An anonymous reader writes "In addition to bringing up the plans for KDE on Wayland, Aaron Seigo just announced at the 2011 Desktop Summit that the KDE 5.0 Frameworks libraries are being planned for development. This central code will be developed in parallel to future KDE SC 4.x releases until it is ready, as to not cause another KDE 4.0 mistake. When the code is ready, key applications will be ported to the new interfaces." (There's another article at IT World.)

oxide7 writes with this selection from IBT: "Hewlett Packard reduced the price of its TouchPad tablet computer again, highlighting the uphill battle manufacturers will need to overcome as they go head-to-head against the dominant Apple iPad line of tablets. Much of a tablet's success is based on the ecosystem of apps that is available to the end-user. HP is far behind Apple or even the No.2 tablet platform, Google's Android."

An anonymous reader writes "During the 2011 Desktop Summit plans were brought up by a KDE developer to support KDE on the Wayland Display Server, which is dubbed the successor to X11. The KDE Wayland support is expected to come in three phases, with the first two phases expected to be completed next year during the KDE SC 4.8 and 4.9 development cycles. Farewell X?"

An anonymous reader writes "I contacted the Director of the Raspberry Pi Foundation, Eben Upton, and he graciously gave an interview pertaining to his foundation, the Raspberry Pi device, and how the device relates to robotics. The Raspberry Pi device is basically a $25 Linux PC on a credit card sized board! This microcomputer looks perfectly suited as a low cost, micro form factor, low power, PC performance robot brain."

An anonymous reader writes "John Carmack just confirmed during his QuakeCon 2011 keynote that the source code to Doom 3 will be released this year. The source drop will follow the release of their Rage game in October. Carmack has also challenged other game developers to release their old source code."

kai_hiwatari writes "In Google+, Torvalds criticized the direction that GNOME has taken with GNOME 3. He called GNOME 3 an 'unholy mess' and said that the user experience is unacceptable, adding that because of GNOME 3, he has ditched GNOME for Xfce. He said that Xfce is a step down from GNOME 2 — but a huge step up from GNOME 3."

Dog's_Breakfast writes "In a declining economy, software licenses become a luxury. Linux and the BSDs offer free alternatives. As the USA toys with the possibility of defaulting on its national debt (and thus risking economic collapse), the author wonders if this might not, at last, lead to 'The Year of the Linux Desktop.'"

gavron writes "The US Department of Justice will review the Nortel patent sale to the entity formed by Apple, Microsoft, and others. This is the same sale that the Canadian authorities declined to review because the $4B+ deal was valued by them at less than $328M. According to a (paywalled) Wall Street Journal report, 'The Justice Department wants to know whether [the consortium] intends to use them defensively to deter patent lawsuits against its members, or offensively against rivals.'"

An anonymous reader writes "China-based company Alibaba looks to take on the might of Apple and Google with a cloud-based operating system. According to the company, its Aliyun OS will be based on the Linux kernel, and will also be compatible with Android apps. Launched alongside the K-Touch Cloud-Smart Phone W700, Alibaba is hoping that a 0% slice of developer profits will encourage adoption, and says it hopes manufacturers will take the platform to global markets."

An anonymous reader writes "Game developer David Braben caused geeks to get excited back in May when he announced plans to develop and release a $25 PC. It is called the Raspberry Pi and takes the form of a USB stick that can be plugged into the HDMI port of a display ready to act as a fully-functional PC. Two months on and the spec of the PCB layout has been finalized and an alpha release has been sent to manufacture. Any doubts this PC wasn't going to happen should now disappear as this alpha board is expected to be almost the same as the final production unit. Although we don't know a release date as of yet, the Raspeberry Pi Foundation is promising images of the alpha boards in a couple of weeks."

