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While we're all waiting for PCLOS 2008 to be released, we were treated to a kissing cousin yesterday with the release of TinyMe 2008.0. It's a small lightweight distro featuring the LXDE desktop with lots of handy apps. I thought I'd take it for a little test run this evening to see what it might be like.

Some complain OpenOffice.org is slow and bloated. With each release there may be dozens of individual performance improvements, but there are also new features, some of which may slow things down. This the natural balance in software development, but in the end, what is the net effect on performance from one version to the next? Is it realistic to expect new features and faster performance? This OpenOffice.org benchmark measures the speed of versions 1.1.5 through 3.0.

Earlier this month KDE Italia attended Open Mind 2008. A Free Software event organised by Roberto Dentice in San Giorgio near Naples. There were KDE talks and KDE demonstrations. Read on for the report. At the three day event, a lot of school children with their teachers were involved to participate in the educational labs, for the talks and the workshops. We tried to show them why it is a good reason to replace Microsoft Windows on their computers to host GNU/Linux Free Software on their disks, they can learn more and be really free using KDE.

Microsoft has begun privately beta testing a new tool, known as “Windows Advisor,” which is aimed at helping consumers better pinpoint why their Windows machines might not be up to snuff.

The storage capacity and data retrieval speeds of Hard Disks have increased multiple folds in last few years. However for large business organizations, which not only need to store terabytes of invaluable data but access them frequently as well. These organizations cannot afford to let their systems go offline even for a short duration of time. Moreover they cannot even think of losing even small amount of data due to disk failure or for that matter any other reason.

As some people here probably already know, I am no fan of Mono - not for technical reasons (mostly [3]), but simply for political ones. Specifically, I’m talking about so-called Software Patents, and even more importantly, precisely who owns those patents

Six degrees of freedom (6DOF) devices allow for movement in three axes, tilt in two axes, and rotation in the third. Some of these devices look like small joysticks -- for example, the SpaceNavigator. These devices are typically used for computer-aided design and manufacturing (CAD/CAM) and other 3-D applications. With a new programming library, you can now also use them with Linux applications. You might wonder why you would ever want to use such a device with a desktop application. Well, imagine using the rotation of the device to control your video playback speed, or moving the x-axis of the device to see the next image in a slideshow.

The IBM Systems Application Advantage for Linux, also known as the Chiphopper offering, provides tools to help developers whose applications run on x86 Linux systems scrub their C/C++ code for portability prior to porting to System p, System i, or System z. Source hardware platforms for 32- and 64-bit applications are x86, EM64T, and AMD systems running Linux Standard Base (LSB) 3.x certified Linux distributions.

Translating equivalent arithmetic operations between bash, Perl and awk. Part of an ongoing series on porting code.

Traditionally, web hosts have had a difficult time offering efficient, highly secure web space for a multitude of customers. Generally, a host will provide cheap accounts on a shared server and offer virtual machines as a more expensive option for the more security-conscious site owners. In this article, Joshua Kramer will explain how to provide highly secure hosting for Python-based web applications in an efficient manner. With the popularity of applications such as Trac, Django, and TurboGears, Python-based web applications will become more prevalent in the future, and the concepts presented in this article will become more valuable.

Late last week I downloaded and installed Slackware 12.1 on my aging (OK, old) Toshiba laptop side by side with Vector Linux Light. I'll post a full review to my O'Reilly Linux Dev Center blog once I've had more opportunity to use the latest version of Slack.

My first impression: Slackware is still Slackware.

Cisco has announced an alternative to the Web-services protocol Soap--and made it open source. Cisco said its Etch messaging protocol will be more efficient than the Soap standard and the company will release the source code. A beta version of Etch will be launched this summer, as part of version 2.5 of the Cisco Unified Application Environment (CUAE). Within that environment, it will replace the W3C (World Wide Web Consortium) standard, Soap, said Cisco, providing a more lightweight and faster interface, suitable for real-time interaction.

I will never cease to be amazed at how fast things change and how quickly people forget. Today’s example is a Slashdot posting with the title, “Why Buy a PC Preloaded with Linux?” Specifically, the dotter—slasher really doesn’t give the right tone—wants to know “‘Why should I buy a PC preloaded with Linux?’ They are more expensive, and it’s not hard just to reformat the PC with Linux. I hate paying the Microsoft Tax as much as anybody else, but if paying that ‘tax’ allows companies to reduce my price by bundling with my PC products that I will never use, why wouldn’t I just buy a Windows-loaded PC and reformat?”

The idea of open-source hardware is slowly slowly but surely gaining traction. VIA Technologies, Inc., joined in on the fun today by unveiling an open source reference platform for low power notebooks, based on its own processor technology (obviously). The CAD files have been released under a Creative Commons license. The machine is tentatively named OpenBook.

On the eve of its first-ever developer conference, Google Inc. threw open the doors for its Google App Engine to all takers Tuesday and unveiled pricing details for the cloud-based development environment. Google's App Engine, which the company first announced in April, provides hosted dynamic Web serving, persistent storage, automatic scaling, a local development environment, and authentication and load balancing aimed at making it easier for developers to build Web applications.

As the popularity of blogs continues to rise, blogging software platforms continue to evolve. With the recent release of version 4.1, the popular Movable Type application offers improvements that allow bloggers to expand their control over the publishing process. Movable Type is professional open source blogging software developed by Six Apart, written in Perl, and released under the GNU GPL. It requires a Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP/Perl (LAMP) server or an equivalent to run, and a mail server such as Sendmail or another SMTP-capable engine. The Apache server must be configured to execute CGI scripts. To start, you can try a functional online demo.

Often, the web browser that comes with an operating system is not set up in a secure default configuration. Not securing your web browser can lead quickly to a variety of computer problems caused by anything from spyware being installed without your knowledge to intruders taking control of your computer. As a result, exploiting vulnerabilities in web browsers has become a popular way for attackers to compromise computer systems. For that reason, it is very important to take control and to decide what kind of  browser and plug-in to use. But here is the good news; Linux is already using Mozilla Firefox as a default browser. This workshop will describe how to use additional plug-ins to browse the Internet more secure but also anonymously on a Mandriva 2008 Spring client.

SystemRescueCD has been around for sometime and their latest version 1.0.3 just came out today. I take a short look at it and briefly describe some of its advantages. Checkout the short flash video at the end of the article to see SystemRescueCD 1.0.3 in action.

It seemed like such a great idea. Linux is moving from edge and departmental servers to the data center, so why not offer Linux data center automation, complete with virtualization Linux lifecycle management? Well, maybe it's still a great business idea, but Levanta wasn't able to make a go of it. Officially, there's still no word that the San Mateo, Calif.-based company is out of business, but former employees say that the company laid them off on April 1. The list of those who were fired ranges from clerical support to Madhur Kohli, the company's former vice president of engineering.

Instructions mentioned bellow in general follow up the ones in my previous post, regarding OpenSolaris 2008/05 DomU at Xen 3.2.1 CentOS 5.1 Dom0 (64-bit). However, Xen 3.2.1 Dom0 had been built on CentOS 5.1 from the source obtained by cloning Mercurial Repository@xensource.com. Install Xen on Ubuntu 8.04 had been performed from Ubuntu Repositories and the patched as usual.