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When Scott Thompson left Visa to take the CTO role at PayPal in 2005, the Web company's data centre surprised him. "Wait a minute," he recalls saying, "they run a payment system on Linux?" PayPal runs thousands of Linux-based, single-rack-unit servers, which host the company's Web-presentation layer, middleware and user interface. Thompson says he quickly saw the economic, operational and development advantages of open source and Linux technology. He now sees no other way to do it.

"It took me quite a while to realize the real root cause of the VAIO - and probably many other machines - suspend/resume regressions, which were unearthed by the dyntick / clockevents patches," Thomas Gleixner explained regarding two patches for fixing suspend issues that Andrew Morton experienced with his VAIO laptop. He continued, "we disable a lot of ACPI/BIOS functionality during suspend, but we keep the lower idle C-states functionality active across suspend/resume. It seems that this causes trouble with certain BIOSes, but I assume that the problem is more wide spread and just not surfacing due to the various scenarios in which a machine goes into suspend/resume." Thomas concluded, "I really hope that this two patches finally set an end to the 'jinxed VAIO heisenbug series', which started when we removed the periodic tick with the clockevents/dyntick patches."

LXer Feature: 24-Sept-2007

The reason that the Russian announcement is funny boils down to the perception over the years that Russia equates to totalitarianism, whilst here in America we're all about Freedom and innovation. Yet our educational system -- the very underpinnings of how we're growing out future technological talent, is based upon the inversion of what one would expect given the respective reputations of both countries.

Certainly another reason to consider when buying your Ubuntu PCs from System76 over Dell, it seems to me. Having dealt with Dell 'support' in the past, it's clear. It is the over-sized anchor on an already sinking ship.

Welcome to this year's 39th issue of DistroWatch Weekly! GNOME 2.20 is finally here and we can soon look forward to a range of releases from all the major distribution incorporating the new version into their products; Mandriva Linux 2008 is expected later this week, but openSUSE 10.3 won't be far behind. In other news: Fedora introduces a new desktop theme called Nodoka, Mandriva simplifies its product range before the upcoming release of version 2008, and Ian Murdock reveals some details about Project Indiana, Sun Microsystems' new Solaris-based desktop distribution. The featured story in this week's issue looks at the security and bug fix infrastructure in today's leading distributions, while those readers who were curious about DistroWatch's recent migration from FreeBSD to Debian GNU/Linux will find the answer in the "Site News" section. Happy reading!

Just sharing some thoughts on FOSS businesses in the US, based on data I've collected on nearly 1000 companies.

Nicholas Negroponte, the visionary behind the One Laptop Per Child initiative (OLPC), has publicly expressed his disappointment at the lack of orders for his low-cost computer for poor children. The situation has become so dire that Negroponte will announce a "Give one, get one" promotion in the US and Canada. While production of the XO-1 is due to start next month, Negroponte had previously said that he needed 3 million orders to start production.

Much has been written about David Allen’s “Getting Things Done” action and time management system (GTD). Many websites have come into existence to help people organize their lives, projects, and time around GTD methodology. GTD software solutions have been developed as well for people who do not want a web-based GTD system. It is a system geared toward the overly busy, technically bombarded lifestyles many people live today. This installment of Lesser Known Applications for Linux provides approaches to getting things done.

The X-Fi family of sound cards from Creative Labs has been around for over two years but through this time there has been no Linux support officially from Creative or from the Advanced Linux Sound Architecture (ALSA). Among the Creative X-Fi solutions are the X-Fi XtremeGamer, X-Fi XtremeGamer Fatal1ty Pro, X-Fi Platinum Fatal1ty Champion Series, and the X-Fi Elite Pro. However, Creative Labs is on the heals of finally releasing a new audio Linux driver that supports the X-Fi family. The driver that will be released any day now is considered beta software, but worst of all is that this sound driver will be closed-source.

In this week's KDE Commit-Digest: A security fix developed for KDM, covering KDE 3.3.0 to 3.5.7. A KioBrowser data engine, HDD monitor applet, and general layout work in Plasma. More refinements in Parley (formerly KVocTrain). GeoData subproject in Marble to support popular geographic data formats. An AI player added to Kombination. Development renewed on the KPicross game. Basic printing support in Gwenview...

In the past, I have found myself hesitant to jump to the Macintosh platform. It was not because there is anything wrong with OS X per se, but the lack of an application called Evolution, among other Linux-only applications, that I would miss using Ubuntu.

Not only was this week marked by the Intel Developer Forum, but the final version of KateOS 3.6 was also released earlier in the week. KateOS 3.6 features a new LiveCD installer, hundreds of updates to packages, a software-powered hibernation system, a new version of update-notifier, and new internationalization support. KateOS is not nearly as popular as Ubuntu or Fedora, but we highly recommend checking it out if you're after a Xfce-powered desktop.

If you've been following the current rift in the Linux community between Linus Torvalds and his minions squaring off against Con Kolivas and the mainstream Linux fanatics, you probably know that it's getting quite heated.

This past week was marked by the release of the NVIDIA 100.14.19 display driver for Linux and Solaris, which was the first alternative OS driver release from this Santa Clara company in about three months. The public change-log is quite lengthy and finally delivered on fixing the GeForce 8 performance regression. In our GeForce 8800GTS Linux tests, the performance fix was very evident. However, now that we have had the time to run more extensive tests with the GeForce 8 series and this new driver, we have found not everything to be smooth sailing.

Computers in the European Union should be sold without a bundled operating system, according to this submission to the European Commission. It says that the bundling of Microsoft Windows with computers is not in the public interest, and prevents meaningful competition in the operating system market.

LXer Feature: 23-Sept-2007

Some of the big stories this week include: A non-profit that refurbishes computers with FOSS get hassled by the EPA, Microsoft wants in on the OLPC, SCO blames Linux for having to file for Chapter 11 and IBM joins up with OpenOffice.org and then releases its own free office suite. All this and more in the LXer Weekly Roundup.

This document describes how to set up Amanda (The Advanced Maryland Automatic Network Disk Archiver) on Debian Etch. For this tutorial I chose Ubuntu v7.04 as a backup-client. The resulting system provides a flexible backup system with many features. It will be able to back up multiple hosts via network to various devices. I chose the disk based backup for this howto.

Setup CUPS (Common UNIX Printing System) Server and Client in Debian

Sometimes I just gotta wonder about GNU/Linux and wi-fi...Maybe you can help.

Howto Set Flickr images as Ubuntu desktop wallpaper