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It has been a few months since Novell launched the SUSE Appliance program. The early returns look promising: More than 43,000 users have embraced Novell's Linux software appliance effort. Here's the scoop.

Ubuntu 9.10 is causing outrage and frustration, with early adopters wishing they'd stuck with previous versions of the Linux distro. Blank and flickering screens, failure to recognize hard drives, defaulting to the old 2.6.28 Linux kernel, and failure to get encryption running are taking their toll, as early adopters turn to the web for answers and log fresh bug reports in Ubuntu forums.

The very popular Skype VoIP service has provided a Linux client for some years now, but it's not nearly as full-featured as its Windows counterpart, and right now it's a binary-only application. However, things may be partially changing at this company that's in the process of being spun off from eBay.

When Google released Picasa 3.5 for Windows, leaving Linux users behind with the older 3.0 release, I decided that it was time to move on. After testing different photo editing and management applications for Linux, I settled for digiKam.

On October 29th the NLUUG held their second conference this year (the first, held in the spring, focused on file systems). With over 200 visitors and talks by 19 speakers, all prominent in their respective fields, this conference was of particularly high quality. This is surely emphasized by the location and surroundings and the excellent organization. Read on for a short impression on the conference, which was attended by several KDE community members.

The Ubuntu Linux menagerie has birthed a new creature, the Karmic Koala, with the release last week of Ubuntu Linux 9.10. The successor to the release code named Jaunty Jackalope (aka version 9.04) boasts a herd of changes and enhancements that are so far making testers smile. [This review appeared in Canada's National Newspaper - Barbara]

Aberdeen-based Suretec Telecom is in the business of supporting a company that makes holiday dreams come true. Specialising in tailor-made holidays, luxury hotels, unique tours and cruises, DreamTicket luxury holidays is a niche holiday provider to the UK travel market, and it prides itself on operating cost-effectively without ‘middle-men’ so it can keep its prices keen. And it’s based in Surrey. Dreamticket contacted Suretec to discuss possibly installing an open source call recording system, that is, using software that does not entail hefty license fees. Such ‘open source’ software is fast being adopted by companies and local authorities alike, as there is greater choice and flexibility, increased security, greater reliability and stability, lower technology costs - and the use of open standards means vendor independence. Dreamticket is now working with Suretec to replace its current call centre phone system to a 100% Asterisk based system.

Mobile specialist Palm strengthens its team by hiring Matthew Tippett, the Linux graphic driver developer since 2003 at ATI, to be in charge of Linux kernel development.

Developer Nanni Bassetti has announced the release of version 1.0 of the Computer Aided INvestigative Environment (CAINE) Linux live distribution. CAINE and NetBookCAINE (NBCAINE) provide a complete digital forensic environment that's organised to integrate existing software tools as software modules and to provide a simple graphical user interface (GUI).

Keeping any computer system running can be some work. It would be nice if we never had to do any type of maintenance or troubleshooting, but no operating system has reached that point. Many desktop Linux users have server administration experience and are quite comfortable dropping to the command line and tinkering with their system. Not only do they know how to do this, it is the method that makes them comfortable. For those users who use a desktop operating system and expect a graphical experience, opening a terminal window is not a normal thing to do. That does not mean they are incapable of learning it. They are just more comfortable with a visual interface. There are many control panel tools and settings dialogs in KDE that make it easier for graphical-minded users to get things done. Here are five stand-alone applications that will help you stay informed about your computer’s status and health.

WINE is basically a windows emulator for Linux operating systems. WINE allows you to run some applications on Linux that does not have Linux support or installers ie: Office 2007, World of Warcraft and many others. This is not a how-to but more a idea of what is going around and what its all about. WINE is the underlying technology for all the above applications.

Yesterday afternoon we ran a story on a new Linux driver for the Intel Poulsbo chipset, which right now is known for being notorious with its troubling Linux support. However, Intel apparently had been working on a new "special driver" that the Linux Foundation was showing off recently in Munich at a mobile development camp. Many details were not shared on this forthcoming driver, which reportedly will be released with Intel's soon-to-be-out Moorestown platform, but this morning we have a surprising number of details on this "special driver" from Intel. Martin Mohring of the Linux Foundation, who was the one showing off the Poulsbo driver on the two Moblin netbooks from the videos shown yesterday, sent over some intriguing details to Phoronix this morning.

With Epidermis you can change the following themes by just a click ,Wallpapers, Metacity window border themes, GTK widget themes ,Icon sets ,GNOME splash images, Mouse cursor themes, Grub bootsplash screen,Usplash bootsplash screen,GDM login screen, Xsplash themes

Today’s victim… *ahem* I mean guest of course sorry, is the new version of Ubuntu. 9.10 to be precise, the Karmic Koala. The names seem to keep getting worse but is the distro itself getting better? I wanted to find out. So I installed the latest daily build in the lead up to release and got to work kicking the tyres, investigating and randomly tutting while stroking my beard. I’ll try to be fair in describing any rough edges as I realise this testing version is pre-release software, but the final version has actually been released today. So I think it’s fair to give it a look. Here’s how I got on…

It's easy to appreciate the wonders of the Web, and all of the riches that the Internet brings into our lives. All of which makes it easy indeed not to notice the things that tend to slip away, as the collateral damage of progress. Recently, we woke up to the fact that if we don't care about document formats, our personal and public documents may disappear into a digital Black Hole of no return. Documents aren't the only thing that may disappear, though, as we place higher and higher priorities on fast loading speeds and easy formatting. If that's all we care about, then the aesthetics of the printed word and its visual presentation will disappear forever as well. That doesn't have to happen. All we have to do is be sure we include the right criteria when we create standards for the digital books and browsers of the future. But who will enter the technical world of bits and bytes to defend the Arts of the Book?

The European Interoperability Framework (EIF) is an important document for the European public sector. Version 1 had strong support for open standards and royalty-free licences to patents. A leaked version 2 shows that open standards and open source are out, and "openness" of the vaguest kind is in, as are software patents. If this really is version 2, things are not looking good for public sector open source in the EU.

LXer Feature: 02-Nov-2009

A couple weeks ago I wrote about NoSQL and provided a short overview of the landscape of non-relational databases. One that has become increasingly popular is Apache CouchDB, so I’d like to spend a couple weeks digging into it a bit and talking about why it’s so interesting. Before I do, it’s worth noting that Ubuntu 9.10 was just released and uses CouchDB under the hood. The Ubuntu One backup/synchronization service makes it easy to back up and sync Firefox bookmarks, Tomboy notes, files, contacts, and more. As more users adopt 9.10 and Ubuntu One, CouchDB usage grows accordingly. If you read my previous NoSQL article and wondered which projects are ready for prime time, consider this a big vote of confidence for CouchDB.

With the release of CentOS 5.4 last month to bring this community enterprise operating system on par with Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.4, we decided it was a good time to see how the server / workstation performance between this new CentOS release compares to that of Ubuntu 9.10, which was released last week, and also how it performs up against the release candidate of OpenSuSE 11.2. In this article are these benchmarks.

The Apache Software Foundation (ASF) is holding ApacheCon US 2009 from November 2-6 in Oakland, California. The foundation for a free webserver is also celebrating its 10th birthday. In honor of this 10th birthday, the celebration includes three days of the conference program available as a FREE Live stream.