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Kristian Høgsberg on the 6th of November had wrote a message on the DRI development list regarding the libdrm repository. With so much of the Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) work going straight into the Linux kernel — thanks in large part to all of the work on memory management and kernel mode-setting — Kristian proposed that the DRM driver code be removed from the separate DRM Git tree. With this message, Kristian created a new DRM repository that dropped all of the linux-core, bsd-core, and shared-core code. Seems simple and straightforward, right? Well, three weeks later with dozens of replies, this change is continuing to cause debate.

Early on in the lifetime of the KDE Community Forums, the staff launched regularly-held courses for people willing to help KDE called “Klassrooms”. For each of these courses, a mentor (usually a KDE contributor, but not limited to them) guided a group of “students” towards a simple, definite goal that would improve KDE, for example fixing simple bugs in an application. However, the courses were not limited to coding: documentation, promo and other important areas were handled as well.

This tutorial shows how you can set up a Fedora 12 desktop (GNOME) that is a full-fledged replacement for a Windows desktop, i.e. that has all the software that people need to do the things they do on their Windows desktops. The advantages are clear: you get a secure system without DRM restrictions that works even on old hardware, and the best thing is: all software comes free of charge.

Cover thumbnailer is a small Python script which displays music album covers in nautilus, preview of pictures which are in a folder and more. The script fits in nautilus like any other thumbnailer of the GNOME thumbnail factory; so you don’t have to run it manually to generate thumbnails.

The new version of PulseAudio has some pretty neat new features built in like the support for Apple AirTunes, which is a protocol that allows you to stream audio to remote devices over a network.

Desktop search engines are all the rage these days. While Beagle may be the most popular desktop search engine for Linux, there are alternatives. If you are looking for a light-weight and easy-to-use yet powerful desktop search engine, you might want to try Recoll.

Just 2 weeks after Release Candidate 1 was released, Linux Mint 8 final dubbed Helena version is available.

Me: “How could you tell they’d hacked it?”

Caller: “Well, when it booted, it didn’t say Windows or Microsoft or anything! It said something about Deviant Linux, I think, and the main screen looked nothing like my good, legal Windows screen at home! I think they hacked that, too!”

If you write something is the New York Times obligated to publish it? Must the Washington Post run a sharply worded op-ed? Can I compel Fox News to give voice to my liberal opinions? The answer to all these questions is an unequivocal no. Private media is permitted editorial control of their content. Websites and blogs are no different. They are simply a newer, different form of private media.

According to the blurb on the book’s back cover, “This book offers a highly accessible introduction to natural language processing, the field that supports a variety of language technologies, from predictive text and email filtering to automatic summarization and translation”. Putting it all together, this book teaches the reader how to do something highly specific and practical with the Python programming language. I put it this way because there are many books out there that will teach you how to learn Python, or some other programming language, which includes learning various typical tasks, but they don’t teach you where to go next.