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A new version of the quick-firing Linux keyboard launcher GNOME Do landed last week, bringing with it a "theme" that acts as a whole new desktop interface. Let's check out how it works. If you're just getting started with GNOME Do, head to the release page and check out how to download the latest version for your distribution. Using the Docky "theme" requires a 3D compositing manager like Compiz Fusion, or GNOME's built-in 3D effects.

Just like open source, right? Cloud computing is the new open-source for Sun Microsystems, which has promised to next month reveal more about a cloud platform it's building.…Free Download - A practical guide to disaster recovery planning

One of the advantages Mac and Windows have is that it is very easy to tell someone to buy a computer with Windows or OS X and know that it will work. Unfortunately, it is not as easy to tell someone to start using Linux.

Following the announcement of plans to set up an international committee encompassing Mandriva and its Community, here is the first update concerning the policies for this working group. We aim to define roles, targets and missions for this committee in order to motivate members wishing to take part in this adventure.

There are numerous little things that a new user should learn and remember when it comes to Linux. Now don't let these scare you, but rather, remember them to ensure that you have a proper user experience. These will also save you from a lot of trouble as you learn Linux.

Let's take a look at Sun Microsystems, the once mighty Unix vendor and maker of servers that powered the Internet, circa 1982. And Red Hat, a company that's been purveying Linux software since 1995. Sun sells more than $13 billion of goods and services per year, while Red Hat sells a little over $600 million. So which is worth more?

LXer Feature: 04-Feb-2009

I interview Jesse Trucks a Director of LOPSA, who along with Chris St. Pierre will be teaching several classes guaranteed to make you a better System Admin at their SCALE University for the second year in a row at the Southern California Linux Expo (SCALE) 20th to 22nd of February in Los Angeles.

How to, maybe, keep your own compulsions from getting you fired today. This post's trick (actually it's more of a gimmick - or a way any one of us has probably screwed up at some point in time ;) is fairly simple and, as is generally the case, inversely proportionate in complexity to the work I'm currently getting paid to do so my wife, kids and 5 animals don't go hungry.

As promised in my last article, here is the JavaScript solution to correct mismatched footer column heights [1.]. One change, you will not find the strenuous complaints pertaining the basic inscrutability of all things JavaScript. I must admit my distaste for this scripting language has not lessened, just that my complaints would be less well grounded were I to sound off too much. Hence, let's accentuate the positive. This time my treatment of column height differences is more generalized. Moreover, I even suggest a more abstract approach at the end, albeit, one I neither tested nor verified. Nonetheless, I am confident that even the latter code could be made to work.

The fact that Mozilla's Thunderbird e-mail client has no built-in way to export the whole of a user's mail from one installation to another is as close to a fatal flaw as can be for a class of application — the stand-alone mail client — as can be.

VMware is offering a free (LGPL-licensed) client for use with its VDI (virtual desktop infrastructure) thin client technology. The VMware View Open Client lets users access personalized, data center-hosted desktops from "almost any" device, VMWare claims. VMware will continue to offer its commercially licensed View Client stack for Linux and Windows. The commercial stack adds features like USB redirection, multiple desktop sessions, and multimedia redirection.

Everyblock, which sorts police reports, public records, and news by address, is going open source and looking for a business model. The site is headlined by Adrian Holovaty (right), best-known for Django and the Chicago Crime Google Maps mashup. It was funded in 2007 by a $1.1 million Knight Foundation grant.

The recent out-of-band emergency patch for Internet Explorer has many pundits recommending any browser but IE as the best security defense. Although there is some safety in using less frequently attacked software, a better question is which is the safest choice among the most popular browsers? What are the most important security features to look for in a browser, and what are the weaknesses to beware?

If you were to break into my network, getting to the contents of the right computer would be easy. I facilitate digital burglars by naming my computers according to what they actually are; my main desktop machine carries the label "Desktop", my Aspire One is imaginatively named "One", and this trend continues down to "PowerMac G4", "Ultra 5", and "T2". I always found giving computers real names was a tad bit wacky, but as it turns out, it can actually be very useful to give your servers and computers whimsical but meaningful names.

There are some among the FOSS community who pay lip service to Mahatma Gandhi when talking about this genre of software. There are others who actually put Gandhi's methods into practice to spread the message. Four young men from the south Indian state of Kerala recently followed the example of the Mahatma - who undertook a famous march in 1930 against the tax on salt, to defy the British colonial rulers of India - and walked from one end of the state to the other , meeting people along the way, to spread the message of free software.

Windows Internet Explorer 7 (IE7) is a web browser released by Microsoft in October 2006. Internet Explorer 7 is part of a long line of versions of Internet Explorer and is the first major update to the browser in over 5 years. And now web developers and end users of Linux can use IE 7 on their favorite operating system. IE 7 should also run on BSD systems with Wine 1.1.4 installed.

There are several layers at which a GNU/Linux system’s appearance can be customized. By far the most visible, especially on a multi-user machine, is the login manager screen. KDM (the KDE desktop manager) has a highly-flexible and easy-to-use XML-based theme system. If you can draw what you want, you can make it happen with a KDM theme. I’ll talk you through the construction of one simple theme I designed for my ASUS Eee PC. Read Terry Hancock's tutorial at Freesoftware Magazine.

Reports from several web sites are stating that the next version of the Sidekick from Danger, now a subsidiary of Microsoft, will run NetBSD. According to the reports, the Sidekick LX 2009 will run a custom version of the open source operating system, NetBSD, instead of, as expected by some observers, a modified version of Windows CE with an customised front end.

At the end of last year I wrote about a big Brazilian project to provide 150,000 GNU/Linux notebooks for schools. Now the Brazilian Ministry of Education has topped that by ordering 324,000 "green" workstations running on GNU/Linux (although I can't quite tell whether this is as well as or instead of - anyone know?).

I've had the good fortune to speak with Zend co-founder and PHP superstar Andi Gutmans several dozen times over the last few years. Though he co-founded Zend, Gutmans has long been its CTO with others taking on the role of CEO. That changes now as Gutmans was named today as the new CEO of Zend.