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Counter to what many people seem to think, Shuttleworth seems to believe that Apple, not Microsoft, is Linux's main competition, and he is right for a number of reasons.

For lo these many years here on ServerWatch's Tip of the Trade, we have toiled to bring you useful tips and tricks to make your job a little easier, and to help you keep up with new applications and useful products. This week, in celebration of summer and the holiday week in United States, we decided to take a minibreak from the serious and bring you some Linux Easter Egg fun.

A Silicon Valley startup called CherryPal announced a two-Watt, $250 ultra-mini PC that runs Debian Linux. Based on a 400MHz PowerPC-based system-on-chip (SoC) from Freescale, the solid-state CherryPal C100 Desktop offers managed "cloud" computing paid for by advertising rather than a monthly fee.

A year after creating an online open-source software development community to take on SourceForge.net and other rivals, the development team at Ubuntu Linux will be the first to admit that it still has a long way to go to achieve the popularity of its competitors. Ubuntu's beta community, called Launchpad, was unveiled last July and has seen a huge increase in the number of open-source projects under development, from 1,500 projects at the start to about 7,000 today.

If you've ever used Microsoft Access or Excel, you have likely used a product that Mike Gunderloy had a hand in developing. The irony is that Gunderloy himself doesn't use those products anymore. He's given up Microsoft for open source -- and he's not going back. Gunderloy, an Evansville, Ind.-based freelance developer for the past quarter century, goes way back with Microsoft. "I was never a full-time employee, but have several times been a contractor with a badge and [Redmond] campus access," he says.

Sun Microsystems Inc. is announcing on Wednesday availability of Sun Web Stack, which puts the company's own twist on the popular open-source LAMP (Linux Apache MySQL Perl/Python or PHP) stack. The company is unveiling the stack at the O'Reilly Open Source Convention (OSCON) in Portland, Ore. Also at the conference Wednesday, Sun will ship Sun OpenSSO Express, which is a version of Sun's OpenSSO (single sign-on) software featuring enterprise support and indemnification. At OSCON, Sun and Joyent Inc. will announce a social application program featuring free Web hosting.

In May of this year, Sun's "Project Indiana" team released OpenSolaris 2008.05, a major milestone on the path to a community-developed Solaris distribution. The release touted several new features: a live-cd, the ZFS filesystem and a completely new packaging interface. Now, while it was Solaris that started me out on my career as a Unix system administrator, these days I find myself far more often in the Linux realm. Can OpenSolaris swing the pendulum back towards Sun? I decided to have a good look at it, to find out...

Ubuntu Linux founder Mark Shuttleworth urged development of a Linux desktop to rival what Apple Inc. has done and aired a vision of software changing the world. Shuttleworth, speaking at the O'Reilly Open Source Convention (Oscon) in Portland, Ore., yesterday, also urged development of a new revenue model to fund free software and set his sights on a services-based mechanism. He also stressed the importance of interoperability with Windows.

Fedora has released its Asterisk-based Fedora Talk VoIP application for connecting Fedora contributors. Other news posted on a recent Fedora blog includes notes on a new automated test case management system, a SIG for ISVs, and new OpenID provider status for the Fedora Account System. Much of the news mentioned in the Fedora blog was revealed at the recent FUDCon Fedora user conference. FUDCon celebrated the new Fedora 9 version of the free and redistributable Red Hat-based Linux distribution, and looked forward toward Fedora 10.

Intel's project to put a Linux and open source stack on mobile devices is getting overhauled to attract developer support, having failed to generate much interest. A year after launching Moblin, Intel plans a second version of its open source stack in the next three weeks, sporting a new operating system, middleware, tools and graphical user interface (GUI).

I'm tired of waiting- I want a dead simple and dirt cheap touch screen web tablet to surf the web. Nothing fancy like the Dell latitude XT, which costs $2,500. Just a Macbook Air-thin touch screen machine that runs Firefox and possibly Skype on top of a Linux kernel. It doesn't exist today, and as far as we can tell no one is creating one. So let's design it, build a few and then open source the specs so anyone can create them.

In the beginning, what was your guess: did you guess Word 2007 will be faster or slower? Well, here are all the tests rolled up together. Word 2003 burned 7.05 seconds to run the gamut after a cold start and 6.17 seconds after a warm start. Word 2007 consumed 16.12 and 12.13 seconds (respectively).

Along with 2.6.27 development ramping up, there is a variety of other Linux kernel news. Shortly after the release of Linux 2.6.26, someone on the Linux Kernel Mailing List (LKML) asked what sort of changes – either potentially or already in the works – might give rise to a 2.7 development series. Torvalds did not even wait 20 minutes to respond, "Nothing. I'm not going back to the old model. The new model is so much better that it's not even worth entertaining as a theory to go back."

Network Security Toolkit is one of many live CD Linux distributions focusing on network monitoring, analysis, and security. NST was designed to give network security administrators easy access to a comprehensive set of open source network applications, many of which are among the top 100 security tools recommended by insecure.org.

Django (for those of you who don't know and are just reading this out of sheer curiosity) is "an open source web application framework, written in Python, which loosely follows the model-view-controller design pattern". At least that's how Wikipedia defines it (it's also a 1966 Italian film directed by Sergio Corbucci and an album by The Modern Jazz Quartet, first released on LP in 1956, but I digress). Before you go any further, check your bag of tricks and make sure you have at least some familiarity with the Python programming language. You're going to need it for this book to be of any use to you.

Dell said it spent months in development and testing to deliver more peripheral support for features, including ATI video graphics, wireless networking and fingerprint readers.

Canonical is working on at least two mobile Linux projects. One called Ubuntu Netbook Remix, the other called Ubuntu for Mobile Internet Devices. So what's the difference between the two? Glad you asked. Gerry Carr, marketing manager for Canonical, described each platform during a meeting at OSCON. Here are the details.

Open source business intelligence firm JasperSoft on Wednesday announced its next-generation community platform at the O'Reilly Open Source Conference. The new platform features tools to enhance community project developers as well as business users.

This article describes how to install and configure Nginx to accelerate an Apache server based on RHEL 5.2.

Doug Moran, one of Pentaho's founders, offers a fascinating description of how the company was created in part by bringing on board the chief architects of several other open source projects, offers not one but two explanations of the Pentaho name, and says more on the recent adoption of the GNU GPLv2 for its Business Intelligence platform.