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Unless you're lucky enough to live within mesh range of many other XO users (or are part of an XO deployment or an innovative classroom project, you probably have a pretty empty "neighborhood," and look to Internet jabber servers to connect with other XOs. The state of the public jabber servers of recent has been in flux for a while, but seems to be settling down.

The recent release of the PS3 Slim brought about joy for those who were waiting for a less expensive/smaller gaming system and indignation for those who were waiting for a Linux experimental machine of the same type as there was no "OtherOS" or Linux option on this model. Why? we cry sadly. Because, the deep, omniscient voices of two Sony representatives boom back.

Sony has been trying lots of new strategies lately to gain marketshare, including adopting the open ePub eBook standard, but are they doing enough to attract a mass market and overtake the Kindle?

In a time when Microsoft is feeling the full impact of the global economic downturn, the open-source Linux operating system is flourishing. While Windows client revenue has let the Redmond company suffering in the 2009 fiscal year, producing three quarters inferior when compared to FY2008, Linux revenue continues to grow and is right on track of making the open-source OS a $1 billion a year business. Market analysis firm IDC estimates that between 2008 and 2013 Linux revenue will deliver a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of no less than 16.9%.

Novell's latest quarterly financial results reinforce the company's biggest challenge: While SUSE Linux sales continue to grow, the rest of the company -- even the security business -- faces falling revenue.

Describing itself as a philanthropic investment company, the Omydar Network has donated two million dollars to the Wikimedia Foundation.

m Berners-Lee has announced the strengthening of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) HTML Working Group. Chris Wilson of Microsoft has stepped down as co-chair.

Novell distinguished engineer James Bottomley believes Linux desktop environments need a dose of open source ingenuity rather than ape ideas from Windows and OS X. Bottomley, who also wears the hat of Director of the Linux Foundation and chair of its technical advisory board, says the next challenge for Linux as a whole is to take the lead in interface advancements. He described his position today in an interview with Brian Proffitt on the Linux Foundation blog.

Getting comfortable with GNU and UNIX commands. GUIs are fine, but to unlock the real power of Linux®, there's no substitute for the command line. In this article, Ian Shields introduces you to some of the major features of the bash shell, with an emphasis on the features that are important for LPI certification. By the end of this article, you will be comfortable using basic Linux commands like echo and exit, setting environment variables, and gathering system information.

In the last article, Akkana Peck talked about the different types of Linux memory and how deceptive values like Virtual Size and Resident Set Size can be. Today she shows us how to get more useful numbers so we can figure out which programs really are memory hogs.

At the end of July, Novell launched SUSE Studio, which it calls a "simple and fast appliance builder". It provides a free and easy-to-use, web-based user interface to roll your own customized (SUSE) Linux distribution. The resulting image can be deployed on bare metal or as a virtual appliance on a hypervisor. Novell has also started a SUSE Appliance Program to support independent software vendors creating Linux-based software appliances.

There continues to be plenty of news in the GP-GPU (General Purpose - Graphical Processing Unit) sector. In case you missed the previews, the standard video card now can be used as a data parallel computer right on your desktop!

In its semi-annual spam report, the Russian security experts Kaspersky Lab have concluded the economic crisis has had no bearing on the amount of spam distributed worldwide. However, spammers have had to turn to creating ads for their very own services.

Open source isn't just for Linux users, there are many excellent free open source applications available ready to run for Apple Mac OS X too. Part 2 of this 2 part feature takes a look at alternative audio, video, burning and encryption applications and much more.

What is exFAT and why should you care? Because the SD Card Association made exFAT the standard file system for the new SDXC cards, and because exFAT is a Microsoft filesystem that claims to be like so totally interoperable, but it isn't.

Last week it was reported by LWN and a few other Linux news sites that Foresight Linux may employ a change of direction…that is, create a spinoff project that places the Conary package manager onto a Fedora Linux base.

Beyond pushing out a new graphical boot screen just before the feature freeze went into effect for Ubuntu 9.10, Canonical released the first public version of their own app store, previously codenamed AppCenter, but now known as the Ubuntu Software Store (or software-store as its package is called). Canonical does have some grand plans for the Ubuntu Software Store and in this article we have some screenshots of what it looks like currently and how it functions along with some of their plans for the future.

LXer Feature: 27-Aug-2009

For a number of years I have been when possible working on what is called the GNU Telephony Secure Calling initiative to make communication intercept a thing of the past, whether for individuals, private organizations, or national governments, and to do so entirely using free software.

The Free Software Foundation today launched a campaign against Microsoft Corp.'s upcoming Windows 7 operating system, calling it "treacherous computing" that stealthily takes away rights from users.

Zim is a WYSIWYG text editor written in Gtk2-Perl. It aims to bring the concept of a wiki to your desktop. Every page is saved as a text file with wiki markup. Pages can contain links to other pages, and are saved automatically. Zim handles several types of markup, like headings, bullet lists and of course bold, italic and highlighted. This markup is saved as wiki text so you can easily edit it with other editors. Because of the autosave feature you can switch between pages and follow links while editing without worries.