloud enabler, has officially announced they’re supporting Chrome OS, Google’s Linux distribution. Here are the implications for corporate customers, consumers and partners.

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The Linux world is all excited about Ubuntu’s new look but surely there are more important things that need to be done to make Ubuntu more appealing?

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Today is my last day of employment at Sun (well, it became Oracle on March 1st in the UK but you know what I mean). I am a few months short of my 10th anniversary there (I joined at JavaOne in 2000) and my 5th anniversary as Chief Open Source Officer. I hope you’ll forgive a little reminiscence.

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Through Phoromatic you can easily build a benchmarking test farm with minimal effort and combined with Phoromatic Tracker you can monitor the performance of a given software or hardware component over the course of time. We used our own tools to launch a Linux kernel tracker that monitors the performance of the very latest Linux kernel code on a daily basis at kernel-tracker.phoromatic.com. We are also announcing another new, important public tracker coming soon, but first off, we needed a few more low-powered Intel Atom systems. We ended up purchasing two MSI Wind Box NetTops (the 6667BB-003US and 6667BB-004US) that are both based around an Intel Atom 330 dual-core processor within a very low-profile enclosure. The MSI 6667BB-003US utilizes Intel GMA 950 graphics while the 6667BB-004US boasts an ATI Radeon HD 4330 graphics processor. Here is our Linux look at these two Intel nettop computers.

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Wyse Technology, the prominent thin client company, is preparing a “completely new product in the consumer and enterprise space” that leverages Ubuntu Linux, The VAR Guy has learned. Here are some preliminary details about the emerging Wyse-Ubuntu effort, and the implications for Canonical and the thin client computing market.

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From March 2-6 CeBIT Open Source 2010 called open source projects, enterprises, and organizations to Hannover, Germany. Here’s our photo gallery from the talks in the Open Source forum, the project lounge, and the Linux New Media awards.

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Now cinecutie is registered on launchpad and on sourceforge. The reason of this choice is that the project now is a real fork and I need to use all free platforms I can. I’m not a Bazaar lover and so Sourceforge is used only as git repository, launchpad is used for bug tracking, features requests and, soon, as repository.

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The development of Linux 2.6.34 has started and is causing heated discussions on the LKML. LWN.net has analysed Linux 2.6.32.9 for security fixes and found almost twenty of them. Linux-Libre removes proprietary files from the kernel, and new graphics drivers for Radeon cards offer numerous improvements.

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Appcelerator has taken the beta tag off its open source Titanium development kit, a means of building native desktop and mobile applications using traditional web-development tools such as JavaScript, Python, Ruby on Rails, html, and CSS. Titanium 1.0 was officially released today, with the Silicon Valley–based startup claiming significantly improved performance on iPhone and Android handsets after reconstructing the kit’s mobile setup. In beta, Titanium built its native iPhone and Android applications by way of the WebKit browsers built into those high-profile mobile platforms, but after a three-month rewrite, it now bypasses the browser entirely, according to director of marketing Scott Schwarzhoff.

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fter 2 years of of development, Elive 2.0 landed under the codename “Topaz”. Elive “Topaz” is based on debian and use Enlightenment 17 as a default desktop .Elive offers great visual appear even with minimal hardware resources. The minimum recommended hardware is 300 Mhz and 128 Mb of RAM.

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There has been a whole host of innovative features being worked on in the build up to Ubuntu 10.04; some of the technical things include noticeably faster booting, other aspects include artwork and imagine redesign. Community leader Dave Walker shares his behind-the-scenes views on the latter…

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Developer Joshua Wright intends to release KillerBee, an open source collectionPDF of Linux tools intended for testing the security of ZigBee networks. According to Wright, many ZigBee implementations are a mess – he hopes that his tool, which is coded in Python, will ultimately lead to more secure products. Wright lists ZigBee applications which include controlling water flows in dams and natural gas control valves. The technology is also widely used in building automation; many thousands of ZigBee devices have been used in the brand-new MGM CityCenter in Las Vegas, for example. Some intelligent electricity meters in use in the US also communicate using ZigBee in a mesh network.

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This guide explains how to set up WebDAV with lighttpd on an Ubuntu 9.10 server. WebDAV stands for Web-based Distributed Authoring and Versioning and is a set of extensions to the HTTP protocol that allow users to directly edit files on the lighttpd server so that they do not need to be downloaded/uploaded via FTP. Of course, WebDAV can also be used to upload and download files.

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Omnis Studio is a cross-platform (Windows, Mac and Linux) Rapid Application Development tool. It allows you to quickly build applications using a combination of graphical elements as well as a code editor. In this tutorial we look at installation on Ubuntu and getting familiar with the excellent tools on offer…

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Berlin, probably one of the most frequented KDE hacking locations in the world, saw another hack sprint from 13th to 21st of February. This time four of the KDevelop and five of the Kate developers shared a week of very productive programming. Additionally team members from Okteta and KDE on Windows joined the meeting.

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One of the big changes in Ubuntu 10.4 (aka Lucid Lynx) is the built-in social networking tools. These include a menu bar option for posting updates directly to any number of social networking sites. This change has been introduced for the first time in the third alpha release, made last week. Called the MeMenu the tool expands on the existing “presence” menu to add a text box for updating the users status on any of their accounts. The existing presence menu includes rudimentary options for marking a user available or away on their instant messaging account. The MeMenu uses the much-improved Gwibber tool to broadcast the status updates to all networks.

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The Novell software engineer, Linux Foundation board member and kernel maintainer talks technical about Linux and more…

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Ahh, poor Palm. Sure, they have their fancy new WebOS toys — but it wasn’t that long ago they were banking on the Foleo changing the mobile world as we knew it. Sadly, they were just a little too early, and a little too lame. Here’s the good news, Palm: We’re ready now. Let me give you a bit of a vision, and you run with it… more>>

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There are lots of ongoing efforts to increase the number of women participating in free software, but reports on how those efforts have fared are few and far between. Sarah Mei spoke at the Women in Open Source (WIOS) conference, which preceded SCALE 8x, to report on what she and other members of the San Francisco Ruby community have been doing to bring more women into that community. Her talk, Moving the Needle: How the San Francisco Ruby Community got to 18%, looked at the goals that were set, the methods that were used, and the results.

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