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Behind KDE is our site for interviews with KDE contributors and a new series is being started by Pau Garcia i Quiles. The theme of the series is the different platforms that KDE is available for. The first interview is with Patrick Spendrin. Patrick works on the KDE on Windows project and tells us how the project works, what can be done with it, how he got involved and how you can get involved. Future articles in this series will talk about Mac, BSD, Solaris and other platforms.

In its continued march across the open source industry landscape, Black Duck Software, a Boston-based company which services managed and secure implementations of open source software, announced today the purchase of Olliance Group, an open source enterprise consulting firm. After acquiring open source search engine Koders in 2008, Black Duck got quiet for a while then slurped up three more companies in the last three months -- Oholoh, SpikeSource, and now Olliance. We caught up wtih Peter Vescuso, Executive Vice President of Black Duck Software to find out more about this acquisition and what the future holds for the company.

The OpenStreetMap (OSM) Project's next State Of The Map conference will take place from 9 to 11 September 2011, in Denver, Colorado. Founded in August of 2004 by Steve Coast, OpenStreetMap is an open source project that is building free online maps, not based on any copyright or licensed map data.

Today, Broadcom is announcing that it is joining The Linux Foundation, and if you've been using Linux for some time, you know that this announcement is a milestone. Broadcom was historically a frequent holdout when it came to delivering Wi-Fi drivers and source code for Linux users, heavily contributing to the reputation Linux had for not being as compatible with essential technologies as Windows and the Mac OS have been. Regarding that overall compatibility issue there are still problems, but we are steadily seeing milestones like the latest one with Broadcom shake the notion that Linux is an unloved island that the technology industry ignores.

In this economy, employees who can save their employers money are highly regarded and will potentially be in line for advancement. Using open source technology is one great way to help your company cut down on costs across the board. In this article, I’ll share twenty great open source applications that can help save your employer some money.

While the free software community was successful in coming up with open-source support for Microsoft's Kinect motion sensing device, there is better support on the way. PrimeSense, the Israeli company that developed this technology, is now putting their hardware into new devices. However, it will not be up to the community to come up with open-source drivers, but the company will be providing the support themselves.

We've talked about the concept of national Linux distributions before, and the Russians are a nation that has engaged in previous attempts to standardize on Linux. Recently, Vladimir Putin, the Russian Prime Minister, made an announcement of a renewed effort towards open source adoption on a massive, despite the previous failures.

Software installation in Linux can confuse new users, while it pleases and irritates more experienced campaigners in equal measure. Here are 20 things we'd change about it.

LXer Feature: 09-Jan-2011

In the Roundup this week we have how to choose the best Distro for a laptop, Linux returns to Walmart, Andy Updegrove reveals more about Attachmate, The "LibreOffice" future of OpenOffice and our own Paul Ferris goes on a rant about the future of Linux. Enjoy!

Appindicator was first introduced in Ubuntu karmic as a replacement for the Gnome panel applet. It is a small applet to display information from various applications consistently in the panel. It can also be used as a access point to access (and control) the application without having to open the application. if you are running Ubuntu Lucid or Maverick, you should see the messaging menu (the applet that contains Empathy, Evolution and Gwibber icons), which is a good example of an appindicator.

This morning we reported on the soft announcement that TransGaming would be replacing Cedega with something known as GameTree Linux. Not much information was available at the time, just that it was built upon Cedega technology, would replace the subscription-based Cedega Gaming Service, and would be distributed as a free program. Now though a few more details have come to light.

Broadcom has become the newest member of the Linux Foundation. In September 2010, Broadcom released its brcm80211 wireless driver for Linux, suitable for the BCM4313, BCM43224 and BCM43225 802.11n wireless chips, under a GPL2-compatible license. Broadcom also says that it plans to continue working with the Linux Driver Project, which is aimed at creating and maintaining open source Linux kernel drivers for a variety of devices.

Linux has managed to carve a little slice of success for itself in nearly every industry. Well, with the exception of broadcast media that is. While I’ve found some limited Linux presence in the broadcast radio industry, I've found that in the broadcast TV market, Linux software appears to be completely absent. It's almost like the broadcast media establishment doesn't realize that Linux exists as a viable alternative for many functions within a TV studio.

Following a challenging week for Intel's Sandy Bridge Linux support in other publications getting the open-source graphics drivers working, Intel came forward to supply us with a Sandy Bridge processor so we can carry out the tests using the needed Linux Kernel / Mesa / DDX / libva Git code. We don't even need to wait for Intel to send out any hardware, as it was hand-delivered today during a meeting with them.

The Puppy Linux developers have released version 5.2 of their independent Linux distribution known as "Lupu". Puppy Linux is a popular small release that is usually just over 100 MB in size, focuses on ease of use and can run entirely from RAM.

In the wake of the news that open source online conferencing and collaboration provider Dimdim is being swallowed up by cloud CRM provider Salesforce, one conclusion seems clear: Many long-standing open source applications are low hanging fruit for powerful proprietary software companies to acquire and metamorphosize for their own purposes. It's easy to be lulled into thinking that this is happening at the same rate that it used to, but the rate at which well-known open source technologies are being flipped under the wing of proprietary software companies is in fact picking up pace exponentially. In Dimdim's case, there are positive and negative aspects of the buyout.

If you ever find yourself wishing that other applications had Vim-keybindings, I have good news for you. At least, if you're a Firefox user. The news? Vimperator. It's a great add-on for Firefox that brings the power of Vim to Firefox. Have some time this weekend? You can be an expert with Vimperator by Monday.

One of the points that Linux users commonly say in lobbying hardware vendors to provide open-source drivers and/or documentation -- particularly for GPU drivers -- is that the open-source community will take the released code or documents and from there develop it into a reliable, working open-source Linux driver. However, that isn't exactly true.

This year’s CES featured more tablets than Michael Jackson’s bathroom cabinet, and they’re pretty much what you’d expect: flat glass slates with few buttons and a strong resemblance to a certain Apple product. Despite manufacturers’ best efforts the interesting tech isn’t the hardware: it’s the software, and Google software in particular. Honeycomb, Android 3.0, is the star of CES so far.

We’ve talked a lot about the rise of Linux in embedded devices lately: from our embedded Linux training classes to the Yocto and Meego projects, to a new Linux Foundation fellow. But what about the end users, the people who are deploying Linux in their products?