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Fedora 9, the latest release from the Fedora Project, goes up for download on Tuesday. The ninth release of Fedora ushers in a number of changes aimed at making the venerable distribution a more newbie-friendly desktop, but longtime users needn't fear a great dumbing down; version 9 packs plenty of power user punch as well. Fedora is a community-driven distribution sponsored by Red Hat and, while Fedora may be best known as a popular server OS, most of the changes in Fedora 9 are aimed at making the system friendlier for desktop users.

"I like to make browsers do things that they weren't supposed to do," Brad Neuberg likes to say. As a developer advocate for Google Gears, Neuberg has a wide scope for pursuing this interest, not only as an active developer, but also as a frequent speaker at conferences. His message is that Gears is not a means of working offline with Internet content -- which, so far has been its main function in applications like Google Reader and Google Calendar -- but also a potential universal update mechanism for browsers that could help to keep the Web free.

What do you want your cell phone to be able to do? Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor Hal Abelson put that question to about 20 computer science students this semester when he gave them one assignment: Design a software program for cell phones that use Google Inc.'s upcoming Android mobile operating system. In the process, they revealed the power of an open system like Android to shake up the mobile phone industry, where wireless companies are being pressured to loosen the control they have maintained over what devices do. If the brainstorms of these MIT students are an indication, phones will soon challenge the Internet as a source of innovation.

After I reviewed Alien Arena last year, some readers criticized my choice of that first-person shooter (FPS) as the best free software game I had played. Several suggested Nexuiz would have been a better choice. At the time, I had not played it. Now that I have tried Nexuiz 2.4, it has become my favorite free software FPS. Nexuiz runs on an improved Quake engine called DarkPlaces. The engine has been undergoing on-and-off development by Lord Havoc, the game's creator, for several years. On icculus.org, Lord Havoc says he developed a custom OpenGL-only engine for DarkPlaces, and other modifications that "support Windows WGL and Linux GLX and have greatly improved graphics and image quality."

It was not intentional, but my later work on OpenSourceToday evolved where I copied up files directly from the version control onto the server. Moreover, I started making quick fixes directly on the version control copy (local) and then loading it onto the server. That cycle, my loading, my testing and my correcting code continued until I had acceptable functionality. Despite my having a poor fit between the site and the version control directory structure, I abandoned old habits. I believe that implies a natural existing advantage, hence, I found myself relying increasingly upon the version control copy.

The first time I played with Zenity, I recognized several potential uses for it. While I'm pretty comfortable with interacting with computers with a command line interface, I know many people are not. Zenity creates GUI widgets from a simple command line and can be used from any shell script. This allows an Administrator to write a shell script that performs a given function but make the program easy for less sophisticated users to interact with.

Times change, businesses have to adapt. Any entrepreneur knows this. But nowhere is it truer, perhaps, than in the telecom and Internet industries. Just ask ISPhone Inc., the Traverse City, Mich.-based IP telephony wholesaler we first wrote about in 1999 when founder and president Victor von Schlegell was just getting his company off the ground.

If somebody accidentally drops a critical table in MySQL, the application no longer works. The solution to this problem is to utilize the (open source) Zmanda Recovery Manager. You are a MySQL database administrator. You take regular backups of your MySQL database. Somebody drops a table critical to the MySQL application (for example, the "accounts" table in a SugarCRM application). The MySQL application no longer works. How can you recover from the situation?The answer is MySQL binary logs. Binary logs track all updates to the database with minimal impact on database performance. MySQL binary logs have to be enabled on the server. You can use the mysqlbinlog MySQL command to recover from the binary logs.

Fedora 9 is scheduled for release tomorrow. Six months after Fedora 8 was released, Fedora 9 will be available in a variety of “spins” (custom boot images for everything from desktop installs to USB devices) with improved networking and eyecandy.

Do you fancy Web-based word processors but aren't ready to leave OpenOffice.org? You can work with your Zoho Writer and Google Docs files from the convenience of OpenOffice.org Writer, courtesy of the OoGdocsIntegrator extension. Despite its name, the OoGdocsIntegrator extension can handle both Google Docs and Zoho Writer. In fact, it offers better integration with the latter than the former. Since OoGdocsIntegrator is written in Java, you have to make sure that you have the Java Runtime Environment installed on your machine and enabled in OpenOffice.org. To do this, choose Tools -> Options -> OpenOffice.org -> Java. Make sure that Sun's Java Runtime Environment is selected, press OK, and restart OpenOffice.org.

The company has abandoned its appeal against a German ruling that it must supply source code with Linux-based VoIP phones, in compliance with GPLv2.

Microsoft has just approached the Blender guys, and I would assume have or will approach other FOSS projects since we learn that Microsoft has assigned a guy to work with Open Source projects, with a request for information on how to make Blender run better on Windows.

The main problem with"social networking" isn't just that your"social" life has corporate boundaries. It's that your personal choices do too.

With Ubuntu 8.04 now on the streets, it’s time to catch a breather and reflect on just why Ubuntu gets all the hype. Why is Ubuntu the hottest brand in Linuxdom at this time? Why is it the distro most frequently advocated? I posed these questions to readers and LUG members; here’s the feedback from real-life Linux users.

I was gladdened yesterday when techbargains.com reported a sale on a new Lenovo ThinkPad R61 running SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop ($552, see below). It's not everyday that you run into a major PC vendor selling machines pre-loaded with Linux (excluding servers). Perhaps pre-installing Linux will become more popular, in part, due to a Vista backlash. Or, the popularity of Linux of ultra-cheap laptops (where Vista doesn't belong) such as the Asus EEE PC, will lay a foundation for its expansion. Once people see and touch and smell recent editions of Linux, they'll realize it is no more different from Windows XP than is the Mac OSX. And, as Lenovo says, Linux "Eliminates virus and spyware downtime".

Wikipedia, the upstart Internet encyclopedia that most universities forbid students to use, has suddenly become a teaching tool for professors. Recently, university teachers have swapped student term papers for assignments to write entries for the free online encyclopedia. Wikipedia is an "open-source" web site, which means that entries can be started or edited by anyone in the world with an Internet connection.

You may never have heard of BitRock, the company that has traditionally competed with OpenLogic, SpikeSource, and SourceLabs in the "open-source stacks" business but has seen much more success with its excellent installers, which upwards of 60 percent of commercial open-source projects use including SugarCRM, JasperSoft, Ringside Networks, and more. The name may be unfamiliar to you, but not for long.

As you may remember from our series on common usability terms, I have a lot of interest in graphical user interface concepts. In addition, I applaud anyone trying to improve existing concepts, people that try to think beyond set conventions to come up with an improved version of that concept, or a new concept altogether. Thorsten Wilms took on the well-established concept of the scrollbar, and came up with a few interesting tweaks.

[Sort of FOSS related, but too cool not to share. - Scott]

LXer Feature: 11-May-2008

In this week's Roundup we have why Brazil loves Linux, a review of the top 5 tiny distros, an article on how the Eee PC is easy enough for kids and why the Eee PC is cheaper with XP on it for some reason. Also, 80 of the best Linux security applications, Should Linux standardize on a single distro, an interactive Linux kernel map and for some laughs we have the top ten reasons for a Linux laptop.

I have read a few blog entries lately questioning the value of open source. The most over-the-top comes from Andy Patrizio. In his posting, titled “Big Money and Open Source May Not Compute”, Andy sounds like a school yard bully angry that his turf is finally being challenged: "Oh yea?! Well, open source hasn’t produced a billionaire. Take that!!!"