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James Grimmelman compares Google to Sauron. I'm flabbergasted. I had always thought that Google was the Ringbearer and that Mordor was where Gates and Ballmer hung out. Was I misinformed? Or am I just confused? If it's the latter, I have a decent excuse. After all, even though Google and Microsoft have very different public personae, it's getting harder and harder to tell them apart as businesses. Both built their empires through the same strategy: gaining control of the economic chokepoint of the prevailing computing model of their day.

One of the items being worked on by Red Hat for Fedora 11 is making the GNOME volume control and sound preferences area more intuitive and easier to use. With Fedora and most other distributions now using PulseAudio, they are beginning to take advantage of some of the features available through this sound server. Some of this work involves reworking the user interface for controlling GNOME Sound Preferences, which we are providing a glimpse of in this article. Among other benefits, there is finally the ability to adjust the volume level on a per-application basis.

Welcome to this year's 1st issue of DPN, the newsletter for the Debian community. This issue is dedicated to Thiemo Seufer, who died on 26 December 2008 in a tragic car accident. Topics covered in this issue include "Bits from the Debian CD team", "Bits from the Debian Installer team" and "Results from the Lenny release GR".

Today I would like to announce the appointment of Tracy Anne Barlow aka tracyanne to Contributing Editor. Tracy has been a force of fact and opinion in the LXer forums for some time now. Her contributions to the forums quite literally speak for themselves. LXer is lucky to have her. Please join me in welcoming Tracy to the LXer Team.

Yesterday I published "Why Linux makes Windows 7 obsolete" . Okay, that was quite funny and we all had a lot of fun. But let's analyze what actually happened. In the past, editors of the "major" websites complained they couldn't publish a story on Open Source without being "flamed to hell". It appears that nowadays Windows supporters are just as touchy. The point is, they seems to feel they have to defend their choice. That is quite a change from the arrogant attitude they had before. All in all, it was an interesting social experiment.

This guide explains how you can set up LVM-based virtual machines on a Xen host running on Debian Etch instead of virtual machines that use disk images. Virtual machines that use disk images are very slow and heavy on disk IO.

Steve Jobs is taking a five and a half month medical leave of absence from his role as CEO of Apple, saying his health issues "are more complex than I originally thought." Jobs underwent surgery for pancreatic cancer in mid 2004. Since then there has been much speculation about his health, largely due to a significant loss of weight that gave him a somewhat haggard appearance.

[I have a feeling its going to turn into more than just five or six months. - Scott]

This is the first time that I'm reviewing GIMP (GNU Image Manipulation Program), and it's definitely long overdue. As the open-source image editor of choice, the feature list of GIMP 2.6 is very long, and despite its status as a free application, it's as feature-packed as any commercial application. GIMP is loaded with the up-to-date tools many demanding professionals need: Bézier path editing with brush stroking, tablet support, Heal Tool, alpha channels, multiple-undo History, area-averaged eyedropper, PSD file compatibility, and a wackload of other high-end tools that are impressive in their attention to detail.

While TiddlyWiki is probably the most popular desktop wiki out there, it’s not the only fish in the sea.

Microsoft has a strategy aimed at converting Linux/Unix users to windows, this is obvious because they are creating the tools and extensions to windows that resemble Linux. powershell I had a good laugh when I met windows powershell for the first time, it's really great. You're used to Linux command line and you always type the wrong commands in windows, and suddenly your commands start working. It was really surprising the first time this happened.

Nokia has announced that starting with version 4.5, Qt will be available under the LGPL 2.1. From the announcement, "The move to LGPL licensing will provide open source and commercial developers with more permissive licensing than GPL and so increase flexibility for developers. In addition, Qt source code repositories will be made publicly available and will encourage contributions from desktop and embedded developer communities. With these changes, developers will be able to actively drive the evolution of the Qt framework."

If you haven’t tried OpenOffice.org’s mail merge feature because you find it confusing or difficult to use, you are in luck. This in-depth guide to mail merge with OpenOffice.org explains all the intricacies of using this powerful feature. Learn how to use the mail merge feature to create letters, labels, and envelopes. The guide is also available as a free PDF Ebook document for your perusal

For some time, Ubuntu Brainstorm has been a place for users to share and vote on ideas for Ubuntu. Today, that process just got a little better with the introduction of a new version of Brainstorm.

Part 1 of this three-part series laid the foundation for building an application targeted at the Nokia N810 Internet Tablet, including choosing a target language (Python), selecting and configuring a development environment (Eclipse with Pluthon), and building a small sample application.

If you've been hacking, coding, or just generally IT-ing for more than ten minutes, you've likely run into a stereotype or two about geeks — and there's always a grain of truth, however tiny, behind a stereotype. At least that seems to be the prevailing wisdom at Germany's Potsdam University, where the IT faculty are gearing up to turn their masters students into master suitors.

All right, knock it off, VCS. ...wait, not that way!!!

Like I say somewhere in this barfed-out mass of words, I saw my problems with Opera in OpenBSD on my Toshiba laptop as an opportunity to get back to Debian, a distro I truly love. I'm reluctant to say this, but in a small way having the same problems in Debian Lenny that plagued my Gateway on a totally different hunk of hardware kind of breaks my FOSS-loving heart. But I know Ubuntu pretty well. And it installed without incident. Call it the path of least resistance, or another case of "Ubuntu saves the day." Ubuntu's color scheme may be poop-brown, but I'll take an easily configured, working system over the alternative any day.

I discovered recently the truth of the old saying that necessity is the mother of invention. Yes, I finally did it. I bricked my beloved EeePc. I had just installed the Smart package manager and a subsequent reboot saw me stuck in, well, an eternal boot loop. Impulsive mixing of repositories always ends in tears—but not being able to boot? Argh! To rub salt into the wound I had mislaid the Xandros DVD to do a reinstall and I didn’t even have an external CD/DVD drive anyway. Organised or what? Read the full story at Freesoftware Magazine.

While some mainline Linux vendors have left the Linux desktop for dead, this article explains how I believe a new set of market conditions opens the door for profitability.

eCryptfs is a POSIX-compliant enterprise-class stacked cryptographic filesystem for Linux.It provides advanced key management and policy features. eCryptfs stores cryptographic metadata in the header of each file written, so that encrypted files can be copied between hosts; the file will be decryptable with the proper key, and there is no need to keep track of any additional information aside from what is already in the encrypted file itself. Think of eCryptfs as a sort of “gnupgfs”.eCryptfs is a native Linux filesystem. The kernel module component of eCryptfs is part of the Linux kernel since 2.6.19.