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The X Window System quietly hit its 25th anniversary back in June; it is, undoubtedly, one of the oldest and most successful free software projects in existence. Keith Packard has been working with X for most of that time; at the Linux Plumbers Conference in Portland he used his keynote address to look at the highlights (and lowlights) of those 25 years and some of the lessons that have been learned.

The recently announced Netgear RangeMax WNR3500L, dubbed an "Open Source Linux Router" by Netgear has been criticised for not being sufficiently open. Founder of gpl-violations.org, Harald Welte, points out in a blog posting that the router ships with binary-only kernel modules and that these modules only work with a Linux 2.4 kernel, such as the Linux 2.4.20 based firmware that Netgear ship with the device.

Christian Perrier (Bubulle) issued statistics in his blog that show which countries of the world have the largest per capita Debian developers. First place goes to Finland.

Many companies like IBM, Google, VMWare, and Amazon have provided products and strategies for Cloud computing. This article shows you how to use Apache Hadoop to build a MapReduce framework to make a Hadoop Cluster and how to create a sample MapReduce application which runs on Hadoop. You will also learn how to set up a time/disk-consuming task on the cloud.

Linux 2.6.31.2 not only offers minor bug fixes, but also selected major changes. The X.org hackers have adapted their development strategy and, in the long term, plan to merge several drivers back into the X Server code.

Apart from the default google themes available, now a bunch for third party artist themes are available for Chromium. Lets take a screenshot tour through the new themes available for Chromium.

Microsoft and Red Hat have now consummated vows to love and cherish each other's operating systems on their corresponding hypervisors. The interoperability pact was inked in February of this year, leading the companies to "synchronize testing" in counterpart validation programs over the months. Starting today, businesses can mix and mingle Windows Server and Red Hat Enterprise Linux on visualized environments with joint support from Microsoft and Red Hat.

I recently installed the beta version of the upcoming version of Ubuntu codenamed Karmic Kuala. The changes since 9.04 are somewhat subtle yet significant. Already in the beta you can feel the polish that went into it. Below, in no particular order, I shall rant about a few improvements that puts a smile on my face.

Samsung Mobile announced its second Android phone of the week, this time aimed at Sprint's 3G network. Now available for pre-order for a Nov. 1 shipment, the "Moment" is based on an 800MHz Samsung processor, and offers a 3.2-inch AMOLED touchscreen, 3.2-megapixel camera, WiFi, Bluetooth, plus GPS, says Samsung.

James Hall is a very experienced software and system engineer who is probably best known for creating and maintaining the freeDOS project for several years. James is eminently qualified to provide an oriention to FOSS and to discuss its sometimes obvious and sometimes rather nuanced significance.

Since the CF card serving as the sole disk drive in the Self-Reliant Thin Client (Maxspeed Maxtor converted to use as a full desktop PC) checked out with fsck via a card reader on another PC, I decided to do a reinstall of Debian, this time Lenny instead of Etch.

The Ubuntu project has released the first beta of Ubuntu Linux 9.10 (Karmic Koala), which has already been favorably previewed, especially for its fast boot time. Based on Linux 2.6.31, Karmic Koala offers GNOME 2.28 and Ext4 as defaults, and adds "cloud" features and improved installation.

There have been promises of an overhaul to Ubuntu’s default theme for quite some time. Ubuntu 9.10, set to be released at the end of this month, will begin delivering on those promises. Below, we take a look at the new system theme and artwork that will debut in Karmic Koala. Here it is.

In a wide-ranging interview with the Digital Memo Blog, Google CEO Eric Schmidt and co-founder Sergey Brinn came off as smug, arrogant and cavalier, and those were the good points.

The Linux kernel has several different IO schedulers. This article provides an introduction to the concept of schedulers and what options exist for Linux.

Lately, a lot of talk has been coming out of Europe. The talk I am referring to concerns an anti-trust case against Microsoft for bundling a web browser they make with an operating system they make. The claim is that Microsoft has made competition in the web browser market difficult because Internet Explorer is included with Microsoft's Windows (a computer operating system).

This year's Open World Forum 2009, held in Paris, brought together the company heads of open source companies, public and government organisations and customers who use open source, for an exchange of views and an opportunity to map out the future of open source. The theme this year was "Free, Libre and Open Source Software: At the heart of the Digital Recovery" and among the numerous strands were presentations, Q&As and round tables with such notables as Jacques Attali, Jim Zemlin of the Linux Foundation, Roger Burkhardt of Ingres, Michael Tiemann of Red Hat, Mark Taylor of Sirius and Canonical's Mark Shuttleworth.

Sun Microsystems’ xVM server virtualization hypervisor has not yet seen the light of day as a commercial product, but the company is continuing to enhance the management tool. Now, the latest version of Ops Center has arrived featuring enhancements for running Solaris-based virtualization.

Hate is a strong word … especially when you’re in love. Consider the situation between Red Hat and Microsoft. During the Red Hat Summit in September, the open source company warned customers and channel partners not to get locked into Microsoft’s Windows Azure cloud strategy. Fast forward to the present, and Red Hat and Microsoft are locked in a virtual hug. Here’s the scoop.

Small and home businesses (SOHO) can benefit greatly from using open-source software applications. Cynthia Harveys offers a tasty buffet of 50 to get you started.