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GNU/Linux offers a bewildering variety of flavors -- or distributions, as they're called. To a newcomer's eye, many of these seem virtually identical to each other. Yet, the more you learn about a distribution and the community that surrounds it, the more different they become. Here, in alphabetical order, is a list of the seven distributions that have most affected GNU/Linux as a whole:

I have read about Asterisk and wanted to test it out as I will be managing/troubleshooting it at work anytime soon, so I thought of getting my hands dirty and getting some basic experience on it.

"Lots of scheduler updates in the past few days, done by many people," noted Ingo Molnar, going on todescribe the more significant updates."Most importantly, the SMP latency problems reported and debugged by Mike Galbraith should be fixed for good now." Ingo noted that the current code base was looking stable and was likely to be merged into the upcoming 2.6.24 kernel,"so please give it a good workout and let us know if there's anything bad going on.

What's the best desktop Linux? For me, it's SimplyMEPIS 6.5, soon to be replaced by 7.0. But this is both a dumb question and a dumb answer. The real question is: What's the best desktop operating system for you?

there's new a dpkg version in experimental: 1.14.7~newshlib, which contains my work to enhance dpkg-shlibdeps with symbol-based dependencies. The work is finished and thus we decided to upload it to experimental to have some broader testing before releasing it into unstable.

There has been a lot of talk lately about WPF/Silverlight. I have also been learning and writing WPF articles, but what I thought might make an interesting article would be to compare and contrast WPF/Flash. I feel I have the right to do this, as I have worked with both technologies, and although I am not selling myself as an expert in either, I feel confident enough to write this article, I thought it would just make some interesting reading for others that just dont know how WPF or Flash work. For example if you're a Flash developer and dont know what WPF is, I am hoping this article will help you, and vise versa.

[We've all had a bit of a set to recently over Silverlight/Moonlight. Here's an article that compares WPF/Silverlight with Flash. - tracyanne]

Last year, I interviewed the team behind Neoscopio, then just a Free/Open Source Software business concept. Now, just a scant 3 months into their official business venture, they are well ahead of where they thought they would be right now. I asked Gustavo Mendez to bring us up to speed on where the fledgling company currently stands...

More on Linux power saving tips: Intel last week launched LessWatts.org, a project focused on reducing power consumption on Linux servers and desktops. Get some handy tips on reducing your consumption.

This document describes how to set up IBM Lotus Symphony Beta 1 on Ubuntu 7.04. IBM Lotus Symphony is an office-suite that is based on OpenOffice.org (a fork of v1.x) and ported to Lotus Expeditor (IBM's enhancement of the Eclipse Rich Client Platform). It contains programs for word processing, spreadsheet and presentation.

Last year, we reviewed Neuro-Evolving Robotic Operatives (NERO), a unique game in which players train forces of autonomous bots, then pit those forces against each other in hands-off, artificial intelligence (AI)-only competitions. NERO spawned a new major release a few weeks ago, and like its eponymous operatives, it has learned some new moves over time. NERO is developed at the Neural Networks Research Group of the University of Texas at Austin's Computer Science department, both as a class project and for ongoing research into machine learning.

"Ok, I think I'm getting close to releasing a real 2.6.23," began Linus Torvalds in hisrelease announcement for the eighth release candidate of the upcoming 2.6.23 kernel."Things seem to have calmed down, and I think Thomas Gleixner may have found the suspend/resume regression that has dogged us for a while, so I'm feeling happy about things." Linus continued:"Of course, me feeling happy is usually immediately followed by some nasty person finding new problems, but I'll just ignore that and enjoy the feeling anyway, however fleeting it may be."The shortlog really is pretty short, and I'm appending the diffstat at the end too in case anybody cares, but basically it's just a number of fairly small but real fixes, with some support for a few new chips to the sky2 network driver.."read more |rsync.net - Offsite Unix Backups

Every time I write a review I get comments and e-mails asking me to review Puppy Linux. Puppy has lots of people who really seem to love and zealously support the distro. I invariably download a copy (most recently 2.17) and try and run it. I invariably give up on it very quickly.

One Laptop Per Child's "XO" device -- commonly referred to as the $100 Linux laptop -- will be offered as part of a "Give 1, Get 1" promotional program in the U.S. and Canada beginning Nov. 12, the organization's director of software said Sept. 24.

Red Hat is suffering from JBoss reflux, according to a pair of prominent open source software watchers. Credit Suisse analyst Jason Maynard has issued a fresh report in which he downgrades Red Hat to "neutral" from "outperform" due to what he sees as organizational struggles. The analyst once thought Red Hat's digestion of JBoss would result in a strong sales increase. Instead, Red Hat faces serious challenges learning how to be more than a one-trick Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) pony.

KernelTrap now provides a useful interface for reading numerous kernel-relatedmailing lists. At this time, we are actively archiving multpleLinux,OpenBSD,DragonFlyBSD,FreeBSD, andNetBSD mailing lists. In addition to providing a simple online browsing interface, we also provide multiple RSS feeds for each of our archived mailing lists.read more |Linux ThinkPads for Scientists

Forces are mashaling to oppose the open access movement, the open source-inspired movement to make academic research publicly available online. The American Association of Publishers (AAP) recently announced the creation of the Partnership for Research Integrity in Science and Medicine (PRISM), an apparent lobby group organized to resist efforts to compel academic publishers to make publicly funded research generally available. PRISM's methods appear eerily similar to those used to oppose legislation to make public documents available in an open format, as well as the actions against free downloads by such organizations as the Motion Picture Association of America and the Recording Industry Association of America.

The Brazilian winter was almost over, and while the mild winters in Florianopolis allowed me to work on the Agape, the coming of spring meant that it was time to set sail for new adventures.Grayson, the youngest of the Pollywogs, showed up early in the morning at the dock, as I got ready to sail."What are you doing?", he asked."I am getting ready to study algae", I answered."Algae!", he exclaimed,"why are you looking for that?"

There are many ways to process multiple virtual hosts on the same machine. One easy way is to setup different webalizer configuration files with different HostName parameters.

For an increasing number of people, Ubuntuis GNU/Linux. Yet, looking at the pre-releases of Gutsy Gibbon, Ubuntu 7.10, I found myself becoming disturbed by the degree to which this popularity has translated into uncritical acceptance.

Nowadays, many people maintain separate email accounts for work, for family and friends, to post into forums, and so on. I use several Gmail accounts, and I find it a challenge to read all those accounts without having to set up a POP client or disconnecting and connecting to the Gmail Web site with a browser over and over again. Gmail Manager is an OS-independent Firefox extension that can help anyone with that problem. With it, you can manage multiple accounts and be notified as soon as you receive a new message in any of them.