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I've taken a few days off from OpenBSD, and in the interim I ran the NetBSD live CD for the first time on the Gateway Solo 1450 (the $0 Laptop). Again, it looks great, but I'm so far from figuring out how to manage the CPU fan in any of the BSDs that I'm not optimistic about running any of them on this laptop. I wish it were different, but until the heavens open and the path forward is made much more clear, I'll stick to desktops (and my old 1999-era Compaq Armada pre-ACPI laptop) for BSD. During that time, I booted into Debian Lenny on the Gateway and installed 141 updates.

Asus struck technological gold with the Eee PC, a two-pound mini-dynamo that defied industry convention by packing a fully functional Linux-powered PC into a machine whose price shames even budget systems, but how does it stack up against more featured packed computers? LAPTOP assigned staff writer and office guinea pig Jeffrey Wilson to the task of answering this question by asking him to explore the ins and outs of this small wonder. Join him on his Eee PC adventure.

The Linux kernel has merged three hypervisors into its mainline tree, starting with KVM in 2.6.20, and continuing with Xen and lguest in the 2.6.23 release of the kernel. Hypervisors let users run multiple operating systems on a host system. Lguest is the simplest of the three in terms of usability and implementation, which makes it a good candidate for helping you learn how virtualization works.

It seems there is a disquieting trend in IT: concepts are getting steadily vaguer, and claims harder to verify. Take web services, for instance. The very name is disingenuous. They are services of a kind, but they don't have much to do with the web. Their key protocol is SOAP, which stands for Simple Object Access Protocol. Well, it is a protocol, all right. But it isn't simple, and it doesn't access objects.

Agave is a color palette selection tool used to pick design layouts for desktop themes, web site designs, icon creation, and much more. It simplifies the process of choosing colors by generating a palette based on an initial color selection according to the selected rule and color set. Supported color sets include GNOME Icon, Tango Icon, Web-Safe, and Visibone.

This is mainly a technology preview for those that are interested in the new ideas and technologies of the KOffice 2 series. The Alpha 6 release is a work in progress. This release introduces improvements in almost all the components as well as in the common infrastructure. All the applications saw big changes, both bugfixes and new features.

linux.conf.au has an interesting structure which differentiates it from most other events. Every year, a completely new set of organizers takes over the event, moves it to a new city, and puts its own stamp on it. They have a great deal of freedom in how they run LCA, but there is still a group of Linux Australia members and past organizers who keep an eye on things and help ensure that the event does not run into problems. The result is a conference which has a lot of fresh energy every year, but which is also reliably interesting. Many attendees consider it to be one of the best Linux events to be found anywhere in the world.

A decade from now, when high-tech historians retrace the history of Linux, they will identify February 2008 as a defining moment. It will be known as the month when Linux laptops made the leap from open source geeks to the consumer masses. Here's why, according to The VAR Guy.

Brasero will replace Serpentine as the CD-writing utility in the upcoming April release of Ubuntu 8.10 (code-named Hardy Heron). Brasero extends the functionality of Serpentine to include data CD and DVD projects, file integrity checking, and multisession support. Why replace Serpentine, a dead simple solution for burning audio CDs? It features tight integration into the GNOME Desktop Environment, with support for Rhythmbox playlists and drag and drop file management from Nautilus, as well as the ability to extract audio from video files.

The European Union yesterday announced that it will invest US$1 million in a study to find the best open source tools for use in Africa, Asia and Latin America. The grant of €703 000 was awarded to a consortium of 11 members, including Canonical, backers of Ubuntu Linix, and the University of the Western Cape.

There were other curious funds that SCO received throughout its lifetime, even when its main role was that of a plaintiff in court. These include court declarationan investment from BayStar, a venture capital firm. In a court declaration it emerged that Richard Emerson, a Microsoft employee, was involved in BayStar's investment in SCO. A BayStar representative later added: "Yes, Microsoft did introduce BayStar to SCO."

In an email to the Wine mailing list late last week, Google software engineer Dan Kegel described how Google has been contracting the CodeWeavers Wine team to improve support for PhotoshopCS on Linux and how Google employees are using their free time to fix Wine bugs.

Dubai Internet City is a strategic base for companies targeting emerging markets in a vast region extending from the Middle East to the Indian subcontinent, and Africa to the CIS countries, covering 2 billion people with GDP $ 6.7 trillion.

[Not exactly Linux, but the website certainly seams to be powered by Linux. It's pretty damned impressive. - tracyanne]

Think about tomorrow’s generation of Linux-based mobile devices and Microsoft ambitions of turning the Net into .NET, most notably using Silverlight. Where does that position Linux? What about Moonlight? And why is a Microsoft ISV trying to shove the patent-encumbered Mono into Linux phones?

In hopes of helping newbies to linux where other have failed via online chat. i have created an irc.freenode.net channel titled #tuxhelper It will also serve as a temporary chatroom for the TinyMe linux distribution.

One "changes" history by going left on his way to work instead of going right. One changes history by mowing his lawn on Saturday instead of Sunday. History is Made when one gives of themselves in order to change the world for the better. We...all of us...have an opportunity now to do just that.

If you've considered a free DNS service for your client resolving needs, there is more than one game in town, now. DNS Advantage, a NeuStar, Inc. service, has just come online. Should you think about switching away from OpenDNS? Should OpenDNS be worried?

Getting my feet wet in OpenBSD has gotten me thinking about how different operating systems handle software updates -- and how important security patches and bug fixes really are. I'm thinking most of you will say they're very important. If you have a Debian-based Linux system, for instance, there are updates available almost every day, both security- and bug-related. Live CDs are different. Knopix 5.1.1 has been around a very long time -- over a year at this point -- and plenty of people are using it, even though it's had no update of any kind in that period of time.

Even though VoIP is one of newest, most revolutionary networking and telephony technologies, people still want faxing, only now they want to do it via IP. Which to me makes as much sense as demanding Morse code-enabled telephones. Me, I keep a plain old analog fax machine just to humor other people. Which is like heating bathwater on the stove even though we have modern plumbing and a water heater.

Months after its initial announcement, the Mozilla Foundation's new nonprofit branch Mozilla Messaging, finally opened for business for the advancement of the Thunderbird e-mail client on Feb. 19. The commercial side of Mozilla, Mozilla Corp., had announced in July what was by then already an open secret: Its focus would be on the Firefox Web browser. That left open the question of what to do with Thunderbird. In September, Mozilla Corp. announced that it would be spinning off Thunderbird into its own company with the working name MailCo.