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Small, efficient devices such as the Acer Aspire One and Asus Eee PC are taking the battle for free software to a different front, bringing Linux to hordes of computer users who don't know or care about Linux. They just want something that works, and when they try it, they like it. This isn't just empty rhetoric: our neighbours across the road at Vista Mansions frequently pop over to ask questions about their Linux-powered Aspire One and borrow a cup of sugar. But the Aspire One's interface is aimed at newbies, and you're not a newbie: you're a Linux guru in the making, so let's see what we can fiddle with…

This guide explains how you can set up fully-virtualized guests (HVM) with Xen 3.2 on a Debian Lenny x86_64 host system. HVM stands for HardwareVirtualMachine; to set up such guests, you need a CPU that supports hardware virtualization (Intel VT or AMD-V). Hardware virtualization allows you to install unmodified guest systems (in contrast to paravirtualization where the guest kernel needs to be modified); that way you cannot only virtualize OpenSource operating systems like Linux and BSD, but also closed-source operating systems like Windows where you cannot modify the kernel.

Fedora 11 Alpha came out a month ago, 2 days later than the initial schedule, and it has recently entered its “Feature Freeze” state. Codenamed Leonidas, Fedora 11 is due to be released on May 25th and it includes a large number of new features (most of them have already been approved). I’ve been using Fedora for more than 5 years and I often run Rawhide (Fedora’s development branch) to preview some of the future improvements. I couldn’t have missed this Alpha release, so I installed it for testing (first, as a guest OS in VirtualBox and then on my laptop).

A mixed bag of jokes today. Both hilarious... unless you don't like them ;)

!whatever:p, sudo !!, ^foo^bar ... if they whet your appetite and set your pulse racing do I have a web site for you! It’s the Digg or Reddit of the Linux command-line world.

When Eric Raymond posted the first of the Halloween Documents in 1998, it marked the end of the beginning for open source. That is to say those documents demonstrated that the logical superiority of the open source development model had penetrated the most headstrong corporate skull in the proprietary software universe: Microsoft. The fact that Microsoft could judge major open source projects to be equal or possibly superior to their own efforts more than 10 years ago, and the fact that they recognized

It's not very surprising as we've all speculated a full-fledged Google OS for years, then Google's mobile OS hit the phone market, and now we've seen it (Android, of course) already installed and working dutifully on netbooks. It's not rock-solid, but Google's CEO has hinted that there'll be subsidized, Android-powered netbooks backed by Google or its partners arriving to the netbook scene soon.

Thinking of buying a BMW, a Peugeot or a Citroen in the near future? If you are then the chances are pretty good that you'll be buying an automobile with a small Linux computer behind the middle console

PekWM offers an additional solution: window grouping. It allows a variety of different applications to be grouped together in a single window. Most everyone is familiar with tabbed browsing by now. Window grouping takes this one step further. When window grouping is used in PekWM the title bar in the window manager is segmented with each section effectively acting like a tab.

This online comic's been going since at least 1998!

Most migrants from other operating systems will seek out a Linux alternative to the ubiquitous iTunes, and chances are they'll come across Amarok 2.0 and Songbird 1.0. They're both contenders for the Linux music player crown, but take different approaches. Which one is right for you? Amarok is a native KDE application (but is also available for other operating systems besides Linux via KDE ports), while Songbird has been built using Mozilla technology, so it's cross-platform from the first step. Migrating to either from other, lesser, applications is a breath of fresh air. They do the same kind of things, but in a more effective and better-looking way.

Linux New Media AG has presented its annual awards for outstanding contributions to Open Source at CeBIT 2009 in Hannover. The OpenStreetMap project ended up garnering two of the six Linux New Media awards.

About a year ago almost every netbook ran on Linux. Now the free platform has disappeared from almost all of them. In an Open Source Forum at CeBIT, Warren Coles of Taiwanese netbook vendor Linpus explained the reasons why.

Knoppix has always been regarded as one of the most versatile Linux distros out there, but the latest version of the venerable Live CD Linux distribution has got yet another trick up its sleeve.

PlayOnLinux version 3.4 has been released and it has some long awaited new features and as always bug fixes and tweaks. Also a new version of the PlayOnLinux website will be coming soon, so keep a eye on the site for these future updates.

The developers behind Novell's openSUSE Linux distribution have unveiled the roadmap for version 11.2 and the schedule for the next several releases. The distro is moving towards a time-based eight-month cycle.

A few weeks ago, after some soul-searching, I decided to pack up the OLPC and ship it off to a new user elsewhere in the world. I've relayed it to a second party in America, who is better equipped to present it to its new owner.

Linux the cool factor As I wrote in my last post, I think Linux is not perceived as cool by enough people. While Linux is definitely very cool! Last time I mentioned compiz, which gave very different responses. Some people think it's great others hate it. Today I'll throw in something completely different.

At some point, nearly everyone who uses Linux has someone ask them “what’s that?” This question almost invariably leads to “why is it better than (other operating system)?” What do you say when someone asks you this?

While my OpenBSD laptop slowly compiles Java (or not ...), I had to pull out the Ubuntu 8.04 laptop (both have identical hardware, Toshiba Satellite 1100-S101) and quickly slam out a couple hours' work late last night (yes, on the night shift, which I finished at home ... at 1 a.m. through the magic of Wi-Fi and caffeine).