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Most migrants from other operating systems will seek out a Linux alternative to the ubiquitous iTunes, and chances are they'll come across Amarok 2.0 and Songbird 1.0. They're both contenders for the Linux music player crown, but take different approaches. Which one is right for you? Amarok is a native KDE application (but is also available for other operating systems besides Linux via KDE ports), while Songbird has been built using Mozilla technology, so it's cross-platform from the first step. Migrating to either from other, lesser, applications is a breath of fresh air. They do the same kind of things, but in a more effective and better-looking way.

Linux New Media AG has presented its annual awards for outstanding contributions to Open Source at CeBIT 2009 in Hannover. The OpenStreetMap project ended up garnering two of the six Linux New Media awards.

About a year ago almost every netbook ran on Linux. Now the free platform has disappeared from almost all of them. In an Open Source Forum at CeBIT, Warren Coles of Taiwanese netbook vendor Linpus explained the reasons why.

Knoppix has always been regarded as one of the most versatile Linux distros out there, but the latest version of the venerable Live CD Linux distribution has got yet another trick up its sleeve.

PlayOnLinux version 3.4 has been released and it has some long awaited new features and as always bug fixes and tweaks. Also a new version of the PlayOnLinux website will be coming soon, so keep a eye on the site for these future updates.

The developers behind Novell's openSUSE Linux distribution have unveiled the roadmap for version 11.2 and the schedule for the next several releases. The distro is moving towards a time-based eight-month cycle.

A few weeks ago, after some soul-searching, I decided to pack up the OLPC and ship it off to a new user elsewhere in the world. I've relayed it to a second party in America, who is better equipped to present it to its new owner.

Linux the cool factor As I wrote in my last post, I think Linux is not perceived as cool by enough people. While Linux is definitely very cool! Last time I mentioned compiz, which gave very different responses. Some people think it's great others hate it. Today I'll throw in something completely different.

At some point, nearly everyone who uses Linux has someone ask them “what’s that?” This question almost invariably leads to “why is it better than (other operating system)?” What do you say when someone asks you this?

While my OpenBSD laptop slowly compiles Java (or not ...), I had to pull out the Ubuntu 8.04 laptop (both have identical hardware, Toshiba Satellite 1100-S101) and quickly slam out a couple hours' work late last night (yes, on the night shift, which I finished at home ... at 1 a.m. through the magic of Wi-Fi and caffeine).

Save time and effort by launching batches of self-configuring virtual machines quickly. Sometimes you need to create an configure a bundle of virtual machines at the same time, but manually cloning and configuring the lot promises to be an unhappy task. In this article, see how to develop an automatic VM deployment solution so you can launch and activate batches of self-configuring VMs quickly. And as a bonus, you'll discover an approach that lets you run customized applications separately for each deployed virtual machine after system start.

It's a swampy bureaucratic wasteland full of legal minefields, and creepy little wild-eyed paranoid people scuttling around clutching secrets to their chests and croaking "Mine! Mine!"

What's more mature HP's Unix or Linux? According to HP, it's UNIX. For the past 25 years, HP has been rolling out its HP-UX Unix operating system on a regular basis to support mission-critical operations. That's going to continue with the company's upcoming update to HP-UX. The release, codenamed "Vigilance" and officially referred to as HP-UX 11i v3 Update 4, will offer improved virtualization capabilities and performance, InternetNews.com has learned.

The more things change, the more they stay the same. In the olden days we had real modems with bauds and everything. A lot of years have passed, and Linux has acquired a lot of new communication protocols and devices. But here we are back to modems (EV-DO and HSDPA) being the latest and greatest. Paul Ferrill shows us what and how.

Free screenshot manager Shutter provides a really handy upgrade from the built-in GNOME screen grabber, sending your images to editors, auto-thumbnailing, sending to FTP or hosting sites, and doing much more. Shutter is actually the 0.7 version of what was once known as GScrot—and, boy, did that name need changing. The free app is a serious boon to bloggers, technical writers, or anyone else who needs to show off part or all of their Linux desktop.

I was with a big customer of ours last year, and reading through my account briefing before the meeting, I knew we were doing well. An analysis of their download activity showed they were heavy users of Solaris and OpenSolaris, and they had a large internal community of MySQL users, as well. In the meeting, their CIO said "we love where Solaris is headed." I then asked if we could help with MySQL, and he said... "I banned it."

Stephan Kulow, the OpenSUSE project manager, has proposed a roadmap for the future versions of OpenSUSE. While Ubuntu and Fedora distributions currently aspire to provide a new release every six months, which is loosely pinned to the GNOME development schedule, previously OpenSUSE did not have a have a fixed release schedule. OpenSUSE will now try to ship a new version every eight months as part of their new release cycle.

Jason Perlow of ZDnet's TechBroiler blog and I will discuss Netbooks and Virtualization.

If you want Java in OpenBSD, it's not easy to get it. Not impossible, but definitely not easy. First of all, it's a port, not a package, and due to Sun's licensing restrictions for Java, when you run the build on the port, you are instructed to, on your own, fetch nine files (some source, some binary) from a variety of locations and place those files in /usr/ports/distfiles.

Back in November we saw the launch of the S3 Graphics Chrome 530 GT and with that they talked up a new magical Linux driver that would provide HD video acceleration support along with OpenGL 3.0 capabilities. But no driver was released, however, a day later it was confirmed by S3 Graphics that they were working on a new Linux driver. Their PR representative said the driver was to be released in December, but that didn't happen. In February they continued to talk up their Linux support but months later there still was no driver. However, that changed in late February when S3 Graphics did in fact roll out a new Linux display driver.