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The report of KDE e.V. for the fourth quarter of 2011 has been published. It gives an overview of the activities KDE e.V. supported in the last 3 months of last year. The report has a message from the President of the Board reflecting on the first 15 years of KDE and looking forward to more opportunities. There are stories about exciting product announcements and the various sprints that produced exceptional results. Read the full report (PDF). read more

Last year, Linux celebrated its 20th anniversary. The kernel that Linus Torvalds started as a hobby project helped the Internet bloom, challenged proprietary operating system dominance, and powers hundreds of millions of devices. From hacker toys like the dirt-cheap Raspberry Pi to most of the Top 500 Supercomputers, Linux dominates the computing industry. But it wouldn't have been possible without GCC, which turns 25 today. Before Torvalds started hacking away on Linux, Richard Stallman and started the GNU (GNU's Not UNIX) project and part of that was the GNU C Compiler (GCC). Eventually that became the GNU Compiler Collection (also GCC) but we're getting a little ahead of the story.

The open source web site of the European Commission is reporting that Iceland's government has started a project to prepare for the migration of all its workstations to open source software. This project is scheduled to be completed within a year and according to its leader, Tryggvi Björgvinsson, the city of Reykjavik, the National Hospital and all of the country's ministries are setting good examples for such migrations.

Fragmentation in the Android universe is causing some developers to flee, according to a recent study from Appcelerator and IDC. "It's not just that Ice Cream Sandwich is new; it's also the fact that very few of the tablets currently available actually support [it]," said Appcelerator's Mike King. Further, there are many devices that cannot run ICS, he added.

Canonical’s next long-term support release of its flagship Linux distribution, Ubuntu 12.04 is in late beta. This next release, due out on April 26th, is in beta now. I’ve been using it for several weeks now and so far, so good. Indeed, the new Ubuntu is good enough already that I’ve it on my default Ubuntu system: a 2009-era Gateway DX4710. This PC is powered by a 2.5-GHz Intel Core 2 Quad processor and has 6GBs of RAM and an Intel GMA (Graphics Media Accelerator) 3100 for graphics. No, it’s not fast, but unlike Windows 8’s beta, you don’t need a fast computer for Ubuntu.

One can never say it enough: the terminal is a very powerful tool, and is probably the most interesting part in Unix. Among the plethora of useful commands and scripts that you can use, some seem less practical, if not completely useless. I’ve selected for you a couple of commands that are useless because they are funny, but not funny because they are useless (or maybe the other way around for some). If you are searching for ASCII art, random math curiosities, or various (in)utilities, this is the best of the useless.

Soon, the kernel will support several AMD graphics cores that are used in recent Radeon graphics cards and in various upcoming processors. In systems with Intel graphics, using hibernation can cause memory corruption. The development of Linux 3.4 has started.

Richard Guenther of SUSE on behalf of the GNU Compiler Collection development community has announced the official release of GCC 4.7.0.

Google has introduced certificate-based authentication for developers requiring secure connections to the advertising broker's cloud. Google Service Accounts - announced today in a post in a blog post - will validate web apps' access to the company's servers with a certificate rather than passwords or shared keys.

Linux kernel maintainer and Linux Foundation Fellow Greg Kroah-Hartman will be moderating the highly-anticipated Linux kernel panel at the Collaboration Summit in a couple short weeks. He was generous enough to take a few moments recently to answer some questions about what we might hear from the Linux kernel panel, as well as some details on his recent work and projects. Oh, and we couldn't resist asking him about the new Raspberry Pi.

The Open Source Initiative has announced three new board members: Mike Millinkovich, Luis Villa and Deb Bryant. From 1 April, they will be taking over seats on the open source advocating organisation's board which were freed by the departure of Mike Godwin, Andrew Oliver and Michael Tiemann. As announced at FOSDEM 2012, for the first time, the OSI board invited nominations for two of the seats from non-directors, specifically the new OSI affiliates; they retained one seat for a board-only appointment.

Video editing has evolved from a niche market in the computer world to something that computers are simply expected to do. It's a tall order to be everything to everyone. But if any video editing software comes close to that mark, it's Kdenlive—a KDE Applications star. With a strong commitment and a plan for making major improvements, the Kdenlive team is raising money. Please help out if you can.

In all likelihood, you already use VLC Media Player, available for Windows, the Mac and Linux, and one of the best open source applications of any kind. The application is famous for handling nearly any kind of video file format; you can use it to broadcast your own video content; you can use it as a video transcoder for converting video file formats; and you can listen to and manage podcasts with it.

The 3.3 version of the Linux kernel includes a small amount of Android code. The addition of the Android drivers "makes it easier for Android platform vendors to take the kernel.org release and create a system without having to hunt around for external patches stored on various other servers," The Linux Foundation's Greg Kroah-Hartman said.

The quarterly survey by Appcelerator and IDC has once again asked mobile app developers about their preferences. For the second time in succession, the number of programmers answering positively to the question of whether they were "very interested" in Android development has fallen. The survey encompassed just under 2,200 developers.

It's been a while since we caught up with Stallman. But a couple months ago we took a look around at what's happening with law, politics and technology and realized that he maybe perhaps his extremism and paranoia were warranted all along. So when we were contacted by an Iranian Linux publication and asked if we would like to publish an English translation of a recent interview they had done with Stallman, I thought that it was a particularly rich opportunity.

We are glad to announce that KDE has been accepted as a mentoring organization for Google Summer of Code for the 8th time. We look forward to working with great students throughout the summer again. To find out more about the program, visit the GSoC website and pay special attention to the FAQ and timeline - print it and hang it on the wall in your work room.

Besides Canonical no longer sponsoring the Kubuntu distribution following the 12.04 LTS release of this KDE-focused Ubuntu derivative, there's some more changes this cycle. As a last minute change prior to next month's Kubuntu 12.04 release, Mozilla Firefox support is being dropped.

It's DrupalCon season once again, which means Drupalers from all over the world will converge next week on Denver, Colorado, to educate each other about their favorite CMS and platform, and this eternal debate about CMS vs. platform seems to be at the heart of this year's event. After a recent conversation with representatives from a couple of very prominent companies in the Drupal space, Mike O'Connor, co-founder of Commerce Guys, and Amy Cham, Director of Marketing at Treehouse Agency, I am even more anxious to hop on my flight to Denver. The theme for DrupalCon Denver is "Collaborative Publishing for Every Device," and I am excited to see which new developments people will be talking about most.

"The whole thing just shows how hypocritical and frankly more than a little nuts the Linux community is," Slashdot blogger hairyfeet opined. "What is the one argument that gets trotted out any time anybody points out every other major OS on the planet has a driver ABI, like BSD, Solaris, OSX, OS/2, and Windows? Why, it's 'ZOMG people might make binary blobs! We can't have that, better to make a lousy product whose drivers break often, ZOMG!'"