OSSPACK

Canonical developer Robert Ancell is working on Simple Scan, a great little program that does exactly what it claims – it makes scanning things simple! Simple Scan is now the default scanning software in Lucid.

A chunky Visual Studio 2010 releases soon, packing more features and representing perhaps more hours of development than any other single-vendor's development tool. How could you resist? And yet many do resist such highly automated and powerful productivity tools and continue to favor Emacs or other text editors and command lines for their development. Ruby, the fastest growing language ecosystem, has evolved primarily without IDE tool support. What explains this love/hate relationship with the IDE among developers and the companies that make them. Will we ever all get on the same page?

Tech Drive-in: ""I must say, the basic artwork in Ubuntu Studio that include themes, wallpapers and iconsets, are way better than that in the original Ubuntu itself. Here is a nice collection of 20 Ubuntu Studio Wallpapers you might want to check out.

I've been an avid Linux user for quite some time. In all that time, I have toyed with making my own distribution, and for me there were many problems. One of those problems was honestly wanting to maintain ownership and control of my code. I felt it would be bad policy to release an OpenSource system that contained a large amount of proprietary code... even if the software remained kostenlos. To that end, I use my code on my own machine, and simply do not release it. Others aren't quite as thoughtful. The distribution that is currently bringing this to mind is Igelle.

Scribbles and Snaps: "digiKam is a truly versatile and powerful application for managing and tweaking photos, but it's not the only photographic tool around. In fact, there are a few other nifty open source utilities that can make great additions to your photographic toolbox. Here are a couple of such tools worth considering."

Novell executives said this week that it's seven-year-old Linux business has finally broken even -- making good on promises made a year ago. But it hasn't been an easy trek to begin making money off of Linux, and one factor may way against Novell's Linux business going forward: The waning revenue from its landmark 2006 agreement with Microsoft to begin reselling Linux support subscriptions. This week, Novell reported its first-quarter fiscal 2010 earnings for the quarter ending on Jan. 31. Net revenues came in at $202 million, a decline from the $215 million reported for the first quarter of 2009. On the net income side, things are a bit brighter. Novell reported GAAP net income of $20 million, or $0.06 per share, an increase over the $11 million or $0.03 per share it reported for the first quarter of 2009.

LinuxCertified, Inc. announced its next two day, hands-on course that provides attendees with experience in creating Linux kernel source code within various subsystems of the Linux kernel. This course teaches attendees to acquaints developers with the fundamental subsystems, data structures, and API of the Linux kernel

This class is scheduled for March 8th - March 9th, 2010.

First of all, I want to thank Haiku, Inc. for giving me the opportunity to concentrate fully for a while on the WebKit port and browser! This is an awesome chance that I intend to make full use of. At the moment, I have mixed feelings. Not about writing blogs. Not about working on WebKit. But about using the new WebKit browser to write the blog entry, haha! I've seen it crash, although in the last days, it has become pretty stable. After we upgraded to a newer WebKit version as the basis for the port, the frequent random crashes have almost disappeared and I saw only one crash in three days. Compared to one every few minutes before.

Android's been around for more than a year, and in that time developers have whipped up some great apps. Whether you're a new Android owner or a pro looking for new tools, these 10 great and free apps belong in your arsenal.

Howtoforge: "This tutorial shows how to set up a standalone storage server on Fedora 12. Instead of NFS, I will use GlusterFS here. The client system will be able to access the storage as if it was a local filesystem."