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With many Linux distributions receiving major updates in recent weeks and months we have carried out a five-way Linux distribution comparison of openSUSE, Ubuntu, Fedora, PCLinuxOS, and Arch Linux. We have quite a number of tests comparing the 32-bit performance of these popular Linux distributions on older PC hardware.

Linux has changed almost beyond recognition since version 1.0 in 1994 and Ubuntu is about as polished and professional as it gets. It's approaching the level of polish of Mac OS X, is faster and easier to install than Windows, includes a whole suite of apps and offers tens of thousands more, runs on cheap commodity hardware and costs nothing.

In this article series by Reynante Martinez, we’ll discuss the following: * What is a particle system and where can we find it in Blender? * What are the types of Blender particle system? * Basic and practical uses of the Particle System * Creating Dust * Creating Smoke * Creating Fire * Creating Bubbles * Simulating Rock Slides * Creating Hair/Fur/Grass

This guide explains how to set up software RAID1 on an already running LVM system (Ubuntu 10.04). The GRUB2 bootloader will be configured in such a way that the system will still be able to boot if one of the hard drives fails (no matter which one).

Microsoft and Red Hat, Linux and Windows aren't supposed to get along right? But they do, and apparently Microsoft and Red Hat are now getting along very well too. During a Q&A session during Red Hat's Analyst Day this week, Red Hat revealed that it's relationship with Microsoft isn't as stormy as it once was. "That relationship with Microsoft, believe it or not, is pretty strong,"Paul Cormier executive vice president and president, products and technologies at Red Hat said.

agedu scans a directory tree and produces reports about how much disk space is used in each directory and subdirectory, and also how that usage of disk space corresponds to files with last-access times a long time ago.

The VideoLAN project is shipping version 1.1 of its open source VLC media player, adding hardware acceleration, WebM support, and faster HD decoding, but deleting Shoutcast support. Meanwhile, several industry reports suggest possible reasons for Adobe's temporary suspension of its beta 64-bit Linux version of Flash.

One thing that is always of concern when dealing with Apple is the extent to which Apple might break “unauthorised” access to “your” device with a new OS update. The recent 1.0 release of libimobiledevice allows access to iPhones and iPads on Linux. So does iOS4 break this newcomer to the iPhone scene?

Following bellow is attempt to debianize Xen 4.0.1-rc3,in other words to build debian packages been installed on recent Ubuntu 10.04 (9.10) servers set corresponding version of Hypervisor up. We follow closely recent blog entry of "User Virtual" , attempting to fix errors in patching of current version of /etc/init.d/xend.

Google VP of Engineering Andy Rubin announced the full availability of Android 2.2 today at Verizon's Droid X event. This makes the Linux-based mobile OS available for over-the-air updates and allows OEMs to package new products with the operating system pre-installed.

Think of Sun Microsystems, and what comes to your mind? For me? Purple workstations--my first exposure to Sun equipment. For others, it might be Solaris. Or Java. There's a host of things Sun was well-known for before it was acquired by Oracle last year and systematically dismantled to fit within the Oracle ecosystem. But I'll bet middleware was not one of the things you initially recalled. But it's some of Sun-now-Oracle's cast-off middleware that may prove to be a huge business for a burgeoning new community, led by some former Sun employees.

Can’t wait till the latest version of digiKam appears in the official Ubuntu software repositories? You don’t have to: using the personal package archives (PPA) provided by the Launchpad service, you can install the latest release of digiKam with a few simple commands.

EveryDesk is a reinterpretation of the Linux desktop, designed to be used in public administrations or as an enterprise desktop. EveryDesk is a real OS on a USB key, not a live CD; so it can be modified, managed, upgraded or changed at will. Designed to work out of the box with AD, integrates local virtualization & lots more. Derived from Ubuntu, it does not need/modifies your HD, so it can be used as a demonstration tool or as an alternative to traditional thin clients.

In this part of the series we complete our tour of the Grace algorithmic composition environment. The Targets: Grace can format its output for the following targets and file types : * Audio - Realtime and file (WAV, AIFF, etc) * MIDI - Realtime and file (MID) * OSC - Realtime * Csound - Realtime and score file * FOMUS - File (LilyPond and others). We've already considered Grace as a generator for MIDI files and realtime performance. Now let's see how it works with Csound.

Just as late December brings Christmas, late June brings the annual "release train" from the Eclipse Foundation, and this year's train features the simultaneous release of project upgrades and new projects from 39 project groups. Featuring more than 33 million lines of code based on the work of 490 developers, the Helios release on Wednesday is the largest ever from the seven-year-old release train series. Highlights include a Linux IDE package, an Eclipse Marketplace Client for accessing open source plug-in software, and improved support for JavaScript and Java Enterprise Edition 6.

LinOn Monday, we suggested Ubuntu as a good starting point for experimenting with desktop Linux. If you have the option, dedicate a machine to it – by 2010 standards, even a modest-spec PC will run it fine. You'll be very pleasantly surprised by the transformation from a lumbering old XP box burdened with years of cruft to one with a fresh install of an OS that doesn't need multiple layers of security software.

Yesterday we reported that Ubuntu 10.10 gained Btrfs installation support and since then we have been trying out this Btrfs support in Ubuntu "Maverick Meerkat" and have a fresh set of Btrfs benchmarks to serve up.

The NoSQL database that powers Facebook's popular FarmVille and Café World games is being released as a public open-source project. Zynga (the games' creator), NoSQL start-up NorthScale, and Korean games portal NHN have announced the membase open-source project at Membase.org, under an Apache 2.0 license. All three have contributed code.

Mozilla on Tuesday patched nine vulnerabilities, six of them critical, in Firefox 3.6 and Firefox 3.5. But rather than highlighting the security fixes in Firefox 3.6.4, the company instead emphasized the addition of crash protection, a move meant to keep the browser alive when popular plug-ins drop dead.

To critics like Florian Mueller of FossPatents, all this sounds more like Skull & Bones than Semper Fi. “Canonical is known for being a strategic partner of IBM, and since IBM is the most influential force behind the OIN, that’s probably the reason why its membership status was upgraded,” he wrote me. While Bergelt said the group’s definition of the Linux System is clearly listed on the group’s Web site, Mueller called those definitions arbitrary. “It seems to me that the OIN is basically a strategic patent troll, a non-practicing entity owned by a small group of companies that can use it for its purposes against their competitors whenever they elect to do so, and the protection of Linux is just a pretext,” he wrote. Most open source advocates disagree with Mueller. Pamela Jones of Groklaw believes it is Mueller who is engaged in FUD: