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Android may give Linux a boost on netbooks, but according to Dell, its Inspiron Mini 9s with Ubuntu have already seen a steady sales stream coupled with low return rates. While MSI told us a few months back that Wind netbooks running SuSE Linux saw 4x higher return rates than that of XP machines, Dell has had quite the opposite experience with its Inspiron Mini 9 offering with Ubuntu. “A third of our Mini 9 mix is Linux, which is well above the standard attach rate for other systems that offer Linux. We have done a very good job explaining to folks what Linux is,” says Dell’s Jay Pinkert.

New features are coming soon. Be careful not to activate them before their time. We had a very strange situation happen that, in fact, completely crippled two of our M4000 servers. The XSCF cards on them experienced an "issue" and that meant that both servers were, for all intents and purpose, out of commission. And, I don't know if the phrase "for all intents and purposes" really does the situation justice.

Gmail went down over night and the vultures are circling, but being down for a couple of hours doesn't mean that cloud computing is a failure. All software fails from time to time and being in the cloud doesn't make it immune.

LXer Feature: 24-Feb-2009

Once more unto the breach my friends, Richard M. Stallman (RMS) has laid another profound thought process out there for us to digest. This man is definitely deserves everyone's respect. Whether you agree with him or not, he has given the whole planet gifts that it does not even realize for the most part. While not the creator of the concept that the code for software should be free, he is without a doubt the one who codified the concept. He laid out exactly what it means for software to be free, in such a fashion that even most laymen could understand it. This alone should earn him the respect of the planet, however, it does not stop at that point.

[This is a response an article that hit our newswire last week. - Scott]

I want you to know that your comments and emails on the last article asking how the two ISO standards (26300 and 29500, commonly known as ODF and OOXML) are doing these days on the openness graph have been read and appreciated. They are useful. There is room for more commenting, including personal experiences you've had struggling to interact with governmental agencies that make little or no allowance for users of Linux. You can comment on the article itself or email me privately. And now comes news that there is a chance to have input into the next major version of ODF, for now being called 'ODF-Next'. There is a call for proposals that went out Friday from the ODF technical committee, and here's where you go to read all about it and to leave your comments. You can comment here too, of course, but you must input there if you wish your input to be registered and considered. What would you like to see in the feature set of the next major release of ODF? What capabilities does ODF need?

This tutorial shows how you can install Xen 3.3 on an Ubuntu 8.10 host (dom0). Xen 3.3 is available from the Ubuntu 8.10 repositories, but the Ubuntu 8.10 kernels (2.6.27-x) are domU kernels, i.e., they work for Xen guests (domU), but not for the host (dom0). Therefore we need to build our own dom0 kernel. This guide explains how to do this with a 2.6.27 kernel.

Even before the proverbial ink was dry on last week's interoperability deal between Microsoft and Red Hat, Linux competitor Novell laid off a still unknown number of employees involved with the open source openSUSE community. The openSUSE community has included volunteer developers in addition to paid employees of Novell, a major rival to Red Hat in the Linux space which forged its own interoperability pact with Microsoft in late 2006.

LXer Feature: 24-Feb-2009

Pentaho, which specializes in commercial open source business intelligence (BI), has launched a formal Gold Reseller Program as part of a global push for the company. Here's the scoop.

Linux vendor Red Hat today is angling to position itself as one of the big players in virtualization, today unveiling a slew of new product initiatives designed to penetrate the enterprise on a number of fronts. The company today showed off a new standalone virtualization hypervisor (define) based on KVM (Kernel Virtual Machine), as well as a new hypervisor for Red Hat Enterprise Linux. It also took the wraps off new management tools for virtualization on servers and desktops.

Yes ladies and gentlemen, it's official... Ubuntu 9.04 has a whole new notification system, almost the same as the one in the Macintosh operating system.

VectorLinux made their 6.0 final release over the weekend. The first thing that is noteworthy about this release is that they have developed their own GUI installer, and it is quite nice. VectorLinux comes in a "Standard" (free) version, and a Deluxe ($22.99 download, $27.99 boxed CD set) version. I have installed the standard version on my Lifebook S6510 and HP 2133 Mini-Note.

According to current figures from Netbookdigest.com, Microsoft has lost $435,000,000 over the last year in netbook sales.

It's not too frequently that Ryan Gordon updates his blog (finger), but when he does it's usually to announce a new Linux game port or an update to one of the titles he has ported. In this morning's update by Ryan Gordon, he mentions that an update is now available for Prey.

The VectorLinux developers have released a new version of the Slackware derivative, VectorLinux 6. This version of the lean system is the first to offer installation via a graphical installer, although text-based installation is still supported. VectorLinux Standard is based on Xfce version 4.43 and includes LXDE and Openbox as desktop alternatives. The developer team is offering a commercial deluxe version with KDE 4.2 and other extras, from the project's online shop. The Gnome desktop environment can be installed using the VectorLinux software repository.

The purpose of the Post Types plugin is to introduce you to different aspects of WordPress backend development.We learned how to modify the Manage Posts panel to display the information we want. We also covered user capabilities, and how using them, we can make sure our plugin is working in multi-user environments. Important lessons which can be learnt from this article are how to Manage Panels, Errors, and User capabilities.

You got to hand it to Microsoft, they certainly know how to scavenge off dead and dying bodies: "Microsoft Corp. today announced a new initiative, Elevate America, which will provide up to 2 million people over the next three years with the technology training needed to succeed in the 21st-century economy."

By the end of the year Asus will reportedly release an Eee PC with the Google Android operating system. Asus pioneered the market for low cost, scaled-down laptops that offer internet and email functionality, now known as netbooks. Netbooks have been one of the fastest-growing segments in the PC industry.

As of late, file-systems have been a popular topic among Linux developers and users. The EXT4 file-system was recently stabilized and it brings some modest performance improvements and is finding its way into modern distributions. While not yet stabilized, the Btrfs file-system was merged into the Linux 2.6.29 kernel and is poised as the Linux competitor to Sun's famed ZFS file-system. There is also open-source work underway in supporting Microsoft's exFAT file-system on Linux. On top of all of that, there is also the Tux3 file-system.

Learn how you can improve UNIX file system performance and security. The UNIX® operating system enables you to split up your disk data into multiple volumes. Knowing how to do this is only half the battle, though; to make effective use of this ability, you must understand how the files on a UNIX system are organized as well as why they're organized in this way. This article addresses the issue of why you should use multiple volumes.