An anonymous reader writes "Mark Shuttleworth (retired cosmonaut and Ubuntu daddy) has written an informative blog entry about the problems associated with open source development. He found that paying geeks to code without assigning them managers lead to "shiny geek toys", rather than the product he was actually paying for. Shuttleworth says that left-field thinking is required when it comes to managing open source teams. See also Andrew Orlowski's analysis of why AOL eventually killed the Netscape project from a few years ago, where he describes Mozilla developers as "wandering off into Lotus-eating land"."

skaet writes "DesktopLinux.com reports that Google is working together with CodeWeavers to bring their photo editing and sharing program Picasa, formerly only available on Windows, over to Linux. From the article: 'The program is now in a limited beta test. If this program is successful, other Google applications will be following it to the Linux desktop, sources say. The Linux Picasa implementation includes the full feature set of the Windows Picasa 2.x software. It is not, strictly speaking, a port of Picasa to Linux. Instead, Linux Picasa combines Windows Picasa code and Wine technology to run Windows Picasa on Linux. This, however, will be transparent to Linux users, when they download, install, and run the free program on their systems.'"

carlmenezes writes "Screenshots of the upcoming and much talked about KDE 4 have appeared at Planet Diaz. They include screenshots of the control panel, system tray, tabbed views, music and mail views, plus a mockup or two. I don't know what the Gnome guys are up to, but KDE is starting to look seriously cool."

This morning OSDL and OSDL member Levanta jointly released a study done by Enterprise Management Associates called Get the Truth on Linux Management. For years, a proprietary software company in Washington State has run what they call a Get the Facts campaign about Linux, full of studies that invariably show Linux to be expensive, hard to maintain, and less than totally secure. Stu Cohen, as CEO of OSDL, a group "dedicated to accelerating the growth and adoption of Linux in the enterprise," will happily answer your questions about Linux vs. Windows studies and the myths and FUD that seem to hover over them. Expect Stu's answers to the 10 - 12 highest-moderated questions later this week.

slummy writes "After much anticipation, MythTV 0.19 has been released. The release notes outline the new features and bug fixes, and the official announcement for this release is available on the MythTV site." From the release notes: "The major changes in this release [include]: LiveTV rewritten to support saving buffered content while watching. Signal Monitoring for DVB and pcHDTV recorders. Ending times may be changed while recordings are in progress. Playgroups allow for default playback options on recordings. Channel changes can be made across tuners without changing tuners manually first. New popup keyboard simplifies setup using remote. Preview schedule changes when making adjustments to recording schedules. Added ability to control MythFrontend through a telnet socket."

turnitover writes "Even though Linus has said 'The Linux kernel has always been under the GPL v2. Nothing else has ever been valid,' LinuxWatch is reporting that Richard Stallman has said it's ultimately up to the developers. And those on the LKML (Linux Kernel Mailing List) are going back and forth about whether to move to GPL3. The sticking point, not surprisingly, is the issue of DRM." In response to the DRM issue Linus wrote: "I personally think that the anti-DRM clause is much more sensible in the context of the Creative Commons licenses, than in software licenses. If you create valuable and useful content that other people want to be able to use (catchy tunes, funny animation, good icons), I would suggest you protect that _content_ by saying that it cannot be used in any content-protection schemes."

Jane Walker writes "The push for a virtual data center and utility computing continued this week as Novell announced that SuSE Linux would have support for Virtual Iron out of the box." Novell has also guaranteed that 'that all existing independent software vendor (ISV) certifications will not be affected.' From the article: "'The applications certification [component] is huge,' said Novell director of data center applications Justin Steinman. 'Customers want to know that their existing applications are not going to break when they deploy their technology [on a virtual server].'"

hamfactorial writes "Novell has announced the public availability of the Xgl code, an openGL accelerated X server layer. Available binaries ought to be coming soon for distributions running the modular X.org 7.0 release (possibly 6.9, though unconfirmed). A temporary page for Xgl information is up at the openSUSE website. This is the same code that was running in the Novell Linux Desktop 10 preview videos as seen earlier. Further information is also available at Miguel De Icaza's blog."

n8willis writes "Three years after Motorola first announced it was migrating its smart phones to Linux -- and a dozen models later -- there are still virtually no third-party applications for them, much less open source ones. Symbian and Microsoft both give away free SDKs to all willing developers, but Motorola seems to be putting up hurdles instead. An article on NewsForge asks why is this the case?" NewsForge is a Slashdot sister site.

