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Faster swithing is just a click away. switchdesk is the command to switch from KDE to GNOME or viceversa. This command provides a simple method of choosing between the various desktop environments available under Fedora Core, Cent OS and Red Hat Enterprise Linux. If X Windows is running, switchdesk will bring up a dialog box which allows the user to choose between the available desktops installed on the system.

Recently, I stumbled upon a "People Behind KDE" interview from September of last year with Derek Kite. The interviewer asked, "What is KDE's killer app? And Why?" Kite's answer completely threw me. His answer was, "Konqueror. Because Linux users are first class citizens for this browser."

African education-focused Linux distribution OpenLab releases beta version with desktop and management improvements. OpenLab, a Linux distribution widely used in education environments, today released a beta of the forthcoming OpenLab 4 release.

AMD's PIC (personal Internet computer), an inexpensive Windows CE-based computer aimed at developing nations, has successfully booted Linux, according to a Siamese Wiki devoted to the OLPC (One Laptop per Child) initiative. The Wiki shows the PIC runing an Edubuntu image created for the OLPC project.

The current draft of GPLv3 includes controversial language forbidding DRM-locked embedded operating systems, but compromise remains possible, suggests ExtremeTech columnist Victor Loy in an insightful look at the GPL's role in device development. Loy's story includes quotes from Eben Moglen's LinuxWorld BoF (birds-of-a-feather) session.

The combination software Novell's Japanese arm is releasing will be known as Integrated Stack for Linux (ISL), and will include SLES, a Novell version of Linux; DB2 Express-C database, which IBM Japan distributes for free; and WAS CE, which is a Web-based execution program. WAS CE is a free, open source program that IBM has taken the lead in developing.

Attend this one-hour technical session and learn how to port Microsoft .NET Web and server applications to WebSphere and Linux, without having to hire Java engineers or rewrite your entire code. Also learn how to implement a single source code development strategy for .NET and J2EE, which saves considerable expense and the complexities of maintaining two functionally equivalent code bases.

Expedited Real Time Threads (XRTs) is a tool for improving predictability of high-frequency, hard, real-time Java applications that can freely communicate primitive values on Linux.

Wow! Sun has hired Charles Nutter and Thomas Enebo to work on JRuby full time. This is a pretty momentus event, and is already sending shockwaves around the Ruby world.

Linux4Kids is a collection of more than 80 GPL-licensed "edutainment" games and educational software available to download for free from the FileGate File Distribution Network.

Announcing the availability of Foresight Linux 0.9.8, now with GNOME 2.16!

Funambol CEO Fabrizio Capiobanco definitely thinks open source contributors should be compensated for their time and effort — at least for the plug-ins and functionality in most demand from his customers.

THE anti-Linux company, SCO has blamed the success of Linux for the reason that its business is still losing money.

Amidst the growing furore about HP's attempt to overtake the CIA, KGB and Mosad as the world's least popular spying operation, Sneak has to admit at least a grudging admiration for the stunning chutzpah of Mark Hurd's evil empire.

Carmarthenshire county council has contracted open source software (OSS) specialist Sirius Corporation to upgrade its existing Suse Linux email solution. The new system could host up to 40,000 users. It will enable the council to centralise the e-mail usage of its primary and secondary schools. The council's ICT development centre currently provides internet and e-mail facilities to 15 secondary schools and 125 primary schools.

A few weeks ago, I finally got my hands on a Linux-based Koobox Mini PCs. The Mini is a full PC in a very small, quiet package, and well worth a look.

Bug report for Debian. Some bugs have an additional set of tags indicating they only apply to a particular release: O for oldstable (woody), S for stable (sarge), T for testing (etch), U for unstable (sid) or E for experimental. X indicates that the package is not in testing.

In this episode: wrap-up of The Linux Link Tech Show Episode 155; listener feedback; three Listener Tips; a discussion of various helpful shell commands, including head, tail, find (more on find at Linux.com), locate, ifconfig, iwconfig, ps, top, grep, adduser, passwd, and how to send a process to the background.

"Using an Xbox modified to run Linux, researchers [at Rutgers University in New Jersey] have developedvirtual reality hand exercises for rehabilitating stroke patients. An inexpensive glove controller is used to interact with the Xbox. The hardware cost is a tenth of a comparable commercial hand rehabilitation system, leading to the possibility of deployment in patients' homes."

One of its latest projects, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), is being built to study particles and the forces that bind them together. Due to become fully operational around September 2007, the LHC will fire billions of protons around a 27-kilometer circuit, 150 meters below ground.