Here are our key findings:

GNOME has a rhythm – there is a measurable increase in activity before release time, and after the annual GNOME conference GUADEC

• While over 70% of GNOME developers identify themselves as volunteers, over 70% of the commits to the GNOME releases are made by paid contributors
• Red Hat are the biggest contributor to the GNOME project and its core dependencies. Red Hat employees have made almost 17% of all commits we measured, and 11 of the top 20 GNOME committers of all time are current or past Red Hat employees. Novell and Collabora are also on the podium.
• A number of top company contributors are consultancy/services companies specialising in the GNOME platform – Collabora, CodeThink, Openismus, Lanedo and Fluendo are in the top 20 companies. As many of these companies grew initially through work on Maemo, this is a sign of the success of Nokia’s strategy around the GNOME stack.

Company	Commits	Percentage
Volunteer	101823	23.45
Unknown	73558	16.94
Red Hat	70790	16.30
Novell	45349	10.44
Collabora	21684	4.99
Intel	11160	2.57
Fluendo	10218	2.35
Lanedo	10090	2.32
Independent	8922	2.05
Sun	8862	2.04
Nokia	6183	1.42

via Safe as Milk » Blog Archive » GNOME Census.

Notice a missing company ?

openSUSE 11.3 is based on Linux kernel 2.6.34 and has KDE Software Compilation 4.4.4 as the default desktop environment. A GNOME version is also available and it uses GNOME 2.30.1. In terms of the default applications, it comes with Thunderbird 3.0.5, Firefox 3.6.4 and OpenOffice 3.2.1 to name a few. openSUSE 11.3 also gives the user the choice of using Btrfs during installation.

You can view the complete changelog here or read the release note. A screenshot tour of openSUSE 11.3 have also been put up.

via openSUSE 11.3 Released – Download Now.

My favourite distro gets an update.

A lot of our developers are using Linux, obviously they want to listen to music while they’re coding away and looking at the feedback we get it appears that they’re not the only ones. So today we’re pretty happy to present a preview version of Spotify for Linux.

Built by our brilliant developers during hack days and late nights, it shares most of the same features as our Windows and Mac OS X desktop applications. Unfortunately, there are issues regarding decoding of local music on the Linux platform so we haven’t included support for local files in this version.

via Spotify for Linux – Spotify.

Nice! Now if only they’d allow us poor mortals(read: those living outside Europe) to use Spotify

Forum post @ Unreal IRCD

We found out that the Unreal3.2.8.1.tar.gz file on our mirrors has been replaced quite a while ago with a version with a backdoor (trojan) in it.
This backdoor allows a person to execute ANY command with the privileges of the user running the ircd. The backdoor can be executed regardless of any user
restrictions (so even if you have passworded server or hub that doesn’t allow any users in).

It appears the replacement of the .tar.gz occurred in November 2009 (at least on some mirrors). It seems nobody noticed it until now.

Not good.

Adobe says:

We have temporarily closed the Labs program of Flash Player 10 for 64-bit Linux, as we are making significant architectural changes to the 64-bit Linux Flash Player and additional security enhancements

Uh-huh.

From Adobe Flash Team Player blog:

I’m thrilled to announce that Adobe Flash Player 10.1 is now available for Windows, Mac, and Linux operating systems. You can get it now.

Some nice features:

• With Flash Player 10.1, we added new functionality that detects when memory is running low. Now, content that runs in Flash Player will automatically shut down when the available memory is running low.
• Flash Player can now automatically reduce the power consumption for content running in the background on a non-visible browser tab to improve performance when users are multitasking. In cases where audio is playing in the background, playback fidelity is maintained.
• For desktops, Flash Player 10.1 introduces hardware-based H.264 video decoding (yay!)
• Smart seek can easily make using Flash Player a DVR-like experience. Smart seek allows the video viewer to seek within a new “back” buffer so viewers can easily rewind or fast forward video
• [...] using a new set of ActionScript 3 APIs for multi-touch and native gesture events, creating the ability to interact with multiple objects simultaneously or work with native gestures, such as pinch, scroll, rotate, scale, and two-finger tap.

Time to update. Hope performance has improved lots under Linux.

I love MusicBrainz Picard. It keeps my music collection organized, tags and renames them, and heck even fetches the cover art for (almost) all songs. Picard is just brilliant.

And the icing on the cake – its FOSS & cross platform. And it was working fine – till couple of days ago.
[...]

I’ve owned a Sony Ericsson HBH-DS970 for nearly 2 years now, and I use it pretty often with my previous phone ( the Sony Ericsson P1i ), and my current iPhone 3G. I also use it occasionally on my laptop. It has worked fine in Windows XP, Vista & Windows 7. Getting it to work with Linux, however has been an EPIC FAIL. The last time I tried it was probably a year ago, and I just gave up in frustration and continued to use my EP-630 as the earphone.

[...]

I wasn’t aware of this tiny little thing  - the filesystem in the  file created by a Wubi install can be easily mounted as a loop device.

[...]

This is the problem that affected me the most in the history of Linux using so far. Image, for two full years i just dint know the solution to this prob is that easy. Too late of me to find out. any ways, better late than never.

So the problem is with FX 5200 Ubuntu liveCD/installation boot will hang mid-way, as to most users, it fills to first three bars and then fails. But the cause is acpi settings create some problem with Ubuntu booting. Nope, “acpi=off” option in Ubuntu boot options does NOT work. Now, that’s what everybody suggests only to know it never helps. Even Sathya suggested to me.

It doesnt work because, BIOS settings dominate at the boot time. The entry makes no sense. SO now does it become clear? You disable ACPI in BIOS!  Wow, that worked like magic for me. Now am running Ubuntu 9.10 (Karmic Koala) on my PC without any boot problems.

However, shutdown does not work properly. Other things like restart and general stuff work fine.

So try that comment on whether it works.