As is already indicated by version 0.9, which has just been released, Eclipse 4 will incorporate several familiar web technologies and put them to new uses. The Eclipse development environment has become a very popular open source project. A flexible software tool kit, Eclipse can integrate the products of several vendors as plug-ins, for example for modelling, development and software tests; for some time now, Eclipse hasn’t just been about Java.

If you’re in the mood for Linux — and who amongst us isn’t — September may be your month, as the Linux Foundation presents the inaugural LinuxCon in Portland. Just shy of two months ago we sounded the call to rise, shine, and catch the early bird rate — sadly, the early bird’s worm is no more. It’s still possible, though, to grab yourself a spot and shave a nice slice off the price.

The Firefox logo. Mozilla announced Friday that it had passed one billion downloads of Firefox, its Web browser that has gained popularity as a free alternative to Microsoft’s ubiquitous Internet Explorer.

Back in May we shared that the Ubuntu Intel graphics performance was still in bad shape after testing out very early Ubuntu 9.10 packages. The netbook experience was killed in Ubuntu 9.04 after a buggy Intel Linux graphics stack led to slow performance, stability issues, screen corruption, and other problems. Months have passed since we last exhaustively looked at the Intel Linux graphics stack, but we have just carried out some new tests using Ubuntu 9.10 Alpha 3. This new development release of Ubuntu carries the latest kernel, Mesa, and Intel driver packages as we see how the graphics performance is with an Intel 945 and G43 chipsets.

Linus has released the 2.6.31-rc5 prepatch.
“Apart from various regression fixes, the diffstat shows a couple of
new drivers (at_hdmac, uc2322, gspca/sn9c20x, ds2782 battery driver), and
some big KMS radeon changes…” See href="http://kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/v2.6/testing/ChangeLog-2.6.31-rc5">the
full changelog for the details.

Red Hat will step up its efforts to help drive developer contribution and remains unfazed by desktop competition, according to its chief executive Jim Whitehurst. Addressing local students during his address Friday at UniSim, Whitehurst provided updates of Red Hat’s Open Source Collaborative Innovation (OSCI) initiative launched just over a year ago.

Howto install VLC media player 1.0.0 in Ubuntu. VLC media player is a highly portable multimedia player for various audio and video formats (MPEG-1, MPEG-2, MPEG-4, DivX, mp3, ogg, …) as well as DVDs, VCDs, and various streaming protocols.It can also be used as a server to stream in unicast or multicast in IPv4 or IPv6 on a high-bandwidth network.

“Red Hat got skewered with the Mass 0wnage award, also known as the “Pwnie for Breaking the Internet,” for issuing a version of OpenSSH that left a backdoor open to hackers.

There are two things you can be sure of about the annual Las Vegas Black Hat security conference: nobody will use the free wifi as they are all too worried about being hacked, and someone will demonstrate an exploit that will scare the living bejesus out of you. The latter has just happened for iPhone users who now have to worry about being their Jesus Phone being hijacked by nothing other than a malformed SMS text message.

Free High School Science Texts (FHSST) founder Mark Horner stops by ISKME’s California office and explains how FHSST got started, and what’s involved in creating an open educational resource project. In this segment, Mark answers the question, “What are the barriers to volunteer productivity?” … OER FHSST Free high school science texts open educational resources textbooks open-source creative co…