OStatic

Xfce is one of the hidden gems of the free desktop. It has managed -- quite successfully -- to capture the familiar feel of a desktop environment while maintaining the speed and responsiveness of the pure window manager. Its small footprint and minimalist approach makes it great for older, less powerful hardware -- but it is full-bodied and functional enough that many choose to use it on machines that can easily handle other desktop environments. The desktop aims to be functional, attractive, light on system resources, and adhere to the specifications proposed by Freedesktop participants to maximize interoperability.

Today, after two years of development, Xfce has officially released the 4.6.0 version of the desktop environment. Some notable new features include out of the box hibernate and suspend functions, a newly re-written sound mixer that leverages gstreamer to support multiple sound cards and configurations, and improvements and enhancements to the Thunar file manager.

This afternoon, Linux Foundation Executive Director Jim Zemlin weighed in with the Foundation's view on the recent patent infringement claims Microsoft has filed against TomTom.

Zemlin says at this point, there's no reason to doubt Microsoft's assurances that this is a dispute solely between TomTom and itself, or that the claims against TomTom are in any manner a direct (or indirect) move against the wider Linux ecosystem.

The Linux Foundation is hopeful, Zemlin says, that the dispute will be resolved as quickly and as peaceably as possible. However, he indicates that if the litigation turns towards the Linux environment in a general sense, the Foundation is prepared to defend the platform.

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As some OStatic readers have likely already heard, Microsoft is taking TomTom, a manufacturer of in-car navigation devices, to court for patent infringement. This is especially disturbing to those in the open source world for at least two reasons -- Microsoft's previous claims that Linux violates over two hundred patents it currently holds, and three of the claims against TomTom deal with TomTom's implementation of the Linux kernel in its products.

Techdirt's Mike Masnick presents some good analysis of the story, including links to the patents in question and those with particularly tenuous claims (in terms of infringement and patentability, in a few instances). While this is worrisome to those who use Linux, and certainly causing TomTom executives to lose sleep, I can't help but wonder, really, what this positioning actually means. Why is this coming up now? If hundreds of Microsoft patents are being violated, why go after a company infringing on eight (with three relating directly to Linux)? And why TomTom?

There are some phrases that come up repeatedly, especially in one's professional life: It's all about who you know. I need to put in some face time. Focus on developing your networking skills.

Traditionally these sorts of things were said in relation to attending conferences and conventions -- live and in-person. Now, however, it's more common to meet and collaborate with others online. Meet the social networking services, which, as the name implies, are as much social as work related. Just like face-to-face conventions, social networks unite people to collaborate on and discuss ideas, and, at least occasionally, goof off.

Whether you're using your social networking time for honest to goodness work, or as a diversion cleverly disguised as work, it's good to use it effectively. You'll end up getting your work done faster, or at least pack as much playtime into your day as possible.

Using this time effectively (for whatever reason) is difficult due to the sheer number of networking services. Linux users have a native gem for keeping on top of it all -- Gwibber.

The majority of computer users don't spend much time thinking about the file system their operating system uses. Granted, people installing alternative operating systems might give more consideration to the available file systems than the general population -- unless there's a specific need for a certain file system, many go with their distribution's default option.

While your file system type isn't something you should need to think about regularly, and making an informed choice for machines with specialized, dedicated tasks is important, usually choosing the default file system type for your operating system is fine. Several Linux distributions (including Fedora and Ubuntu) are planning to move their default file systems from ext3 to ext4 in upcoming releases, while a number of distributions already (or will soon) support ext4 as a file system option.

IBM has a (rather surprisingly) interesting look at what's different about the ext4 file system, including details on why some changes were made, and how moving from ext3 to ext4 works.

Every year or two, some hardware component comes down the line that truly takes my breath away. On the past few occasions, these bits of circuitry have all used open source software in some capacity, though whether that's due to my tendency to notice such things, or a measurable increase in hardware developments that feature open source technology is uncertain.

TMCnet introduced me to this year's take your breath away device, the Marvell SheevaPlug. This plug computer (it's designed to hang comfortably from a household wall socket) features a 1.22 GHz Kirkwood (Sheeva-based) processor, 512 MB DRAM, and a Gigabit ethernet connection. In addition to its onboard 512 MB Flash storage, the plug has a USB port for external storage. The hardware, the multiple Linux distributions it currently supports, and the API framework (called Raindrop ) that is currently being developed for running third party applications -- are all open source.

Why? Because, as Marvell's product manager, Raja Mukhopadhyay told TMCnet, ...[open source] is what we see going forward.

Though 2009 has only just begun, it looks like this year's going to be a busy one for Chumby Industries. The makers of the hackable, completely open, Linux-based, internet-enabled, so-much-more-than-an-alarm-clock -- well, alarm clock -- have announced a number of partnerships since January's Consumer Electronics Show.

The first two partnerships, with Samsung and Marvell, bring the widget-based Chumby platform to digital photo frames and similar embedded devices. The latest partnership, with Broadcom Corporation, aims to bring the Chumby platform to internet-enabled televisions, set top boxes, and Blu-Ray players.

One of the goals put forth for Ubuntu's Jaunty Jackalope at the last Developer Summit, the development of a unified, hands-off notification display, has finally made an appearance in the testing release, according to Canonical CEO Mark Shuttleworth.

The new notification display is designed to behave similarly regardless of desktop environment, and deliver notifications in an non-intrusive manner. An overview of what Shuttleworth calls attention-management guidelines is outlined on the Ubuntu wiki, describing how to design notifications that get the user's attention, inform, and then effortlessly get out of the way.

The development team working in this area is aware of at least 35 applications that need extra attention to work well with the new system, and its current focus is to address these issues and identify other applications with similar quirks.