The Banshee Project released 1.5.3 on January 27th. This release brings a slew of improvements to the already impressive media player that gives iTunes a run for its money, if not hype.

For those not familiar with Banshee, it’s a media player written in C# on the Mono platform, started by Aaron Bockover. Since its debut in 2005, Banshee has seen contributions from nearly 100 developers. Banshee is Free Software, licensed under the MIT/X11 license, and has been packaged for ‘all major Linux distributions' as well as recent releases for Mac OS X. The most recent Mac OS X release removes the requirement for the Mono and GTK frameworks, bundling everything in one binary for installation on Mac OS X. Note that Mac builds are beta quality and may be missing some features present in Linux releases, or may not be quite as stable.

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After just a few weeks, SourceForge has backed off its policy of imposing a blanket ban on all users trying to access the site from countries on the U.S. "banned" list. Instead, it announced on Sunday that it's putting the decision in the hands of each project that hosts on the site.

According to SourceForge's Lee Schlesinger, the company has no way of knowing which projects should or shouldn't trigger a block. So it will leave that up to the individuals running the project:

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The first step is often the hardest, but don't let that stop you. If you've ever wanted to learn how to write a shell script but didn't know where to start, this is your lucky day.

If this is your first time writing a script, don't worry — shell scripting is not that complicated. That is, you can do some complicated things with shell scripts, but you can get there over time. If you know how to run commands at the command line, you can learn to write simple scripts in just 10 minutes. All you need is a text editor and an idea of what you want to do. Start small and use scripts to automate small tasks. Over time you can build on what you know and wind up doing more and more with scripts.

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Working on a first draft of questions for the next openSUSE survey. It’s been a while since we queried our users, and it’s about time we do it again.

A couple of challenges here:

The Southern California Linux Expo (SCALE) is coming up shortly. We’re looking for some volunteers to help man the openSUSE booth at the show. If you’re an openSUSE enthusiast and planning on attending SCALE, please drop a note to the openSUSE marketing list.

The show is February 19-21, but the expo floor is only open on the 20th and 21st. We won’t need a lot of help setting up the booth, just folks who can help man the booth, answer questions about openSUSE, hand out some swag, and be friendly. You don’t need to be able to answer every technical question that an attendee might ask, but should know your way around openSUSE 11.2 and be able to answer general questions about openSUSE.

Happy 2010! It’s great to be back from vacation, and it’s time to start getting a jump on the new year. Part of that is getting openSUSE 11.2 media to ambassadors and folks running open source events.

If you’re looking for openSUSE 11.2 DVDs for events or groups, we have plenty in stock. We’re happy to send openSUSE 11.2 DVDs to openSUSE Ambassadors and folks running FLOSS/Linux events.

The best way to get your hands on some openSUSE DVDs right away is to send me an email directly (zonker@opensuse.org) and be sure to include the following information, bold is required:

Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols writes that the “writing is on the wall. OpenSolaris is on its way out.” Is it really? And what does that mean for the FOSS landscape?

It makes more sense for Oracle to fully embrace Linux. A well-organized transition from Solaris/OpenSolaris to Linux — where Oracle redeploys the Solaris folks to working on Linux and trying to merge some of the better features of Solaris into Linux, would be a fantastic boon for the FOSS community.

That’s not what Vaughan-Nichols is predicting, though:

I can’t imagine that Oracle will announce that it’s actually killing OpenSolaris off. What I’m very much afraid I see happening is that Oracle is going to let OpenSolaris-and other non-core to Oracle Sun projects like MySQL and VirtualBox — wither and die on the vine without corporate support. Their staffers will be either reassigned or laid-off.

The good news is that Microsoft is writing extensions for Firefox. The bad news is, the Redmond giant is slipping the extension onto systems without notifying users and making it difficult to get rid of the extension. Even worse? It’s an extension that allows Web sites to install software onto users’ PCs behind the scenes — meaning that Firefox users on Windows may not be as safe as they think.

Brian Krebs, who originally recommended the .Net Framework that sneaks the extension into Firefox writes:

Anyway, I’m sure it’s not the end of the world, but it’s probably infuriating to many readers nonetheless. Firstly — to my readers — I apologize for overlooking this…”feature” of the .NET Framework security update. Secondly — to Microsoft — this is a great example of how not to convince people to trust your security updates.

Matt Asay excorates the whining masses that are taking Twitter to task for its ill-considered removal of the @replies feature. Asay says “pay money so that you actually have the right to voice your displeasure as a customer rather than as a user.” However, Asay misses a glaringly obvious point here — Twitter hasn’t given anybody the ability to pay up.

In general, I do agree with Asay that being a user isn’t enough to give someone the right to complain — or, at least, the right to be taken seriously. For open source projects, there needs to be some kind of consideration before taking a seat at the table — either as a contributor or customer. If you’re putting in sweat equity to a project, rather than cold hard cash, you should be taken seriously.

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