Linux News for Nov 25, 2009

• Editor's Note: Saffire on Linux, KDE on Windows, No Gimp in Ubuntu (Nov 25, 2009, 23:03)
  I like to leave a clean desk for a holiday, so I'm going to clear up a few loose ends: further adventures of using the excellent Focusrite Saffire Pro on Linux, KDE on Windows is cool, and when did having to learn anything become a criminal offense?


• SSDs,Coming Soon to a Server Near You (Nov 25, 2009, 22:33)
  ServerWatch: "Oh, right, the downside. You're right; it's the price tag. They currently range in price from two or three times for smaller drives (about 30GB) to more than 10 times that for drives in the 120GB to 250GB range."


• Does Metasploit Have a Future? (Nov 25, 2009, 22:03)
  EnterpriseNetworkingPlanet: "The future of Metasploit, the highly respected, open source penetration testing framework founded by renowned security expert H.D. Moore, was plunged into doubt last month following the announcement that the project had been acquired by Rapid7."


• Exclusive: Former MySQL boss Marten Mickos talks open source (Nov 25, 2009, 21:33)
  Silicon: "Why Microsoft could become one of the "biggest friends of open source" and why Oracle getting its hands on MySQL could be "one of the biggest open source coups ever"


• Why Does Everyone Hate Ubuntu (Nov 25, 2009, 21:03)
  Datamation: "Yet this popularity has a flip side. If Ubuntu is the most popular distribution, it is also the most hated."


• Mobile Web Applications (Nov 25, 2009, 20:33)
  Linux Magazine: "The mobile web is maturing — but be careful to not stuff your application chock-full of "features.""


• Putting Trust in the Cloud (Nov 25, 2009, 20:03)
  Linux Foundation: "If you have any gold in your portfolio, then you are indeed a fortunate soul. With gold at an all-time high, upwards of US$1,100 per Troy ounce, lots of people with this precious metal are feeling quit flush right now."


• K Desktop Environment is Dead: Long Live KDE (Nov 25, 2009, 19:33)
  OStatic: "Following in the footsteps of KFC, the KDE Project is rebranding and getting rid of the full name "K Desktop Environment.""


• Linux in 5 Easy Steps (Nov 25, 2009, 19:03)
  Daniweb: "Hey Windows fans, would you like to take Linux for a spin to see what everyone's buzzing about? It's easy to do in just five easy steps. You can test Linux for yourself without having to setup multibooting, worry about partitioning or installing over your current Windows system."


• Rambus EU Settlement Appears Near (Nov 25, 2009, 18:33)
  Standards Blog: "According to Reuters, one more thread in the long-running saga of Rambus and the JEDEC SDRAM standards abuse saga appears to be reaching an end."


• The Un-Scary Screwdriver (Nov 25, 2009, 18:03)
  The GNOME Journal: "Cathy Malmrose gives a glimpse into a project where seven year old girls build desktops with Ubuntu for their grandparents."


• Review: Goggle Wave so far (Nov 25, 2009, 17:33)
  A Million Chimpanzees: "Thank you for signing up to give us early feedback on Google Wave. We're happy to give you access to Google Wave and are enlisting your help to improve the product".


• Giving up the GIMP is a sign of Ubuntu's mainstream maturity (Nov 25, 2009, 17:03)
  ars Technica: "During a planning session at the Ubuntu Developer Summit last week, a decision emerged to remove the GIMP from the default Ubuntu installation. Although this decision has generated a bit of controversy, it's a sign of Ubuntu's growing maturity as a mainstream platform for regular users."


• Kernel Log: Coming in 2.6.32 (Part 4) - Driver (Nov 25, 2009, 16:33)
  The H Open: "The forthcoming Linux version 2.6.32 comes with numerous new and improved drivers – for instance for the Hauppauge HVR 2200 and 2250, for some ThinkPad notebooks by IBM/Lenovo, and for the MSI Wind's fingerprint reader"


• Mastering Characters Sets in Linux (Weird Characters, part 2) (Nov 25, 2009, 16:03)
  LinuxPlanet: "In Part 1 Akkana Peck talked about Unicode, character sets and encoding -- how accented and special characters are transferred in email and web pages, and why you see funny characters. But can you fix it when it goes wrong? And if you're a programmer, how should you be handling all these encodings?"