Ravi writes "Any system or network administrator will know the importance of applying patches to the various softwares running on their servers be it the numerous bug fixes or vulnerability checks. Now when you are maintaining just a single machine, this is really a simple affair of downloading the patches and applying them on your machine. But what happens when you are managing multiple servers and hundreds of client machines? How do you keep all these machines under your control up to date with the latest bug fixes? Obviously, it is a waste of time and bandwidth to individually download all the patches and security fixes for each machine. This is where this book named "Linux Patch Management - Keeping Linux systems up to date" authored by Michael Jang gains significance. This book released under the Bruce Perens' open source series aims to address the topic of patch management in detail." Read the rest of Ravi's review

OSNews has an interesting editorial about security on UNIX-like systems. "One of the biggest reasons for many people to switch to a UNIX desktop, away from Windows, is security. It is fairly common knowledge that UNIX-like systems are more secure than Windows. Whether this is true or not will not be up for debate in this short editorial; I will simply assume UNIX-like systems are more secure, for the sake of argument. However, how much is that increased security really worth for an average home user, when you break it down? According to me, fairly little"

ThinkingInBinary writes "Want easier power management and better battery life on your Linux laptop? Try powermgr, a daemon that automatically (or manually, if you choose) switches your system between power "profiles". It has support for ACPI (of course) as well as Asus, Dell, IBM, Omnibook, and Toshiba extensions. It can control CPU governor, screen brightness, wireless card, laptop mode (via services), runlevel, services, and more, and can switch based on AC adapter and battery state, load average, temperature, running processes, and more. Tests indicate that it can prolong battery life by 20 minutes to almost two hours, depending on what the system is doing. Try it out!"

Percy_Blakeney writes "Have you ever wondered why a simple text editor on Linux can use dozens of megabytes of memory? A recent blog posting explains how the output of the ps tool is misleading and how you can get a better idea of how much memory a process really uses."

nursegirl writes "Novell has been running a survey about apps that people need in order to convert their data centers or desktops to Linux. The online survey has been running since Jan 13, and Adobe Photoshop was at the top of the list as of February 1. Desktoplinux.com has an interesting article about why the existence of the GIMP isn't enough for many professionals."

Joe Barr writes "Linus Torvalds explains in three recent posts why he doesn't care for the DRM restrictions in GPLv3, and he has never been one to hold back. From his commentary: 'I _literally_ feel that we do not - as software developers - have the moral right to enforce our rules on hardware manufacturers. We are not crusaders, trying to force people to bow to our superior God. We are trying to show others that co-operation and openness works better.' NewsForge has the complete text of all three posts available." We discussed his initial reaction to GPL3 at the end of last month. NewsForge is a sister site to Slashdot.

An anonymous reader writes "You-Review.Net has an interview with Mark Tilden, the inventor of the Robosapiens line of products. In this interview, Mr Tilden reveals more information about the RSMedia bot, which will be the world's first walking, talking, MP3 playing, ARM9 powered programmable Linux computer (with a Subwoofer, just incase). No news yet on the GPL status of this beast."

zenboomerang writes "It looks like Novell is trying to hit the hammer on the top of software developers heads and try and get them to port their applications directly to Linux. With help from the public they will try to pursuade the management of the most popular programs picked to get into the 21st Century and do some Linux testing. It seems to me to be a good idea and all it needs is a little help from the community."

HenchmenResources writes "Late Wednesday a posting from Linus Torvalds appered on the the Linux Kernel Mailing List. In it Linus states that the Linux Kernel will remain under the GPLv2. Types Linus,"The "version 2 of the License, or (at your option) any later version" language in the GPL copying file is not - and has never been - part of the actual License itself.""

nanday writes to tell us that Newsforge (Owned by VA Software, just like Slashdot) is running an interesting look at the, recently reported on, GPLv3 by the Debian team. From the article: "Initially, Branden Robinson says, he was worried about GPL3. 'The amount of secrecy around the initial draft process had me very nervous,' he says. In addition, after the Debian consensus rejected the GNU Free Documentation License, he was concerned that GPL3 might become equally contentious in Debian. 'I'm glad to say that my fears are assuaged,' Robinson says. 'I was impressed with both the large and small changes. In a nutshell, I like it.'"

Constable On Patrol writes to tell us that IBM DeveloperWorks has an interesting look at the 'fundamentals of how memory is constructed and managed' in the Linux memory module. The article serves as a great intro to the basics of memory management for Linux design and implementation. From the article: "This guide includes an examination of the segment control unit and the paging models as well as a detailed look at the physical memory zone."