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At the Fedora 17 Final Go/No-Go meeting today, the F17 Final Release (RC4) was declared GOLD and ready for GA on May 29, 2012. Thanks to everyone who came today, and to everyone who helped get the Beefy Miracle ready for public devouring. :)

"At the heat of a thousand hot dog cookers, the seventeenth release of Fedora shall be forged by contributors the world over, and it will be known as: Beefy Miracle. The mustard shall indicate progress. For six months, participants in the Fedora Project shall freely contribute to the release of the distribution, in the spirit of the Four Foundations -- Freedom, Friends, Features,  and First -- and moreover, they shall relish in Fun, as a community without Fun would be like a day without sunshine. Upon release, a free and open source operating system shall be available to  all, catering...

Lennart Poettering has written a guide for optimizing systemd to the extent that a two-second boot-time or less for this popular free software project. The systemd optimization guide can be found on the FreeDesktop.org Wiki. While right now there's many manual steps to lower the systemd-controlled boot-time, the goal is to eventually incorporate these tweaks into upstream distributions as the defaults. "It is our intention to optimize the upstream distributions by default (in particular Fedora) so that these optimizations won't be necessary. However, this will take some time, especially since making these changes is often not trivial when the general...

As I briefly mentioned in my recent article on the influence of the Linux desktop, with a new major Windows release just around the corner we are being treated to an onslaught of articles proclaiming the failings of Linux on the desktop. You'd think that such articles wouldn't be necessary if the Linux desktop had indeed failed. One recurring theme is the idea that Linux has terrible hardware support. The premise is always that Linux is impossibly difficult to install and that lots of hardware just doesn't work with Linux. The author almost always proclaims his or her love for...

Summary: The leading Linux desktop and the number one desktop of all, Windows, are both undergoing radical transformations, but which will be the better for it? Windows 8 Metro vs. Ubuntu 12.04 Unity 2012 has already seen a major update of what’s arguably the most important Linux desktop: Ubuntu 12.04 and we’re also seeing the most radical update of Windows with Windows 8 Metro coming since Windows 95 replaced Windows 3.1. So, which will end up the better for its change?1. Desktop interfaceUbuntu replaced the popular GNOME 2.x interface with Unity when their developers decided the GNOME 3.x shell wasn’t...

There's one feature In the upcoming Fedora 17 release that is immensly useful but very little known, since its feature page 'ckremoval' does not explicitly refer to it in its name: true automatic multi-seat support for Linux. A multi-seat computer is a system that offers not only one local seat for a user, but multiple, at the same time. A seat refers to a combination of a screen, a set of input devices (such as mice and keyboards), and maybe an audio card or webcam, as individual local workplace for a user. A multi-seat computer can drive an entire class...

Customers are moving to mission critical Linux MAKER OF EXPENSIVE PRINTER INK HP said mission critical technologies in its proprietary HP-UX Unix operating system will cascade down to Linux and Microsoft Windows. HP recently told The INQUIRER that it will commit to Linux in the mission critical market, however it said its HP-UX Unix implementation will be the proving ground for features that the firm will push in Linux and Windows. According to Kate O'Neill, product marketing manager for HP's Business Critical Systems unit, the firm wants to bring a "UNIX-like experience to Linux and Windows".Talking with The INQUIRER about...

I like to think that Linux is about a flexible an operating system as you can find. But it can be easy to forget just how flexible it is. We can get ourselves stuck in our computing habits and stick with the old and familiar. And sometimes, just trying something new can sometimes seem daunting and just not worth the effort. But I believe it is worth the effort. And by the end of the process, you will have probably learned something that you did not know already. One of the aspects of Linux that I would like to point...

UPDATE: I have been contacted by Qualcomm PR regarding this expected presentation next week. The content of the Qualcomm Atheros developers was not approved by Qualcomm's legal department and the views to be expressed will be of their own personal beliefs. Next week at the 6th annual Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit in San Francisco, two Qualcomm Atheros engineers will be speaking about their Linux device driver development experiences and will go as far as calling for all proprietary drivers to be killed for good. They talk not just about killing proprietary drivers for Linux, but for all operating systems. Can...

Every year, The Linux Foundation compiles an analysis of who actually contributes the most to Linux’s code (PDF Link). In the last year, 2011, besides the usual suspects, which includes Red Hat, Intel, Novell, IBM, Samsung, Oracle and Google, you’ll also find some you didn’t expect to see such from such as Nokia and, drum-roll please, Microsoft. Microsoft has significantly contributed before to Linux. In the past though its main contributions have been to its own Hyper-V virtualization hypervisor drivers. Hyper-V is Microsoft’s 64-bit hypervisor-based virtualization system. It’s Microsoft’s answer to VMware and Linux’s own native Kernel-based Virtualization Manager (KVM).Microsoft...

