Unixster

Lifehacker readers, you’re in luck today; if you’ve ever wondered what a real life Macgvyer does for a living, I’m about to show you. I work with Limor at my "other" job designing educational electronics. It’s a dream come true. Ladyada is perhaps the smartest person I’ve met on the planet. I’ve always called her "Lex Luthor smart" or "MacGyver clever", and most people seem to understand those analogies. She uses her smarts for mostly "good" and of course some mischief, which I would say is also good on a long enough timeline. That said, her work speaks for itself, so let’s take a look and listen…

As part of a public consultation exercise, US industry association the International Intellectual Property Alliance (IIPA), whose members include lobbying organisations such as the Business Software Alliance, the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) and the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), has submitted recommendations to the US trade representative for revising the US’ blacklist of copyright sinners. The 498 page submission lists a number of countries in which, in the opinion of the IIPA, intellectual property rights are poorly enforceable or inadequately protected. The submission expressly calls for a number of countries to be placed under special observation – in part in response to their support for open source software.

The ambitious volunteer-based OpenStreetMap has now mapped more than 120,000 km of South African roads. It’s ambitious and time-consuming work to produce free maps of the whole of South Africa, but that is exactly what the OpenStreetMap (OSM) team is doing. Relying on a team of volunteers willing to hit the highways, streets and tracks of the country with their GPSes in their spare time, the OpenStreetMap SA team has now mapped more than 120,000 km of the country’s roads. The resulting maps are licenced under a Creative Commons licence so that anyone can use the information.

The GNOME community’s design and usability experts gathered for a week-long hackfest hosted by Canonical in the UK to shape the next major iteration of the GNOME desktop environment. GNOME 3, which is tentatively scheduled for release in September, will introduce new user interface paradigms and include an upgraded desktop shell environment.

In my previous article I already touched on the subject of the virtual file-system mounted on /proc As this is an important topic on the LPI exam (and it’s also a very interesting subject), we are going to explore the /proc file-system today.

While visiting Craigslist today before signing in I noticed that I the picture they used to display cautionary directions about scam addresses is most likely an Ubuntu screenshot of Firefox.

Linux is the operating system of choice for devices with ARM processors. Unfortunately problems with graphics appear in most cases. Ubuntu wants to fix this with a