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Following previous reports that Dell's Mini 3i smartphone was merely a proof of concept, the computer giant has now confirmed that it's planning on releasing the device. Dell says that it's Android-based phone will feature a 3.5 inch capacitive touch screen display and that it will be launching this year in Brazil and China. Additional specifications have yet to be released, but, according to reports, the mobile will be available in 2G and 3G models.

It can be tempting to throw hardware at MySQL performance problems, but there are ways to tune your SQL database so that it doesn't always need more power. Sean Hull gives some excellent tips on simplifying, strengthening, and speeding up your MySQL database.

By the time you read this Karmic Koala will have been released to a waiting world, but I couldn't wait. A felicitous combination of a desire to do a distribution upgrade to the release candidate and a Twitter arriving on my laptop giving me a link to Raindrop kept me busy for the day. I was intrigued by Raindrop and having used other Mozilla lab experimental software I was determined to see what all the hype was about. If you like the idea of combining a tool for aggregating Twitter, e-mail, RSS and other social Web 2.0 stuff with free and open standards then read on. Read the full howto at Freesoftware Magazine.com

OpenSUSE 11.2 tugs at Karmic Koala's fur Novell has released openSUSE 11.2, just a few short weeks after Ubuntu 9.10 - aka Karmic Koala - landed.…Case Study: WhatsUp keeps Legoland turnstyles ringing

There seems to be quite a few concerns and complains about recent Ubuntu releases. Are there really that many regressions and instabilities with the latest releases of Ubuntu? Probably! Should we accept that in a production OS? No, but there is something that a many people tend to forget: the primary objective of these interim releases is not stability. I think that a lot of people tend to dismiss the Ubuntu release cycle, and for a good reason: that cycle is not a perfect solution. Lets look at the problem in detail...

LAMP is short for Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP. This tutorial shows how you can install an Apache2 webserver on a Fedora 11 server with PHP5 support (mod_php) and MySQL support.

The call came in about 7 PM last Monday. It was from Skip Guenter. "You on a secure line?" "Yeah", I said..."I guess so". "Well, I can't take the chance it's not secure. Stay there, don't leave and don't tell anyone I'm coming by." With that he hung up.

It's a fact of life that Linux distributions go extinct and it happens more often than our Linux fan base would like to admit. At last count, there are approximately 50 individual distributions that are now extinct. What happens to the poor unfortunates who adopt and use these defunct distros? Are they left in the cold or are there alternatives that are close enough that a relatively tech savvy administrator could migrate apps and dependencies to another distribution? Some of these distributions were excellent and very capable. Damn Small Linux (DSL) is a notable one that I used extensively and have written about. It's very disappointing to have a distribution pulled out from under you when you depend on it for productivity.

Here's my problem. I need a calendar app that rudely beeps to tell me when to go to meetings and such. In Ubuntu, that means the Evolution mail client, which has an extensive calendar function, or so I'm told. But I don't run Evolution. I use Thunderbird to manage my mail, and Thunderbird doesn't have a calendar function ... or does it?

[My apologies for the "Bohemian Rhapsody" pun in the headline - Steve]

Eclipse Galileo includes new features for applying patches, including the ability to copy a patch to the clipboard and paste it directly into the Project Explorer. This article introduces this and provides an overview of the method for creating and applying patches, and includes an overview of the patch format used by Eclipse.

The fundamentals of computation theory are not obvious. A group of the greatest mathematicians of the twentieth century needed decades to figure them out. If this information is not communicated to lawyers and judges they have no chance to understand what is going on and mistakes are sure to happen. All the errors I have found result from this omission. The purpose of this text is to help fill the gap.

[A long read, but definitely worth it for the philosophical defense of FOSS - gus3]

The Novell-backed OpenSUSE Linux distro project today released the final OpenSUSE 11.2, which received a mostly positive, in-depth review from eWEEK. Meanwhile, Novell released its Mono Tools for Visual Studio for developing .NET applications for Linux, Unix and Mac OS X, says another eWEEK story.

Last week I visited a Nepali primary school which is using the OLPC laptop. Here is what I found out.

Recently, we took on a project for a Iraqi couple who had spent 3 years in a refugee camp prior to finally getting to the US. Their names are Ziad and Mona and they need help far past my ability to help them. It's not just a matter of the system we gave them being Linux...these folks are not computer users and the concept of right and left mouse clicking eludes them. A challenge I know... Now try to imagine trying to teach them with the Language Barrier in place.

Some of the new and interesting features of this release include: KDE 4.3, a major update to the KDE platform, which offers improved networking support, and better integration of Firefox and OpenOffice.org with the KDE environment; GNOME 2.28, the latest release of the popular GNOME desktop, which includes a brand new theme Screenshots at SEO Expert Consultants

Our Russian friends at Unigine Corp, who have their very impressive Unigine Engine that is multi-platform and delivers the best graphics on Linux and have said they like Linux very much, last month released Unigine Heaven. Heaven is the most-impressive tech demo / benchmark yet, but when released in October it only came out for Windows with its DirectX 11 renderer. However, as we exclusively shared, Unigine Heaven is coming out to Linux.

An experiment in Nicaragua shows just how powerful Open Source software can be in leveling the playing field. The second poorest country of the Americas now has one of the best software solutions for displaying agricultural data in the western hemisphere. It all started about a year ago. I was in Nicaragua doing anthropological research, when I was asked to give a talk at the yearly Debian Day in the capital city of Managua. I spoke on Latex, which really had nothing to do with agriculture, but afterward Denis Cáceres of Debian Nicaragua approached me.

What the heck does ?€œ mean? Why do we see these, and what be done about them? Akkana Peck explores the mysteries of character sets and encodings.

This tutorial shows how you can set up a Mandriva One 2010.0 desktop (with the GNOME desktop environment) 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.

Pidgin Embedded Video is a GTK plugin for the popular instant messaging client Pidgin. It transforms a simple conversation into a much more attractive and interesting experience. The purpose of this plugin is to provide a faster way to watch videos while chatting with your friends. No more additional browser windows!