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Three recent news items provided evidence that the age of GNU/Linux on the desktop is arriving. The years of GNU/Linux languishing on the pc desktop are finally drawing to a close. Whether you are looking forward to its release or not, no one can deny that Windows 8 will be a radical departure from the Windows of the past. I have had at least 1 Windows computer in my house from 1996 to today, but Windows 8’s arrival marks the first time that I am actually not considering upgrading. The reason? Two words: Ribbon Interface.

The success of GNU/Linux, free software, and open source have inspired a whole new generation of collaborative projects. In The Linux Week in Review 42, I will describe what GasBuddy is, and how it can help you to use the collaborative concepts behind GNU/Linux and Wikipedia to save money on gas.

Emperor Tewodros II of Ethiopia created a modern Ethiopia during the 19th century using the sheer force of his considerable will. He set out to modernize and unify Ethiopia, as Google, Red Hat, Mozilla, Microsoft, and other companies seek to unify the Web today.

In this edition of the Linux Week in Review, I will shine a high powered laser on the growing use of Fedora to create rich Android applications.

The GNU/Linux operating system recently received a huge boost, courtesy of the United States Navy. One momentous decision has officially made GNU/Linux too big to fail.

I put Fedora 17 Beta to an extreme stress test over the last several weeks. Now, on the eve of the official release of Fedora 17, perhaps the most anticipated Fedora release ever, I will reveal my test results.

Oracle Corporation of America just suffered a massive defeat at the hands of Google in its patent infringement lawsuit. A California jury decided that Google did NOT infringe on Oracle’s Java patents with its ubiquitous Android operating system. This decision has a significant impact on the future on the of Free Software. After this decision, will anyone dare try to shake down a FOSS-based company again?

The final version of Fedora 17 does not arrive until May 22nd, 2012. I have installed the final Beta version, and it is the best version of the Fedora operating system that I have ever used. In TLWIR 37, I will look under the hood of Fedora 17, and let you know what you can look forward to in the “Beefy Miracle”.

Google’s ultra high speed Internet project aims to bring Kansas City, Kansas and Kansas City, Missouri Internet speeds 100 times the current U.S. average. This has Hollywood petrified. Will users with gigabit connections pirate enough movies to decimate the movie industry’s revenue? Will piracy crush Hollywood in the way that it crushed the music industry? Not if Hollywood is smart: they need to CAREFULLY study how the Linux kernel is developed, and how Free Software is developed in general.

When Nokia’s N900 smart phone was released on November 11th, 2009, it was a revolutionary device. The N900 truly contained the power of a desktop computer in the form factor of a mobile phone. It ran the Maemo 5 Linux-based operating system, and its hardware specs made geeks around the world drool. So why did Nokia turn their backs on a device so far ahead of its time? They were offered a deal that they found too good to refuse. That deal led to the Lumia 900, and other Windows Phone 7 Nokia smartphones. In this edition of the Linux Week in Review, I will take a close look at how the three year old Nokia N900 measures up against the much newer Lumia 900. Is the Lumia 900 doomed or is it destined to become a smashing success?

In this special edition of The Linux Week In Review, I will discuss the coming growth of GNU/Linux running on tablet computers. GNU/Linux on tablets was indirectly predicted by various devices on Star Trek years ago.

I recently purchased a Toshiba Thrive Android tablet. It is a wonderful device! The only thing that I can fault it for is not having access to the rich repository of GNU/Linux software. In this article, I will detail my dream tablet: a tablet running Linux.

I am proud to be a member of the Free Software community. I have found it to be a very open, and very tolerant, community that believes deeply in the South African concept of Ubuntu: the allegiance of people to one another. I find the tenets of the Free Software to be in sharp contrast to the uncivil discourse that dominates so much of modern society. Free Software has a lot to teach the world in terms of how we can all live together, and share our world in peace. In late March 2012, a large Free Software conference will take place in Abuja, Nigeria. Windows 8 has been generating a lot of buzz lately. Will Windows 8 drive disgruntled computer users to GNU/Linux? Extreme Tech writer Matthew Murray thinks so. Designer Marco Alici has used Blender to create a case design for the Raspberry Pi. The case can be created with a 3-D printer.

Summary: As a C++ programmer, I like to program coding examples, and then paste them into tutorials on websites. I used to use web based solutions to format and highlight my code. These solutions usually have you paste the code in their web page. The web page then color-highlights the code, and allows you to download the formatted result. This can be a pretty good solution, but I really wanted a solution that I could use on my GNU/Linux PCs. Highlight is a wonderful program that provided the perfect solution. Highlight isn’t just for highlighting C++ source code; it can handle PHP, C, C#, Perl, Python, or just about any programming language that you can throw at it. In this article, I will show you how to use Highlight to format your code perfectly every time.

Summary: For too long, GNU/Linux has been locked out of the tablet market. That is about to change with the May 2012 arrival of the Open Spark. The Open Spark is a new tablet that will run a variant of GNU/Linux called Mer. A group of 42 Free Software developers have released a wonderful book called Open Advice. It chronicles their lessons learned from working on hundreds of Free Software projects. The Linux Foundation received an esteemed new fellow from SUSE, Mr. Greg Kroah-Hartman. Finally, the Free Software Petition on WhiteHouse.gov received a key endorsement.

On January 30th, 2012, I started a petition requesting that the U.S. government broaden their use of Free Software and Open Source to save money. I deeply believe that this one step is part of the solution to the problem of the crushing national debt that the United States is currently facing. Will shifting to Free Software completely solve the crisis? No, it will not.

Free Software is mainly about innovation. Free Software engineers find radical new ways of solving old problems. In doing so, they teach those whose minds have ossified how to think outside of the box. The U.S. manufacturing sector is in trouble, partially because we have been outperformed by our neighbors in the East. They have tried bold new ways of doing things, while we cling to the past. Free Software is one of the boldest concepts yet created, and I believe that it can save American manufacturing…and jobs.

Yesterday we did a Linux hangout on Google+. Mike Weber demonstrated how to setup an FTP server on CentOS 6 and answered several questions on the topic. If you have questions or an idea for a hangout please leave a comment down below.

I believe in Synergy. One positive event feeds other positive events. The share of computer users who use Linux, GNU, and other Free Software is growing because people are actually starting to put some marketing muscle behind the concepts. Canonical is one of these companies. Red Hat is another. Google is also fighting the good fight. It was only a matter of time before we had to see positive results. Ubuntu TV, Android phones and tablets, and the rise in GNU/Linux’s desktop market share in 2011 are 3 such tangible results. Free Software and Open Source have arrived in 2012!

I recently migrated from Firefox to the more cutting edge Firefox Nightly. As its name implies, Firefox Nightly is updated on a nightly basis. The reason for my switch initially was to get access to a 64-bit version of Firefox on my Windows 7 system. I fell in love with Nightly, so much so that I now use it on ALL of my computer systems. Unfortunately, there is no yum repository for Nightly yet (as far as I know), so I can't update Nightly automatically. My solution was to write my own Bash shell script to semi-automate the process. I just run the script once a day (late in the day so that I run it after the daily update). The script downloads the latest Nightly build for GNU/Linux, unpacks it, installs it, and then deletes all of the downloaded files.