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Last week there was the news post about whether AMD is open-sourcing something next week (this week), which turns out to be based upon a Twitter comment I had made. A discussion about AMD possibly open-sourcing something had ensued, including comments by AMD's John Bridman, where he had said nothing was basically planned. Interestingly though, the initial open-source Llano APU support was just published.

Undeterred by slumping netbook sales, Asus announced three such devices, one of which -- the Eee PC X101 -- will be offered with the Linux-based MeeGo operating system for just $200. The EeePC X101 comes with a new 1.33GHz Atom N435 processor, while the Windows-only EeePC 1025C and 1025CE will include the "Cedar Trail" Atom N2600 and N2800, according to multiple reports.

Well, that was interesting. Just weeks after Microsoft announced it's shelling out billions to acquire Skype, the VoIP provider drops support for the open source Asterisk telephony system. Skype insists the parting of ways was underway well before Microsoft made its move, but suspicion still fills the air.

In 1996, Linus Torvalds released Linux 2.0, and we got symmetric multiprocessing (SMP) and we were on our way to Linux supercomputers. In 1999, Linux 2.2 appeared, and Linux made a major move off Intel chip architectures. In 2001, after some delays, Linux 2.4 turned up with great server improvements. And, in 2003, Linux 2.6 showed up, the prototype for modern Linux. So why haven’t we seen a Linux 2.8 or 3.0 in the last few years?

LXer Feature: 30-May-2011

Was it just me or did yesterday not feel like a Sunday? In the Roundup for this week we have SJVN talking about Novell & SUSE's new structure under Attachmate, Linux Mint 11 ships with retro GNOME 2.32 desktop, Emery Fletcher pontificates on Linux World Domination, it is revealed that HTC pays Microsoft $5 for every Android phone they make and Microsoft is in decline? I thought we already knew that.. Enjoy!

For anyone that was doubting Linus Torvalds would finally part ways with the Linux 2.6 kernel series, you lost your bets. On the eve of Memorial Day in the United States and his departure to Japan for LinuxCon, Linus Torvalds just tagged Linux 3.0-rc1 in Git.

As pointed out in our forums, the first screenshot of Desura running on Linux has emerged. Desura is a digital distribution service that's similar to Valve's Steam service, but at this point is primarily used by indie game developers and game mods.

I use Twitter quite a lot. For the longest time, I used Web-based Twitter clients, clients for my smartphone, or browser extensions to interact with my Twitter account. Why? The desktop clients for Linux left me feeling cold. They either did too much or too little, and just weren’t satisfying overall. One client that does come close to being everything that I need is Turpial. Written in Python, Turpial is fast and easy to use. And it does just enough – it doesn’t pack too many features, but it’s not bare bones either. Let’s take a look at how to tweet using Turpial.

I had the opportunity to sit down with Mark Shuttleworth, founder of Ubuntu and Canonical, for an wide-ranging, hour-long conversation while at Ubuntu Developer Summit (UDS) in Budapest. In his opening talk, Shuttleworth said that he wanted to "make the case" for contributor agreements, which is something he had not been successful in doing previously. In order to do that, he outlined a rather different vision than he has described before of how to increase Linux and free software adoption, particularly on the desktop, in order to reach his goal of 200 million Ubuntu users in the next four years. While some readers may not agree with various parts of that vision, it is definitely worth understanding Shuttleworth's thinking here.

Just how much market share can the Linux Desktop claim? The debate's a familiar one, perhaps even a tired one. But recently Pingdom published a list of the 20 countries in which the Linux desktop enjoys the most popularity. Naturally, that list was quickly criticized from multiple angles. So what's Linux's true penetration? "In the end, I don't think we will ever know," said blogger and developer Jeff Hoogland.

In 2008, Microsoft hired Hamilton “Hammett” Verissimo, the founder of the open-source Castle Project, as a program manager on the Microsoft Extensibility Framework (MEF) team in the company’s Developer Division. On May 17, 2011, Verissimo quit Microsoft. People join and leave Microsoft every day. (In fact, the last of the original Xbox founders submitted his resignation from Microsoft this week.) But I was interested in hearing from Verissimo whether it was a conflict in open/closed source philosophies that led to his decision to go. It turns out many of his frustrations are similar to ones I’ve heard shared by those leaving Microsoft whether or not they were in the open-source camp.

Skype has terminated its partnership with Digium, effectively killing Skype for Asterisk, which integrated Skype's VOIP service with the open source PBX/telephony platform. While some analysts see Microsoft's impending acquisition of Skype as the source of the schism, others argue that Skype has never been an open source supporter, and had already been backing away from the Asterisk product.

With the release of version 3.6, the Tiny Core crew have added a GUI method for hard disk installation. As I have, on previous occasions, banged on about this omission, I thought I'd take a look.

The openSUSE Project has announced that the openSUSE Build Service will be renamed the Open Build Service, retaining the well-known OBS acronym. Jos Poortvliet, the openSUSE community manager, said that the rename is "a small but important step in the right direction for us", noting that the idea for the name change came from community members as OBS works for more than just openSUSE.

Cray's latest supercomputer will run Cray's modified version of SUSE Linux on AMD's upcoming 16-core & Interlagos& Opteron chip and Nvidia's Tesla 20-Series GPU (graphics processing unit). The XK6 system should deliver up to 50 petaflops of performance when it ships later this year, claims Cray.

Time to be honest here for a minute. The open source community really has outdone themselves coming up with some very obscure names for packages. Let's take this list of packages for instance: emacs, gimp, gcc, mutt, grub, kyle rankin, parted, tar, mutt, vim. Nine times out of ten, a common person is going to look at that list and become utterly confused over what package does what. That's just the beauty (and beast) of naming software in the open source community. But every so often a tool comes across my screen with such a blatantly obvious name that I just have to run a 'man' to make sure my eyes are not deceiving me. In this case, it's ethtool. Yes, a simple name, for such a powerful utility. The name itself tells you what it does, an Ethernet Tool. Tada! That's it, ethernet tool.

Fedora Linux not for everyone. If you’re an experienced Linux user who wants an easy-to-use desktop Linux, I recommend Mint 11. If you’re new to Linux and just want something that’s easy to pick up and use, I think you should give Ubuntu 11.04 a try. But, if you’re a Linux expert, and want to explore the outer limits of what’s possible with Linux, then Red Hat’s new Fedora 15 Linux is the distribution for you.

Linus Torvalds has indicated on the kernel developer mailing list that he will probably finish merging major changes for the next Linux version derived from the main development tree on Sunday evening, in advance of a trip to Japan on Monday. He had previously suggested that this might be the case in the release email for last week's Linux kernel 2.6.39 release, with the aim of ensuring that subsystem maintainers were able to submit their changes on time before the closure of the merge window, which opens the development cycle.

One of the challenges free and open source software projects have that proprietary software doesn't is determining the best method for accepting developer contributions to a project from a legal perspective, not an engineering perspective. In proprietary software, where all of the developers work for the employing entity, the copyright in their work belongs to the employing entity under the “work for hire” doctrine found in 17 U.S. Code §101.

It seems that Google is working with carriers that are requesting the removal of third-party tethering apps from the Android Market. If you ask me, having to pay an extra monthly fee for that service isn't very fair, considering customers already pay a data plan fee for either unlimited data access, or limited access with an extra per-MB fee after the limit is met. Why should it matter how they're using the data?