For the last few years, there has been something of a popularity contest between two well-known Linux distros: Linux Mint and Ubuntu. Both of these distributions share the same code base, as Ubuntu is based on Debian and Linux Mint is based on Ubuntu. In both instances, the distributions took the foundation that Debian built, then added their own flavor to make it more user friendly. The similarities between the two distributions go even further, in that Ubuntu packages work flawlessly on Linux Mint, just as Ubuntu PPAs work well on Linux Mint.When Linux Mint was first being developed, the...

t’s not every day that you start a business and quickly decide to say “no” to 70 percent of your potential customers. In retrospect, this turned out to be 4ormat’s secret weapon. At 4ormat, our goal is to provide an easy way for creative professionals to create and manage an online portfolio website. Although the portfolio itself looks great in all browsers, to this day, the portfolio building interface does not support Internet Explorer. And we don’t just mean IE6 or even IE7. We mean every version of Internet Explorer.

Apparently, Torvalds stepped into the arena and helped convince an ITC Administrative LAW Judge named Theodore R. Essex that Microsoft’s patent in question was invalid. The same judge who determined that Motorola had violated four Microsoft patents, including one known simply as the 352 patent. That particular patent has to do with storing filenames with a lot of characters in old file systems like Windows FAT. Torvalds told the judge that Motorola had found the posting he had made about long filenames used in a compatible manner with short filenames, and that post predated the Microsoft patent by three years....

Devices will soon be available ANYONE THAT HAS THOUGHT the Raspberry Pi is exciting in the last few weeks but is annoyed that they cannot get one can cool their jets, as the wait is almost over. We have heard that the uncased early models are slightly delayed, and already sold out, but good news comes from RS Components.The Pi Foundation blog has shared an email from RS Components about the hardware and its progress.RS Components is making Raspberry Pi devices. It has updated them on its ordering systems and has plans for a dedicated online store. "We will be...

Linux. It’s really not a hard operating system to learn. In fact, that very first statement is wrong. Linux is not an operating system. Linux is a kernel which is used as the very core to build an operating system around. But these are the things that children of today are not learning. Not in public school systems anyway. When I was a teenager, I was very interested in computers. I looked forward to and really enjoyed my Information Technology classes. But it wasn’t just the computers that I was interested. The more I got involved with them, the more...

I got a really strange call from an old friend regarding "proprietary Linux". It would seem that AARP is peddling foolproof old people PCs with "proprietary Linux" installed on them. It seems my friend got handed a brand new laptop courtesy of AARP that the sound doesn't work. (Aww dam' remember the driver wars?) My question: Has anybody heard of "proprietary Linux". According to him it can only be fixed online for a fee.

Raspberry Pi is the name given to an ultra-low-cost computer that went on sale recently for just $35. The bare-bones PC, which is built to run a few different flavors of Linux, is capable of hooking up to a mouse, keyboard, HDTV and Ethernet. Initial interest has been strong -- the first batch quickly sold out. Frantic buyers cleaned out the shelves of two UK retailers offering a small US$35 Linux computer from the Raspberry Pi Foundation.

What would really help give a better overview of any general trend in Linux usage is an average market share percentage. So I’ve done just that, taking the average reach for each month (based on stats from all the companies) and plotted it below.

Version 1.2 of Cinnamon, the Linux Mint project's fork of the GNOME Shell, has been released and the APIs and desktop interface have been declared fully stable by Mint Founder Clement Lefebvre. Created last year to streamline the Mint developers' changes to the GNOME 3 environment, the Cinnamon fork brings familiar GNOME 2 design elements to the GNOME 3 shell. Among the enhancements in the stable version is easier customisation through a "Cinnamon Settings" tool which includes, for example, the ability to set the date format for the calendar applet and change panel launchers' icons. The Settings tool is also...

I use a Linux desktop. According to Google Analytics, 12% of the visitors to my various technology Web sites use Linux. Nevertheless, I know that on the traditional desktop, the vast majority of ordinary users are running Windows, and don’t even get me started on “The Year of the Linux Desktop.” It’s not going to happen. But, and this is interesting, it appears that there is a slight upward trend in desktop Linux use.First reported by Katherine Noyes on Linux Insider, it turns out that the Web research firm Net Applications’ data show that Linux’s desktop market share has been growing...