There's been a lot of information scattered around the internet about these topic recently, so here's my attempt to put them all in one place to (hopefully) settle things down and give my inbox a break. Last week I spent a number of days at the GNOME Developer Hackfest in Brussels, with the goal to help make the ability to distribute applications written for GNOME (and even more generally, Linux) in a better manner. A great summary of what happened there can be found in this H-Online article. Also please read Alexander Larsson's great summary of what we discussed and worked on for another view of this. Both of these articles allude to the fact that I'm working on putting the D-Bus protocol into the kernel, in order to help achieve these larger goals of proper IPC for applications. And I'd like to confirm that yes, this is true, but it's not going to be D-Bus like you know it today.

Question2Answer (Q2A) is a popular open source Q&A solution, currently in use on thousands sites world-wide in 40 languages. It is built on the standard PHP/MySQL platform, and runs safe and fast. A Q&A engine helps you to create an online community to share knowledge. People with questions quickly get the answers they need. The community dynamic is enriched by commenting, voting, notifications, user points and rankings. In this guide we will show you how to install this popular software on Ubuntu LAMP.

David Herrmann has provided an update on his ambitious initiative to kill of the Linux kernel console. Herrmann has long been working on making the Linux kernel CONFIG_VT option unnecessary for providing a Linux console by punting it off to user-space. The Linux kernel VT console hasn't been changed much in the past two decades and Herrmann is hoping to see it replaced with a user-space solution he's been developing that would allow for multi-seat support, a hardware-accelerated console, full internalization, and other features.

Did anybody else notice Novell BrainShare 2013 occurred last week in Salt Lake City? It was a prime opportunity to promote Novell’s progress under Attachmate’s ownership. Plus, SUSE Linux (Novell’s sister business) could have published some updated business milestones of its own. Did Novell and SUSE deliver? Here’s the scorecard.

Dario Faggioli, a member of the Xen project, describes how you can easily install Xen and xen-tools on the Fedora distribution. If you thought that Xen and Fedora don't mix, think again!

As promised, here is the Linux Foundation UEFI secure boot system. This was actually released to us by Microsoft on Wednesday 6 February, but with travel, conferences and meetings I didn’t really get time to validate it all until today. The files are here

LinuxCertified,Inc. a leading provider of Linux training, will offer weekend Linux system administration bootcamp on [url=http://www.linuxcertified.com/class_schedule.html] February 23rd - 24th, 2013[/url] in South Bay (CA). This workshop is designed for busy information technology professionals and is designed to cover the most important Linux administration areas.

While there's plenty of code pouring into the Linux world for bettering open-source graphics drivers from desktop graphics cards to ARM SoCs, in the *BSD world they are struggling with their graphics driver support. Matthieu Herrb gave a presentation on the (rather poor) state of graphics on Unix-like platforms outside of Linux.

For someone who works with, writes about and teaches cutting-edge technologies, I tend to be a bit of a laggard when adopting new ones. I upgrade my laptop and servers very conservatively. I got my first smartphone just earlier this year. I still use the Apache HTTP server, even though I know that nginx is a bit faster. And until recently, Mozilla's Firefox was my default browser.

This week we look at Android's market dominance, the fall of BlackBerry in the enterprise and why cloud computing needs standards.

Not satisfied with the experience on current forum software packages, Stack Exchange co-founder Jeff Atwood founded Civilized Discourse Construction Kit Inc to come up with a software package to replace them. Its open source Discourse software is built with JavaScript, Ruby on Rails and PostgreSQL and, according to the developers, can be used whenever a mailing list or forum is needed. According to the team: "Discourse is a from-scratch reboot, an attempt to re-imagine what a modern, sustainable, fully open-source Internet discussion platform should be".

Senscape, the people who brought Shivers to the PC world are doing a new expanded world of psychological horror : Asylum. This could be the greatest horror genre game available on Linux since Amnesia: The Dark Descent. But it needs our help. A Kickstarter campaign is going on now:

Which Linux operating systems are the most popular among home and small business users? Which Linux desktop is the best choice for enterprise users? Questions like these are meaningless and unanswerable, even for Linux developers. "Measuring Linux adoption ... has always been -- and will likely always be -- a difficult task, due to the lack of empirical data," said Jeremy Garcia, founder of LinuxQuestions.org.

Canonical announced a few days ago on the Ubuntu One blog that, because of some major investments in their new data sync infrastructure for the Ubuntu One cloud service, they would have to close the Tomboy Notes sync service.

The Open Data Day wiki (sans logo, so a little rough around the edges) is now live and ready for action. The wiki is where organizers can list the city in which they’ll be putting together an event and where interested participants can find local events and let people know that they’ll be attending (to give organizers a sense of numbers) and what projects, workshops, discussions, or other activities they are interested in participating in.

We’re hearing reports that Microsoft is having trouble pushing copies of the whiz-bang don’t-call-it-metro Windows 8 even at reduced fire sale prices, with one tech writer suggesting a Vista-esque rollback to Windows 7. The new Microsoft Surface Pro tablet that was supposed to make Microsoft the new Apple and Steve Ballmer the new Steve Jobs has brought less than enthusiastic reviews. What’s a down on it’s luck technology company to do? If you’re Microsoft, you do what you’ve always done: round up the usual suspects, buy some genetically modified FUD seeds and start sowing them.

Playing with ansible, its "ec2" module came to my attention: it is intended to manage virtual machines in Amazon's EC2 cloud. The idea is that you describe a system with the property "needs to run in Amazon's cloud", and ansible then starts the machine if it isn't there already. In order to get to the point where this can be played with, a working version of the euca2ools package was required first. Packaging was mostly a no-brainer, and a package is currently under review and will end up in pkgsrc eventually. The more interesting part was to verify if the pkg actually worked as expected. This proved tricky for two reasons: 1) my overall lack of how to use the Amazon AWS command line tools (ec2-ami-tools, ec2-api-tools), and 2) the fact that euca2ools is mostly written for the Eucalyptus Cloud infrastructure, which just happens to be compatible with Amazon AWS. To give future parties something to google, here are the steps that to fire up a NetBSD machine in the Amazon cloud.

If you're wondering what graphics hardware / driver is best if you intend to do much gaming within Wine or CrossOver on Linux, a CodeWeavers' developer responsible for much of the Direct3D layer spoke about his experiences with gaming on Wine for the best results.

Semi-manual LVM disk partitioning guide for Fedora 18 provides a step-by-step guide on how to customize the disk space allocated to the root logical volume, so that it gets just enough disk space required for the life of the installation.

This is a short tutorial on how to find out weak passwords for your mail users. This will save you you a huge headache since spammers will find out mail accounts with weak passwords and send spam emails which will result in your mail server being blacklisted.