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There are a number of popular choices for Linux enterprise level servers including CentOS, Ubuntu, Debian, Slackware and others including Red Hat Enterprise. What is important to recognize in this evaluation is that how you view advantages and disadvantages are dependent upon the expertise of your Linux administrators and the level of support you need to maintain your servers.

The Linux world has everything, if you know where to find it, including an in-between option to the command-line interface, and a full-blown X Window System environment. Juliet Kemp talks about ncurses, the excellent graphical environment for the console.

Over the last 12 months, netbook and mobile Linux has made massive advances in features and install base. This is primarily thanks to two netbook distributions – Moblin and Canonical's Ubuntu Netbook Remix (UNR). Both have built on the massive potential that was unlocked by the Asus Eee PC but led nowhere, as its operating system failed to inspire a new generation of Linux users. There's a new breed of netbook distro that's aiming to change this perception and take the fight for the perfect mobile platform back to the manufacturers.

Familiarity undoubtedly ranks among the largest barriers to open source adoption — software, like so many other things, is habit-forming. Much of that familiarity, at least among younger users, comes from the prevalence of proprietary applications in education, an area awash with government regulations, competitive bidding, and its own habit-induced hangups. Enter Albany Senior High School, an Auckland, New Zealand-based unorthodox enclave of education. The school, which opened its doors in 2009, takes a different approach to learning, utilizing open principles that include open spaces, open interaction, open opportunities — and open source.

Red Hat has launched opensource.com as a community site for open source. The Drupal powered site has been created by Red Hat but Jim Whitehurst, Red Hat's President and CEO, says "This will not be a site for Red Hat, about Red Hat. Instead this will be a site for open source, about the future". He added that "this site is one of the ways in which Red Hat gives something back to the open source community"

KDE’s default web browser is Konqueror, and many users love it for its speed, integration with KDE, and its host of features. Nevertheless, some sites do not perform as well as they do in Mozilla Firefox, and some users prefer the large number of available Firefox add-ons. Furthermore, users who move from Windows to Linux might prefer Firefox for its familiarity. Regardless of their reasons, there are plenty of KDE users who want or need Firefox. Unfortunately, Firefox uses GTK themes for its visual appearance, which ruins the visual continuity that KDE users have come to expect. But fear not, there is a way to make Firefox look and partially feel like a real KDE app. Using four Firefox add-ons and one GTK theme, you can give Firefox an extreme makeover.

Frank wondered how long his phone had been buzzing.  He was about to turn it off when he saw that it was his daughter Marla calling.

My excitement quickly turned to concern when I learned why Mozilla is not supporting this new streaming video format in their Firefox browser.

Emery Fletcher muses on how a rank Linux beginner can figure out how to install the latest Firefox release, even when professional tech journalists can't.

LXer Feature: 25-Jan-2010

Large ongoing cost savings because they do not need to keep buying patches.

In our previous tutorial we showed how you to access the iPhone OS 3.x filesystem and read/write to its music database using iFuse and by compiling our own libgpod4. Then we had to create a file on the iPhone, manually mount the phone each time and so on. Maybe a bit complicated for an average user. However, there is now a lot easier way using GVFS which will automount your iPhone for syncing with Rhythmbox, for example. And you don't need to compile anything anymore.

January 31st will be my last day with Novell. I've given it a great deal of thought, and decided that it's time to move on. With the openSUSE Conference wrapped up, 11.2 launched, the major projects I've been working on are completed and I feel like this is a good parting point. It wasn't an easy decision, but I had some time to refocus over the holidays and I know that it is time to move on. One of the most important responsibilities any employee has -- especially a community manager -- is to know when to move on, and not remain in a role just for the sake of having a job.

Android will trail only Symbian in mobile phone market share by 2013, according to IDC. Android phones such as the pictured Sony Ericsson Xperia X10, which is now heading for NTT DoCoMo, will grow 150.4 percent to 68.0 million units by 2013, but other Linux-based phones will struggle, says IDC.

Today, Python is one of the most popular programming languages in the open source space. It's a vast language and there are many gems to discover - here are ten tips for new users to get the ball rolling…

News that 75% of kernel hackers are now paid for their work has led some to suggest that they've sold out. That's not the case: here's why.

Microsoft takes 3 months to patch the latest headline vulnerability in its 'safe' browser only for a security researcher to reveal another huge hole as the patch is being released. Nice. When will the hoi polloi realize it is time to dump this pile of steaming code?

Lighttpd is a secure, fast, standards-compliant web server designed for speed-critical environments. This tutorial shows how you can install Lighttpd on a CentOS 5.4 server with PHP5 support (through FastCGI) and MySQL support.

Last week we published the first Debian GNU/kFreeBSD benchmarks that compared the 32-bit and 64-bit performance of this Debian port -- that straps the FreeBSD kernel underneath a Debian GNU user-land -- to Debian GNU/Linux. We have now extended that comparison to put many other operating systems in a direct performance comparison to these Debian GNU/Linux and Debian GNU/kFreeBSD snapshots of 6.0 Squeeze to Fedora 12, FreeBSD 7.2, FreeBSD 8.0, OpenBSD 4.6, and OpenSolaris 2009.06.

Those familiar with Linux will be able to tweak settings, add and remove apps and customise the menu, toolbars and other desktop elements. Incredibly, those are about all the skills you need to create your very own Linux distro. We're going to take a look at some scripts that'll help you customise different distros.