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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.

Over the years, I’ve developed a generalized theory about the relative cost of getting things done in Windows versus that of Linux, and as something of a corollary, the reason a lot of people say Linux is too hard, or “not ready for the desktop.” The essence of this theory can be illustrated by a graph that I call The Difficulty Divide. You can see the graph and my theory on Works With U, a site covering Ubuntu Linux.

If your life is like mine, it's probably more complicated than it should be. There's that full time job, social events, and vacations to say nothing of various side businesses and their associated deadlines. The kids have Cub Scouts, soccer, and baseball. Since we homeschool, we have science club, field trips and play dates. And it seems that everyone we know has 2 email addresses and at least 3 phone numbers. Then there is the family budget, workout goals and the infamous Honey-Do List. This is a lot of information to keep track of.

Which Eclipse distribution is right for you? Compare the CodeGear JBuilder 2008 Turbo trial version, nexB EasyEclipse, Europa bundles, and Innoopract's Yoxo On Demand distros. Many of these Eclipse distributions already contain the plug-ins and tools you need to start working right away.

Ars tests the latest beta release of Banshee 1.0, an open-source media player for Linux. This version adds support for video content, including video podcasts.

You wouldn't know it by looking at the market today, but VIA Technologies was really the original mainstream company to be the proponent of the "mini-notebook" market that has become epitomized by the ASUS Eee PC. Last June VIA demonstrated and showed off a device called the VIA NanoBook at Computex in Taipei; essentially a very small form factor laptop with Windows XP on it. Looking at it next to the current generations of the Eee PC and you'd be hard pressed to find significant differences. The single area that VIA failed to address was actually PUSHING their devices into the market - we never really found them in the US and they never took off.

Ubuntu's deep software catalog, focus on usability and active community combine with long-term support to put desktop Linux's best face forward. Canonical has marshaled the best of what the open-source world has to offer in Ubuntu 8.04, a Linux-based operating system that's capable of mounting a serious challenge to Microsoft Windows on mainstream desktops and notebooks.

Anyone interested in writing academic and research papers knows that the process includes researching existing works, planning a research study, collecting and analyzing the results, and writing up the findings. In such papers, reference and citation information is essential. GPL-licensed Wikindx lets you store bibliographic references, quotations, and notes in a database, from which you can easily insert appropriate citations into a paper using its built-in Web-based word processor.

Lenovo's core PC and laptop businesses are under attack. And the company hasn't said much about its long-term server strategy -- especially as it relates to Linux. That has to change fast.

In 1999, Rockstar Games and Rockstar North (then known as DMA Design) furthered the groundbreaking gameplay concepts established just two years prior in the original Grand Theft Auto - with the release of GTA2.

The KDE Project is happy to set the first beta of KDE 4.1, codenamed Caramel, free today. KDE 4.1 is intended to meet the needs of a broad range of users and we therefore respectfully request you to get testing Beta 1. Beta 1 is not ready for production use but is in wide use by KDE developers and is suitable for testing by Linux enthusiasts and KDE fans.

These days, business and free software co-exist with little friction. Although you still find some members of the free software community who automatically view business with suspicion, for the most part the community considers the multibillion dollar open source industry as a validation of its beliefs. Business and free software are so closely intertwined that kernel developers Linus Torvalds and Andrew Morton are employed by the Linux Foundation, a non-profit consortium of corporations. But in recent months, this cooperation is showing signs of becoming strained.

While the RadeonHD developers have been busy working on Radeon HD 3200 / 780 Series support and other features for this open-source ATI R500/600+ driver, the DRM (Direct Rendering Manager) support has been lagging behind. Earlier this month Matthias Hopf was successful in getting DRM working on an RS690 GPU and he has published RadeonHD DRM code into his personal development tree, but no code has yet to reach master. Meanwhile, as the xf86-video-ati driver is using AtomBIOS, they are able to spend more time working on the 3D features and other areas and less time "banging on registers" or even waiting on register documentation to arrive. David Airlie has been working on the R500 3D support along with Alex Deucher and Corbin Simpson.