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With the stable release of FreeBSD 8.0 arriving last week we finally were able to put it up on the test bench and give it a thorough look over with the Phoronix Test Suite. We compared the FreeBSD 8.0 performance between it and the earlier FreeBSD 7.2 release along with Fedora 12 and Ubuntu 9.10 on the Linux side and then the OpenSolaris 2010.02 b127 snapshot on the Sun OS side.

System76, the Ubuntu PC maker, continues to offer special holiday pricing on selected systems through Monday evening, November 30. Here's a look at System76's Ubuntu PC and notebook discounts, which are part of an ongoing Black Friday and Cyber Monday sales promotion, reports WorksWithU.

New distros pop-up every day & try to be as FREE as possible, however when attempting to install a distribution on a new PC of a common next door user, you will probably find that you can’t avoid falling into these two proprietary sins..

There’ve been a lot of big releases in the Linux distro world lately, and none bigger than OpenSUSE 11.2, the latest offering from Novell. They can be a controversial company in some parts of the FOSS community, but whatever your personal view, you can’t deny they’re also contributing to progress in many ways. They employ a lot of important Linux kernel developers for example. The last time I did a really in-depth review of OpenSUSE was 2 years ago with 10.2, though I did do a quick review of version 11 for Linux Planet. I decided it was high time to take a look at how things are developing in the SUSE world. So here’s how I got on.

Early on in the lifetime of the KDE Community Forums, the staff launched regularly-held courses for people willing to help KDE called "Klassrooms". For each of these courses, a mentor (usually a KDE contributor, but not limited to them) guided a group of "students" towards a simple, definite goal that would improve KDE, for example fixing simple bugs in an application. However, the courses were not limited to coding: documentation, promo and other important areas were handled as well.

Kristian Høgsberg on the 6th of November had wrote a message on the DRI development list regarding the libdrm repository. With so much of the Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) work going straight into the Linux kernel -- thanks in large part to all of the work on memory management and kernel mode-setting -- Kristian proposed that the DRM driver code be removed from the separate DRM Git tree. With this message, Kristian created a new DRM repository that dropped all of the linux-core, bsd-core, and shared-core code. Seems simple and straightforward, right? Well, three weeks later with dozens of replies, this change is continuing to cause debate.

This tutorial shows how you can set up a Fedora 12 desktop (GNOME) that is a full-fledged replacement for a Windows desktop, i.e. that has all the software that people need to do the things they do on their Windows desktops. The advantages are clear: you get a secure system without DRM restrictions that works even on old hardware, and the best thing is: all software comes free of charge.

The new version of PulseAudio has some pretty neat new features built in like the support for Apple AirTunes, which is a protocol that allows you to stream audio to remote devices over a network.

Cover thumbnailer is a small Python script which displays music album covers in nautilus, preview of pictures which are in a folder and more. The script fits in nautilus like any other thumbnailer of the GNOME thumbnail factory; so you don't have to run it manually to generate thumbnails.

Just 2 weeks after Release Candidate 1 was released, Linux Mint 8 final dubbed Helena version is available.

Desktop search engines are all the rage these days. While Beagle may be the most popular desktop search engine for Linux, there are alternatives. If you are looking for a light-weight and easy-to-use yet powerful desktop search engine, you might want to try Recoll.

Me: “How could you tell they’d hacked it?”

Caller: “Well, when it booted, it didn’t say Windows or Microsoft or anything! It said something about Deviant Linux, I think, and the main screen looked nothing like my good, legal Windows screen at home! I think they hacked that, too!”

If you write something is the New York Times obligated to publish it? Must the Washington Post run a sharply worded op-ed? Can I compel Fox News to give voice to my liberal opinions? The answer to all these questions is an unequivocal no. Private media is permitted editorial control of their content. Websites and blogs are no different. They are simply a newer, different form of private media.

Richard Mathew Stallman or “RMS”, his famous initials of the hacker community at Harvard where he graduated magna cum laude in Physics in 1974, is the most prominent American Free Software Advocate alive today.

According to the blurb on the book's back cover, "This book offers a highly accessible introduction to natural language processing, the field that supports a variety of language technologies, from predictive text and email filtering to automatic summarization and translation". Putting it all together, this book teaches the reader how to do something highly specific and practical with the Python programming language. I put it this way because there are many books out there that will teach you how to learn Python, or some other programming language, which includes learning various typical tasks, but they don't teach you where to go next.

Ironically there has not been as much crossover in my current environment (at least as of this writing) and my hobbyist/home coding/administration life in quite some time. For once I have found something I wrote at my job that has a direct translation into something other admins would find useful; a script that performs and reports multiple checks at once. In this the first part of the series a look at the motivation, helper functions and some core generic functions of the script. I provision a lot of systems, a lot of them; almost 1/week (although not at that frequency - the frequency varies) - some of these systems are virtual machines, some are cloned virtual machines, some are physical servers while in the rare instance some are just devices of some type (or really dumb servers). Part of the post installation setup is adding systems to the appropriate Nagios monitors.

We presume , that xen-3.4.1-5.fc12.src.rpm has been already installed on the system and Xen Host been built via mentioned “rpm” , Libvirt 0.7.1-15 and 2.6.31.6 pvops kernel is up and running at the time of upgrade. Apply following patch to /root/rpmbuild/SPECS/xen.spec

Google unveiled an experimental open source project in early November aimed at reducing web site load times. SPDY, as it is called, is a modification to HTTP designed to target specific, real-world latency issues without altering GET, POST, or any other request semantics, and without requiring changes to page content or network infrastructure. It does this by implementing request prioritization, stream multiplexing, and header compression. Results from tests on a SPDY-enabled Chrome and a SPDY web server show a reduction in load times of up to 60%.

A data warehouse is a repository of an organization's electronically stored data. Data warehouses are designed to facilitate reporting and analysis.

The 4.0 release of the KDE software compilation marked a major milestone for the KDE community. While the underlying development platform has seen a modernization to better work with increased demand of applications, the community also saw a shift in its development methods. Interaction design has become much more important, and hence the need to collect feedback from the user in a structured manner. Ultimately, this leads to more understandable user interfaces and simpler handling of the underlying complexity of modern computers and portable devices. Nuno Pinheiro, a well-known artist and icon designer in the KDE community and engineering psychologist Björn Balazs from the Open Source Usability Labs and director for analysis, design and testing at Apliki decided they wanted to help with this.