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Parsix is a beautiful OS which is derived off of Kanotix and based off of Debian. The install was quite simple and intuitive, though not as simple as Ubuntu based distributions. What grabbed my attention immediately was the beautiful artwork that was part of the default LiveCD and the Install. Also, the install came with a lot of nice apps that are quite useful, though Parsix was not bloated like some other distributions tend to be.

An article that describes how you can play ASF stream under linux (Fedora 10) and what the results where under the following media players: Totem, VLC, Xine and mplayer. The results are surprising (in a negative way).

Last time I did Screen Shots of ZenWalk, was the 5.2 beta release. Now, not much has change since the 5.2 release as far as the UI is concerned. But other changes have been made... One thing I noticed immediately, was that the installer was simpler and faster.

Multiple open source companies are pumping the same message into The VAR Guy’s email inbox. From Compiere to Pentaho, small open source application providers are calling on VARs to deploy business software in the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2). Here’s the scoop.

A number of senior kernel developers, including Linus Torvalds, Ted Ts'o, Alan Cox and Ingo Molnar, have been squabbling over the sense or otherwise of journaling and delayed allocation in Ext3 and Ext4. The trigger for the discussion was a response from Jesper Krogh to Torvalds' announcement of kernel version 2.6.29, in which he described massive delays in writing out the file system cache on Ext3 file systems despite fast RAID arrays on computers with lots of RAM.

The Beta version of the upcoming Ubuntu 9.04 (codename Jaunty Jackalope) was uploaded a few minutes ago on the official mirrors. As usual, we've downloaded a copy of it in order to keep you up to date with the latest changes in the Ubuntu 9.04 development.

There are many technical explanations of Open Source licensing but this introduction looks to provide an insight into how Open Source works and how to be a positive influence on the community. Most explanation of Open Source discuss licensing and the technicalities of Closed vs Open Source. This article explains why people create Open Source projects, looks at the initial need and how that becomes an idea, then a solution and evolves into a community. It explains how everyone can participate in Open Source even if you don't know how to code. It explains the business advantages in a manner than even your CFO could understand!

OpenGeeeU Luna Serena (8.10), the special OpenGEU version dedicated to the EeePC, is available for download now. OpenGeeeU 8.10 has been built over EasyPeasy 8.10, so it is optimized for your netbook & it includes all of the drivers & fixes needed for your Asus Eee PC to work well out of the box.

I'm more than a little excited about Dell's Inspiron Mini 9 netbook, the price of which has dropped to $249 for the basic Ubuntu Linux/512 MB RAM/8 GB solid-state drive model. I had the pleasure of trying this very-small but quite usable netbook at the San Fernando Valley Linux Users Group booth at the recent SCALE 7x show, and I was quite impressed with it.

Expanding its Ubuntu training series, Canonical is planning to make an Ubuntu Server training course available later this year. In a blog posting Canonical, the financial backer of Ubuntu Linux, said that the new course is being designed in response to requests from both students and partners.

There are quite a variety of tracing options for Linux, with SystemTap being the most prominent, but that particular solution has yet to become easily usable, at least partly due to its many dependencies on user-space configuration and tools. Another choice, which originally came from work on realtime Linux, is ftrace. Ftrace is a self-contained solution, requiring no user-space tools or support, that is useful for tracking down problems—not only in the kernel, but in its interactions with user space as well.

Development of those new technologies on a commodity platform like Linux allows startup companies to enter the market with less capital and compete more effectively with their larger counterparts. In addition, using free open source applications and technologies encourages innovation and creation of new products for technology-hungry buyers. For smaller companies and startups, maintaining a high level of frugality is necessary for survival in any market environment. Linux won't directly save individual consumers a bundle of cash, but they will find financial solace in Linux-based services whether they know the services are Linux-based or not.

Python programming is all the rage because it is clean, easy to learn, and powerful. It supports creating both command-line and graphical applications, and has at least four good toolkits for writing graphical applications. Akkana Peck introduces us to Tkinter, and shows us how to create an all-purpose timer (for cooking and other reminders for absent-minded geeks) in one lesson

The recession has sharply accelerated interest in open source technologies among enterprise IT buyers, says an eWEEK story. Pointing to recent remarks made by Alfresco GM Matt Asay, the story says that cost pressures and the growing maturity of open-source software has led to a pronounced shift in recent months. Only two and a half years ago, potential buyers of Alfresco's Linux-ready web content management tools were telling Asay that open source software was "too risky" for them. A week ago, the same buyer changed his mind, telling Asay that in the current economic climate, he could lose his job buying expensive proprietary software, according to the story.

Freescale may be the first semiconductor company to associate itself aggressively with portable Linux devices. The former Motorola semiconductor division is sharply targeting the low-priced Linux-based Netbook market, which is hot in the world market and just starting to get warm in the US. read more

Back in December we looked at the Sapphire Radeon HD 4650 512MB OC graphics card. This mid-range ATI graphics card had performed well under Linux and what separated it from the other Radeon HD 4650 graphics cards on the market was its factory overclock of 650/900MHz. While not factory overclocked beyond the RV730PRO specifications, PowerColor has the PowerColor SCS3 Radeon HD 4650 512MB, which instead offers passive cooling. Is this an ideal candidate for a Linux-based HTPC? In this article we are looking at the PowerColor SCS3 Radeon HD 4650 512MB.

When VoiceCon kicks off in Orlando, The VAR Guy will be looking for information about open source Asterisk information. But it looks like traditional closed source solutions will dominate the conference. Here are seven key trends worth tracking at the event.

By default, Windows applications ran through Wine don't look very well, since that's the look and feel of Windows 98 at best, to mention nothing about XP: So what follows are a few easy steps which will allow to change the way applications ran through Wine look like. If you need guidance for installing Wine, here are two tutorials I recently wrote, for Ubuntu 8.04 here and here, and for Debian Lenny here. These should also work in Ubuntu 8.10 (and the upcoming 9.04 Jaunty Jackalope) and the latest Wine release.

This story is part bug hunt, part open-source love-story. The bug was a particularly gnarly, beautiful little bug and I'm going to try to convey some of that to you. But the other half of the story is really the thing here; The Guardian is serious about engaging with the wider technology community - while we work hard to open out our data to the world at large, we also participate by speaking at conferences, sponsoring events, and sometimes in the simplest way of all; contributing code and fixes for the Open Source software that we use.

The NY Times is reporting on 2 articles to be published in the NEJM. One on a study from the RWJF and the second from the esteemed Mandl-Kohane brain trust out of Harvard. A highlight: "the current health record suppliers as offering pre-Internet era software — costly and wedded to proprietary technology standards that make it difficult for customers to switch vendors and for outside programmers to make upgrades and improvements... encourage the development of an open software platform on which innovators could write electronic health record applications"