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One early spring day as we were walking home from the bakery on the corner, we passed by a neighbor and struck up a conversation. He complained about his desktop being constantly attacked by viruses. We suggested Ubuntu. A professional man in his 50s, he said he wanted to try installing a Linux distribution on his desktop but that, “it looks too complicated. I probably couldn’t install Ubuntu. I don’t want the hassle.” My little five year old daughter had been snuggled in my arms while I was talking to this neighbor. She had been listening closely. When we got home, she said, “Mom, I can install Ubuntu. I bet I can. Can I try? Can I try?”

[A few weeks old, but waaay too good not to post -- Sander]

There's a provocatively titled article by Robert Strohmeyer over at PC World that professes "The Future of Linux is Google". But let's be honest though. Without Linux, Google might not have grown into the powerhouse you see today. I'm not saying it wouldn't have been a successful company, just not as successful. Let me explain.

The acquisition of Sun Microsystems by Oracle has become an ongoing saga, one that is reportedly seeing Sun hemorrhage cash at an alarming rate. The company's troubles have now found their way to the hallowed halls of Congress, where a majority of the U.S. Senate has entered the fray.

Can you believe that there's only ten? It's hard for me to admit it but there are things, ten things to be exact, that I really hate about Linux. Sometimes I think it's just me but I do see other people stating a few of these in the forums so I'm at least not alone with some of these issues. These are in no particular order and they aren't just rants; they're legitimate problems and issues that I find annoying, destroying or cloying. Feel free to add your own to the list.

[I just couldn't stop myself from posting this..enjoy. ;-) - Scott]

Hello, my name is Jacob Lludkrab, I am an advocate for Free Software. I am writing to you in hopes that this email might reach the Combat Arms developers, or those in charge of the licensing of Combat Arms. Will you please forward it to the appropriate recipients? Nexon having developed in part “Counter-Strike: Online”, have knowledge of the GoldSrc engine, which is based on id Software’s Quake engine. With this recent history of gaming engines, the developers must be aware of the decision by id Software" ...

The KDE community has modified its product branding and expanded its focus beyond the KDE Linux desktop to support a wider range of open source projects, says eWEEK.. Meanwhile, the community has released Version 2.1 of KDE's KOffice suite, featuring improved OpenDocument support and KWord enhancements.

There’s blogging nowadays and everyone has to be writing stuff on the web all the time about what they have been doing. Sometimes even to the cost of not actually doing it properly. There is a whole bunch of newbies out there writing poor howtos, pretending to save the day of a fellow GNU/Linux user, but not teaching him any real knowledge. I want to share a couple of examples of this behaviour I have seen in the last days and a real suggestion for you, fellow user.

Handbrake 0.9.4 is released. HandBrake is an open-source, GPL-licensed, multiplatform, multithreaded video transcoder.

The basics for MySQL are important to understand so you can make adjustments. The first in the series showed you how to set up a LAMP Server, the second in the series showed you how MySQL needs to be configured and this now shows some of the basic settings that you need to know.

eBox Platform is an open source small business server that allows you to manage all your services like firewall, DHCP, DNS, VPN, proxy, IDS, mail, file and printer sharing, VoIP, IM and much more. These functionalities are tightly integrated, automating most tasks, avoiding mistakes and saving time for system administrators. This tutorial shows you step by step how to use eBox as a Windows Primary Domain Controller. At the end of it you will be using eBox Platform 1.2 for users and shared resources management on your Windows domain.

Somewhere between the debut of Ubuntu 9.10 (Karmic Koala for those into animal names) and today, the developers/maintainers/overlords of what many consider the leading Linux distribution have fixed the dreaded "kernel mode setting bug" that rendered the X Window system on many computers using Intel video hardware unusable until kernel mode setting was turned off.

What if we could use a bash script to use "apt-get" with Axel (a command line application which accelerates HTTP/FTP downloads by using multiple sources for one file) so the "apt-get" download speed would increase dramatically? Well, you can, thanks to Matt Parnell who has created a bash script which does just that.

Opensourc3 is a magazine dedicated to Unified and Cloud Computing using open source technologies. It is published on a monthly basis and is available free to readers worldwide.

LXer Feature: 26-Nov-2009

Here's a quick blog, because I'm really in hurry, so please forgive any mistakes.

Microsoft worked together with Apple to bring Silverlight video to the iPhone. What this solution basically does is take a video at the server side, cut it in parts and convert the parts to separate H.264 streams. Then stream those files to end users with IIS Media services. These have .ts extensions, a format mplayer understands.

About a half year after big technological changes, the KOffice project has released version 2.1 of its office suite, even if it's not quite ready for everyday use.

A lot of people at the moment are immensely intrigued by Google Chrome OS. I won’t hide that I am one of them. Google promises a much needed shift in the way small computers work. Problems like software updates, backups, installation, maintenance, viruses, have plagued the world for too long: a shift is way overdue. To me, however, the change about to happen shows us what many people have refused to believe for a long time: KDE and GNOME shot each other dead. I write this knowing full well that I am going to make a lot of people angry. This might be the first time a writer receives very angry responses from both camps — KDE and GNOME’s users might actually (finally?) join arms and fight just to show everybody how wrong I am! Read the full article at Free Software Magazine.

In Part 1 Akkana Peck talked about Unicode, character sets and encoding -- how accented and special characters are transferred in email and web pages, and why you see funny characters. But can you fix it when it goes wrong? And if you're a programmer, how should you be handling all these encodings?

Are the fights that matter just the ones between giant companies? Doesn't the health of the Net and the Web matter more than any commercial battles? These questions came to mind when I read How Murdoch Can Really Hurt Google And Shift The Balance Of Power In Search in TechCrunch recently. In that piece Mike Arrington supported Jason Calacanis' suggestion that Murdoch stick it to Google by cutting an exclusive search deal with rival search engine Bing. Even Jay Rosen took the same side. (Though perhaps in jest.)

According to Reuters, one more thread in the long-running saga of Rambus and the JEDEC SDRAM standards abuse saga appears to be reaching an end.

Technological advances in high-throughput DNA sequencing have opened up the possibility of determining how living things are related by analyzing the ways in which their genes have been rearranged on chromosomes. However, inferring such evolutionary relationships from rearrangement events is computationally intensive on even the most advanced computing systems available today.