For a long time, using an iPhone with Linux was a complete no go. With a jailbroken phone, you could mount it over a wireless connection using fuse, and then sync music your music that way – but syncing an entire music collection via wifi? No thanks. However, thanks to some rather clever folk, there’s a new solution that gives you access to a whole lot of your iPhone functions on Linux “natively”.

n a move that will boost support for open video on the mobile Web, Google has provided funding to TheorARM—a project that produces an ARM-optimized implementation of the Ogg Theora video codec. Google's support for the project could be a signal that the search giant is significantly warming up to open video. Although HTML5 delivers open standards for Web video playback, browser vendors have not been able to reach a consensus on the codec. Some parties favor Ogg Theora, a royalty-free codec that can be freely redistributed because it is thought to be unencumbered by patents. Others favor H.264, a codec that offers technically superior compression but is burdened with costly licensing fees.

Apple might have just tipped its iPhone OS 4.0, but Android has jumped to nine percent of the U.S. smartphone market, according to ComScore. Meanwhile, Nielsen says U.S. smartphone sales will eclipse feature-phone sales by 2011, and ABI Research predicts that over 800 million Android apps will be downloaded this year, making it the fastest-growing OS in app downloads.

After forty years in the commercial computing business, the one idea that has been drilled into me by security professionals is the fact that there is no such thing as a secure computer system, only levels of insecurity. Therefore the cost of keeping the information and system secure has to be balanced with the cost of losing that information or system, or having it damaged. Unfortunately the speed and availability of the Internet combined with the low cost of very powerful computers and network services have made the cost of “cracking” go down and the cost of “securing” go up.

The LWN.net Weekly Edition for April 8, 2010 is available.

LXer Feature: 23-Mar-2010

Sorry for the late posting of the LXWR. This past week we had several different Ubuntu related items including Mark Shuttleworth stating "This is not a democracy", a list of Linux applications you might not know of and our Hans Kwint shows us that there are real alternatives to the iPad. Enjoy!

On February 9th 2010 the KDE community released the a new major version of the KDE Software Compilation to the world. As this provided an excellent excuse for throwing a good party, the last 7 weeks have seen hundreds of KDE enthusiasts gather at over thirty release parties around the world. Most parties featured demos and talks about the new release and the majority included beer, other drinks, food (including KDE cake!), some had karaoke and all of them were about meeting cool people and having some fun.

Snapping a quick screenshot is a capability you get out of the box with most current Linux distributions. Hit the Print Screen function key, and you should see a dialog box pop up with a capture of your entire screen. For GNOME users this typically launches gnome-screenshot while Kde will bring up Ksnapshot. Both tools are similar in functionality and get the basic job accomplished.

LinuxDevices looks at the Ben NanoNote, a small, open machine produced by Qi Hardware. "The Ben NanoNote offers OpenWRT Linux pre-installed, and the device can also boot over USB. (OpenWRT is a small footprint distribution commonly found on routers.) Other components in the distribution include the Uboot boot-loader, although one of the many project pages on Qi Hardware notes that the eventual plan is to move to the lightweight Qi boot-loader."

Jennifer Cloer talks with Matt Asay, COO of Canonical. "Asay: We have the chance to turn the technology world upside down. At Canonical we have Google or Apple-sized ambition, because we have community that dwarfs both of them put together. Our task is to work with the community to fulfill that opportunity. I believe we can. That's what I signed up to accomplish."