Important Linux News

climenole points out a post from Canonical founder Mark Shuttleworth about internal strife in the free software community. He wrote, "Tribalism is when one group of people start to think people from another group are 'wrong by default.' It's the great-granddaddy of racism and sexism. And the most dangerous kind of tribalism is completely invisible: it has nothing to do with someone's 'birth tribe' and everything to do with their affiliations: where they work, which sports team they support, which Linux distribution they love. ... Right now, for a number of reasons, there is a fever pitch of tribalism in plain sight in the free software world. It's sad. It's not constructive. It's ultimately going to be embarrassing for the people involved, because the Internet doesn't forget. It's certainly not helping us lift free software to the forefront of public expectations of what software can be."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

There will always be a place for relational databases, but non-relational solutions are proving to be fast, flexible, and scalable for many tasks.

Tabbed browsing has arguably had a significant impact on the way that people use the Web, but the feature hasn't really scaled to accommodate the increasing complexity of the average surfing session. The existing tab management and overflow handling mechanisms that are present in modern browsers are dated and suffer from some fundamental limitations that significantly detract from user productivity.

As more software shifts into the cloud and users increase their reliance on the browser for daily computing tasks, browser tabs will have to evolve from a primitive mechanism for switching between documents into a full-blown task management system. The mainstream browser vendors have been slow to address this issue and haven't applied much innovation to the problem over the past few years. Mozilla has stepped up to plate and is aiming to hit the ball out of the park with some unique and truly compelling improvements to the tab concept.

Read the comments on this post

During GUADEC 2010, the GNOME Release Team met and decided to hold the GNOME 3.0 release for the March 2011 release instead of September 2010. Even though it means an additional six months to GNOME 3.0 is officially released, it could be a good thing.

The official release of Eclipse 4.0 SDK, which reworks the underlying platform of the IDE, is now available for early adopters. Production users will have to wait for tools to be updated to feel the benefit...

.NET for Android - dubbed MonoDroid - has come a step closer.…...

At last week's OSCON conference, the big topic on the minds of open sourcers was whether or not an open source social networking offering can break down the walled gardens of popular services such as Facebook, and win...

Nokia has unveiled a knock-off of Opera's Mini phone browser, intended for use on its low-end handsets in emerging markets. It's the first manifestation of Nokia's own ad engine.…...

Sorry to disappoint the people who were so upset that Dell was 'abandoning' Ubuntu Linux, but the PC vendor is actually expanding it desktop Linux offerings.

Why do some people choose to run Linux as their PC platform of choice while others opt instead for other ways of running their computing experiences?

Julie188 writes "GNOME 3.0 was scheduled to be released in September but during the developers conference, GUADEC 2010 in Den Haag, the organization had to face facts: the much ballyhooed GNOME Shell really wasn't ready. The Shell is supposed to bring 'a whole new user experience to the desktop.' So now, in September, what users will see is GNOME 2.32, distributed as a new stable release. Next target date for 3.0: March 2011."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The developers behind the GNOME project have gathered in the Netherlands this week for the annual GUADEC conference. During a meeting that took place at the event, the GNOME release team made the difficult decision to delay the launch of GNOME 3, the next major version of the popular open source desktop environment.

The new version has been deemed unready for mass consumption and will need another round of refinements before it can achieve the level of maturity and robustness that is expected by the software's users. Although the news will likely disappoint some enthusiasts, it is consistent with the GNOME development community's conservative approach to release management and strong emphasis on predictability.

Read the comments on this post

Mozilla has announced the availability of the second Firefox 4 beta. This prerelease introduces several new features and brings further refinement to the open source Web browser's new user interface.

We took a close look at Firefox's visual refresh when we tested the first beta earlier this month. The tabs have been moved to the top, above the main toolbar and URL text box. The menubar is gone, replaced with a single menu button that is embedded in the top corner of the window. These changes move Firefox into conformance with the prevailing user interface paradigms that are already used by Opera and Chrome.

One of the major user interface additions in beta 2 is support for "application" tabs. When you convert a regular tab into an app tab by selecting the relevant option from the right-click context menu, the tab will shrink down to just the icon and move to the far left-hand side of the tab bar. When the implementation is complete, the app tabs will eventually persist across sessions. The idea seems similar to the tab-pinning feature that is available in Chrome.

Mozilla is planning to institute a more radical overhaul of tab management and overflow handling, as the organization demonstrated in its recent Tab Candy prototype. You can look forward to reading our full hands-on report about Tab Candy in the near future.

Mozilla is also working to improve the browser's rendering, scrolling and startup performance, and handling of emerging Web standards. CSS3 transitions and transformations are supported in the new beta. Users who want to test the new beta can download it from the Mozilla website. For more details, you can refer to the official Mozilla blog.

Read the comments on this post

The KDE software collection has a new BlueTooth stack called "BlueDevil."

Google has released a new mechanism for helping to ensure that Android app developers get paid for premium content. The solution to curtail app theft? It's all in the cloud.

ChiefMonkeyGrinder writes "Software on medical implants is not open to scrutiny by regulatory bodies. Glyn Moody writes: 'Software with the ability to harm as well as help us in the physical world needs to be open to scrutiny to minimise safety issues. Medical devices may be the most extreme manifestation of this, but with the move of embedded software into planes, cars and other large and not-so-large devices with potentially lethal side-effects, the need to inspect software there too becomes increasingly urgent.' A new report 'Killed by Code: Software Transparency in Implantable Medical Devices' from the Software Freedom Law Center points out that, as patients grow more reliant on computerized devices, the dependability of software is a life-or-death issue. 'The need to address software vulnerability is especially pressing for Implantable Medical Devices, which are commonly used by millions of patients to treat chronic heart conditions, epilepsy, diabetes, obesity, and even depression.' Will making the source code free to scrutiny address the issue of faulty devices?"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Although a command line isn't a necessity anymore in modern desktop Linux distributions, there are many situations where it's still the most efficient way to perform and automate tasks. I often spawn terminal windows in clusters on my desktop while I'm working so that I can monitor and switch between a number of simultaneous operations. A large number of terminal windows can be frustrating to manage, however, and can look cluttered on a desktop.

The standard GNOME terminal application supports tabs for command-line multitasking, but that's often not sufficient for complex arrangements. I want to be able to have more control over how my terminals are organized and I want to be able to manage them better collectively. One good solution is an alternative terminal application for GNOME called Terminator that allows users to organize multiple command line sessions into resizable split panes and tabs.

Terminator, which is developed in Python, provides splitting and other similar features, but uses the same high-quality VTE widget that powers the standard GNOME terminal. There are configurable shortcuts for creating vertical and horizontal splits and rotating through panes and tabs. A "maximize" feature allows you to temporarily collapse the inactive panes so that the active terminal takes up the whole window.

You can also designate groups of panes to which you can "broadcast" your input. The optional broadcast feature allows you to send the same keystrokes to multiple terminals at the same time—a capability that is especially useful if you are using ssh to remotely connect to more than one computer and you want to execute the same command across all of them.

Terminator has been around for a while, but has recently reached a level of maturity where it is a compelling replacement for gnome-terminal in day-to-day use. I highly recommend it to GNOME users who are looking for the ability to split the terminal.

Read the comments on this post

Are you ever overwhelmed by the sheer numbers of open source software projects produced by the community?

Knowing how serious the Obama administration is about trimming costs and using the latest technology, Google makes a strong case with the release of new version of Google Apps that meets federal security requirements.

During a keynote session at the OSCON open source conference, David Recordon, the senior open programs manager at Facebook, detailed the LAMP infrastructure in use today at Facebook.