sfcrazy writes "Now, Microsoft is coining yet another term to further confuse users — 'Open Surface.' Senior Director for Open Source Communities at Microsoft, Gianugo Rabellino, said at Oscon 2011 that customers don't care about the underlying platform as long as the APIs, protocols and standards for the cloud are open. That's when he threw the term 'open surface.'" This seems to have more than a grain of truth to it — after all, programmers have been creating open-source software with closed-source programming languages for many years, and I'm certainly more impressed by Google's willingness to let me export my data than I am turned off by the fact that they use a mix of open and closed source software to run the Google circus.

dkd903 writes "Debian has announced they are introducing support for multiarch in Debian Wheezy. Multiarch support means a Debian system will be able to install and run applications built for a different target system."

jrepin writes "KDE 4.7 releases provide many new features and improved stability and performance. Lots of visual polishing took place with an update to the Oxygen icons, and improved consistency between panel items such as clock and notification areas. The window manager KWin brings a new shadow system and can now run on OpenGL ES supporting hardware, making it better suited for mobile devices. Network management widget is much improved. Navigating through applications and recent files is easier with the addition of breadcrumbs to the Kickoff application launcher. Kontact groupware solution rejoins the rest of the KDE software, with increased stability, better connection to new services and sharing of communication information between more applications. Dolphin file manager has a cleaner default appearance. The menu bar is hidden, but easy to reach and restore. The file searching interface has been improved. Marble the virtual globe now has voice navigation support and a map creation wizard. Gwenview image viewer now offers the ability to compare two or more pictures side by side. Digikam photo management app brings face detection and recognition."

deadeyefred writes "Even though it's still only in alpha, it appears as though the forthcoming version of Ubuntu, version 11.10, will be much faster than earlier versions, according to this story. Quoting: 'After installing the OS onto a PC with an Intel Core 2 Duo E8400 at 3.00 GHz and a hard disk drive, we stop-watched boot-up time at 12 seconds — more than three seconds faster than the previous best time we’ve measured.' It looks as if the switch from GDM to LightDM will have a significant impact as Ubuntu gets closer to 'instant on' status."

darthcamaro writes "No big surprise, but Microsoft has now officially extended their patent, interoperability and Linux resale deal with SUSE. This was the deal that Novell had originally signed. Now, with the Attachmate sale, Microsoft is bringing the deal back to SUSE. The deal is being extended until 2016 and Microsoft is set to invest another $100 million into SUSE Linux Enterprise Server certificates. This is on top of the $300-million-plus they've already brought since 2006."

luceth writes "According to Android Police, the Google Music library manager now supports Linux! Also available in the Linux upload manager is new support for Ogg Vorbis, though they transcode it to 320 Kbps MP3 like they do with FLAC. Still, it will be nice to get some use out of that beta invite."

Suchetha writes "In a posting on his Google+ page Linus Torvalds announced the launch of Linux kernel 3.0. This follows the kernel missing the planned release date of the 19th because of 'a subtle bug.'"

donadony writes "The Lightweight Portable Security distribution was created by the Software Protection Initiative under the direction of the Air Force Research Laboratory and the U.S. Department Of Defense. The idea behind it is that government workers can use a CD-ROM or USB stick to boot into a tamper proof, pristine desktop when using insecure computers such as those available in hotels or a worker's own home. The environment that it offers should be largely resistant to Internet-borne security threats such as viruses and spyware, particularly when launched from read-only media such as a CDROM. The LPS system does not mount the hard drive of the host machine, so leaves no trace of the user's activities behind."

drspliff writes "Oracle today announced it's completed the acquisition of K-Splice, dropping support for Redhat, CentOS, and SUSE, and closing doors to new customers. Unless of course you want to become an Oracle Linux Premier Support subscriber — then it comes as standard."

alphadogg writes "Part of the buzz this week about Google+ is that Google is reportedly working to lure celebrities such as Lady Gaga to its new social network service with verified accounts. Not sure if tech big shots beyond Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg count as celebrities, but the list of the technology industry's biggest names using Google+ is on the rise. Dell chief Michael Dell – yes, the real Michael Dell — has grabbed headlines for his early enthusiasm for Google+ and interest in using it as a newfangled customer support and interaction tool. Open source movers and shakers like Linus Torvalds, Miguel de Icaza are also posting away."