• How To Upgrade From Fedora 11 To Fedora 12 (Desktop & Server) (Nov 25, 2009, 15:33)
  Howtoforge: "This article describes how you can upgrade your Fedora 11 system to Fedora 12. The upgrade procedure works for both desktop and server installations."


• Mollom: A solution to comment spam (Nov 25, 2009, 15:03)
  CMS Report: "However, allowing for anonymous comments also invited my site into a war against comment spam. My latest weapon to do the fighting for me in this war is Mollom."


• Five things Chrome OS isn't (Nov 25, 2009, 14:33)
  Cyber Cynic: "Some people still seem a little confused about what Chrome OS is, and isn't, so here's my quick guide on what's really what with this forthcoming operating system."


• Will U.S. Government Embrace Canonical Landscape and Ubuntu? (Nov 25, 2009, 14:03)
  worksWithU: "Opportunity is knocking in the government market for Canonical's Landscape, a systems management and monitoring tool for Ubuntu systems."


• Ubuntu 9.10 on SSD (Nov 25, 2009, 13:33)
  Linux Pro Magazine: "I've been thinking about replacing the hard disk on my production notebook with a solid-state disk (SSD) for quite a while. So when I stumbled upon a good offer on Kingston 64GB SSDNow V series SSD I decided to take the plunge."


• Create a Database and Data Entry Form in OpenOffice.org Base (Nov 25, 2009, 13:03)
  Linux.com: "For many people the mere thought of having to create or use a database sends shivers down the spines of many users. But it doesn't have to. Creating a database and adding data to that database is actually a simple task in OpenOffice.org Base."


• KOffice 2.1 released, ups Microsoft Office compatibility (Nov 25, 2009, 12:33)
  TechWorld: "KOffice, a cross-platform open source office suite, has reached version 2.1 with the import and export of Microsoft Office on the list of big improvements."


• FInally, FreeBSD 8.0 Released (Nov 25, 2009, 12:03)
  Phoronix: "The much-anticipated FreeBSD 8.0 release is finally available, albeit it's arriving more than a month late."


• Google Chrome OS. Or, how KDE and GNOME managed to shoot each other dead (Nov 25, 2009, 10:33)
  Free Software Magazine: "A lot of people at the moment are immensely intrigued by Google Chrome OS...To me, however, the change about to happen shows us what many people have refused to believe for a long time: KDE and GNOME shot each other dead."


• LCA 2010: The art of the matter (Nov 25, 2009, 09:03)
  IT Wire: "Heather Buchanan isn't organising anything very technical for the next Australian national Linux conference. But her contributions will remain with the delegates much longer than those of the other volunteers."


• Ubuntu 10.04 LTS Has 100 Paper Cuts Again (Nov 25, 2009, 07:33)
  Phoronix: "Ubuntu 10.04 LTS will have ten rounds to fix 100 (or more) paper cuts in time for the Lucid Lynx before it is released in April."


• Use MP3 Diags in Linux to repair your MP3 collection (Nov 25, 2009, 06:03)
  Ghacks: "Do you have a massive MP3 collection that contains files with problems? Don't you wish you had a program that could search through that collection, find problems with those files, and fix the problems?"


• Combining Flexibility with Control: Managing the "Complexity Hell" of Customized Linux Platforms (Nov 25, 2009, 04:33)
  Linux Magazine Webinar: "OS groups are under pressure to tailor off-the-shelf Red Hat Enterprise Linux and other OS platforms — but, today, it’s flexibility at the expense of control."


• Britain's new Internet law -- as bad as everyone's been saying, and worse. Much, much worse. (Nov 25, 2009, 03:03)
  Boing Boing: "The British government has brought down its long-awaited Digital Economy Bill, and it's perfectly useless and terrible. It consists almost entirely of penalties for people who do things that upset the entertainment industry..."


• Some Reasonable Defaults for MySQL Settings (Nov 25, 2009, 01:33)
  Linux Magazine: "Out of the box, MySQL isn’t exactly tuned for resilience on a busy network where things occasionally go haywire."


• Learn to use Git version control for added flexibility (Nov 25, 2009, 00:03)
  Techrepublic: "Vincent Danen introduces Git, a distributed version control system that gains extra flexibility from being free of a central server, like Subversion or CVS. Here are some of the features that set it apart."