A new Linux App Store apperi.com has been launched allowing one-click installation of over 100,000 packages across recent Debian and Ubuntu versions. "Apperi provides a simple way to search and install applications on your Debian or Ubuntu Linux computer. By using the official repository package lists and apt-url it allows for one-click installation of every official package in its supported distributions. Apperi was developed by Ryan Quinn who is also the founder and lead developer of the currently dormant GNU/Linux distro SymphonyOS."

KVM acts as the host for the guest operating systems that build the target software for the user. By switching from VMware build guests to Linux KVM guests, build times for each guest are reduced by as much as 50 percent. Learn how to set up the build server and create guests, customize build requests, and organize and access build results.

How does the Alpha Geek establish dominance over the other techies in the herd? With a self-consciously old fashioned, expensive, and fussy computer accessory, of course! We take a look at the Das keyboard and see if it's that much better than the mushy crap keyboard that came bundled with your Dell.

Every now and then, these news items cross your path that simply don't need any words or imagery in order to make an impact. This is definitely one of those. You all know Amazon's Kindle, right? It's Amazon's successful e-book reader which allows you to buy a subset of Amazon's book catalogue in electronic form. Well, the term "buy" doesn't really apply here. Update: In a rare case of company mea culpa, Amazon has explained that deleting the books was a bad idea, and they assured us it won't happen again. The issue here was that the publisher behind the two Orwell books in the Kindle Store did not have the rights to sell these books, and after Amazon was informed by the rightsholder, they removed the books. Still, according to the NYT, more books were deleted from Kindles, even though Amazon doesn't have the right to do so according to its own TOS.

The news has been abuzz about Google's upcoming OS. Many people have been arguing reasons for and against the system, its viability in such a market, and, if the OS is successful, even the morality of the company who may be trusted with even more private information than it already has. Well, here's another reason for Chrome OS: it could bring more jobs in the area of Linux IT.

"I'm really excited to announce a new feature in Jetpack 0.4 -- Audio Recording. 'Jetpacks' can now access the microphone with just a few simple lines of Javascript The result is an audio file encoded in Ogg/Vorbis, which you can then playback, or if you choose to upload the file to a remote location". A while ago we discussed Jetpack (and Google's) HTML / JavaScript based browser extensions. Now the ante has been upped, with such creativity as URL-based voice memos!

Mono from SVN is now able to use LLVM as a backend for code generation in addition to Mono's built-in JIT compiler. "This allows Mono to benefit from all of the compiler optimizations done in LLVM. For example the SciMark score goes from 482 to 610. This extra performance comes at a cost: it consumes more time and more memory to JIT compile using LLVM than using Mono's built-in JIT, so it is not a solution for everyone. Long running desktop applications like Banshee and Gnome-Do want to keep memory usage low and also would most likely not benefit from better code generation. Our own tests show that ASP.NET applications do not seem to benefit very much (but web apps are inherently IO-bound). But computationally intensive applications will definitely benefit from this. Financial and scientific users will surely appreciate this performance boost."

While we regularly discuss Ubuntu, and to a lesser degree Kubuntu, there's also a version of Ubuntu tailor-made for the Xfce desktop environment. As most of you are aware, it's called Xubuntu, and after trying it out for the first time, I have to say that I find that it provides a better and more coherent experience than Ubuntu (let alone Kubuntu).

The uphill battle that open-source programs face to steal ground from proprietary software comes with added pitfalls in China, where problems like software piracy take away strengths that open source has elsewhere. The Chinese government backs multiple domestic open-source projects, but their software is not widely used. Low awareness, a lack of big open-source projects and difficulty finding expertise in certain programming languages all hamper the development of open source in China.

Ubuntu 8.04.3 LTS has been released. "In all, 80 updates have been integrated, and updated installation media has been provided so that fewer updates will need to be downloaded after installation. These include security updates and corrections for other high-impact bugs, with a focus on maintaining stability and compatibility with Ubuntu 8.04 LTS."

For a while now, the Palm Pre and its webOS have been out and about, but the accompanying App Catalog remained remarkably empty, because Palm had not yet opened its software development kit for everyone. The SKD was leaked not too long ago, and today Palm has announced the official release of the Mojo SDK for everyone who wants to get their hands on it. It includes a webOS emulator.

I'm sure most of you are aware of the advertisements going back and forth between Apple and Microsoft. Apple started out with the "I'm a Mac, I'm a PC" campiagn, and Microsoft responded - after a long wait - with the "Laptop Hunters" ads. Recently, Apple made some price cuts, and according to Microsoft, the Cupertino company's lawyers contacted Microsoft, demanding they take down the ads.

Jeff Layton talks to Valerie Aurora, file system developer and open source evangelist, about a wide range of subjects including her background in file systems, ChunkFS, the Union file system and how the developer ecosystem can chip in.

Earlier this year, it became known that the Palm Pre, engineered by a number of ex-Apple engineers, could interface with Apple's iTunes as if it was an iPod. Everybody more or less expected Apple to block the Pre from syncing with iTunes, but I don't think any of us had anticipated just how forthright Apple would be about it.