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This'll be short. I read a review of the current incarnation of Ubuntu 10.04, code named "Lucid Lynx" at the In a Tux blog this morning. The author pointed out a number of flaws, great and small, with the Lynx but finished up the review by saying, "This version of Ubuntu 10.04 is not a stable or final release of Ubuntu, so some of these thing my change. Please do not judge them to soon" (and the spelling errors are the sole property of the In a Tux author). Since the Daylight Savings Time change has "jet lagged" me into near-incomprehensibility (and that's hard to spell when you're really tired), I wasn't quite sure when the Lynx was to be released and I decided to look up the release schedule at Ubuntu.

It’s popular to hate on IE8, and easy to do! But the truth is, Firefox could take a few cues from stodgy old Internet Explorer. From user-friendly features to deployment tools, there are still a few things that IE does better.

We, my partner and I receive a regular advertising newsletter from Dell, because our company is on their mailing list, apparently although we have never purchased a single Dell, we are one of their best customers (the deal is offered to quote "our best customers"). The latest one was pushing a special rate on Dell Laptops and desktops with Windows 7, around $1750. So I rang the up and asked for a price with Linux.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 (Tikanga) was released on March 14, 2007 and yesterday was RHEL 5's 3rd birthday. Since then we have gotten 4 update releases. Given the fact that Red Hat original plan was to have a new RHEL release every 18 - 24 months, one has to wonder where RHEL 6 is and why it is so late. My best guess is that RHEL 6 (which so far has had a non-public alpha release within Red Hat as witnessed in some Bugzilla reports) will come out sometime this summer... possibly in time for the Red Hat Summit in Boston (June 22-25, 2010). For that to happen I would expect a public beta for RHEL 6 to be released in the not too distant future. We'll see how that pans out. While we are waiting, how about some idle discussion?

A number of humorous yet undocumented features are hiding beneath the surface of some of the most popular open source software applications. Although easter eggs are generally easy to spot when you can look at an application's source code, there are a few that aren't widely known.

I regularly sit in the #ubuntu channel on the Freenode network helping folks with their Ubuntu issues and one of the things I see people often doing is attempting to install software from source before researching other installation methods.

The AuthorSupportTool extension not just adds some random features to OpenOffice.org Writer, it dramatically enhances the word processor's functionality, turning it into a powerful tool for working on research papers and complex documents.

In the growing war of words between Apple and Google, Google just picked up a very sharp tongue with many followers. Even without writing a line of code, his impact will be felt through his blog and tweets. One month after resigning from Oracle and after spending a few days teasing it on Twitter, Tim Bray, the co-creator of XML and one of Sun's more prominent personalities, has resurfaced with Google to work on the Android platform. At Google, Bray will assume the title and position of Developer Advocate, which he admits is a bit fluid at this point. He also admits that he has a lot to learn about Android, the Google-backed open source mobile platform, and is not totally sure of what his job will entail. Bray plans to bring himself up to speed on HTML 5 and write an Android app to learn the platform.

Mark Shuttleworth, founder of Canonical, says some progress has been made towards what he calls cadence, an alignment of versions and release schedules, between distributions, even though his earlier proposals of a formal alignment between Debian and Ubuntu were not taken up. He points to an informal synchronisation between Ubuntu 10.04 LTS and Debian Squeeze on the Kernel, GCC, Python, OpenOffice.org, Perl and Boost versions, as an example of progress.

Join me on a tour of my house as I show how I use open source software in nearly every room. This episode also is the first to use my new intro. This episode is NOT sponsored by the Apple iPad.

Forget Firefox, Chrome, Internet Explorer and the rest. We put the seven other browsers through the PC Pro grinder, with surprising results.

Switching to Linux is easy if you know how to run Windows applications on it. For many users considering switching to Linux the biggest hurdle is a question of whether they can find a suitable replacement for their favourite Windows applications. While sites like LinuxAppFinder list hundreds of open source application alternatives it's not always as straight forward as that. Many users are bound, for one or other reason, to using a particular application, be it because there is no way to convert existing data or because company policy demands they use a particular application. Fortunately there are a number of ways to run a good deal of Windows applications on Linux.

X2go - Open source terminal server project (alternative to FreeNX). x2go is an open source terminal server project offering a comprehensive “server based computing” solution. Combining the advantages of existing systems it features ease of use, performance and scalability. x2go provides you with access to your desktop as an individual as well as a corporate user - from within your own network and via the internet. x2go is not limited to any particular hardware, it supports a variety of devices and architectures. x2go is open source and open minded. The project also offers you a command line client for you to implement your own client applications and ideas. Like any open source project we welcome your support.

If you ever used or seen some screenshots of Linux Mint (or openSUSE), I'm sure you noticed how amazing it's menu is. I don't know about you, but I've always wanted to install it in Ubuntu. Sure, you could install Gnome Main Menu ( sudo apt-get install gnome-main-menu ) but I don't find it to be nowhere near as useful as the Linux Mint main menu.

In which the shadowy Alexandria Project finally shows its hand - and delivers an ultimatum.

This tutorial shows how to do data striping (segmentation of logically sequential data, such as a single file, so that segments can be assigned to multiple physical devices in a round-robin fashion and thus written concurrently) across four single storage servers (running Fedora 12) with GlusterFS. The client system (Fedora 12 as well) will be able to access the storage as if it was a local filesystem. GlusterFS is a clustered file-system capable of scaling to several peta-bytes. It aggregates various storage bricks over Infiniband RDMA or TCP/IP interconnect into one large parallel network file system. Storage bricks can be made of any commodity hardware such as x86_64 servers with SATA-II RAID and Infiniband HBA.

Some Linux users insist that anything you can do on Windows, you can do better on Linux. While there's some truth to that, many of us have Windows applications that make completely leaving Windows close to impossible. That's where CodeWeavers' latest version of CrossOver Linux comes in. CrossOver Linux 9 (code-named Snow Mallard) and its Mac brother, CrossOver Mac 9, let you run many popular Windows applications on Linux or Mac OS X. Supported Windows applications include Microsoft Office (from Office 97 to Office 2007), Internet Explorer 6 and 7, Outlook 2002 to 2007, all current versions of Quicken up to 2010 and QuickBooks up to 2004, and some versions of Photoshop and Photoshop CS.

XML co-inventor and languages expert Tim Bray has taken a job at Google just a month after he left Oracle. "As of this morning I work for Google. The title is 'Developer Advocate'. The focus is Android. Fun is expected," he wrote in a blog post titled "Now A No-Evil Zone". Bray, who is among a growing list of Sun veterans to have jumped ship since Oracle bought the company earlier this year, didn't mince his words about his new anti-iPhone job with the Mountain View Chocolate Factory.

Will a mass produced Linux pad ever exist to compete with the iPad? One reader says that there is one but you get a different story when you click "Order."

LXer Feature: 15-Mar-2010

This past week on LXer we had Jonathan Schwartz reminiscing in "Good Artists Copy, Great Artists Steal", a newbies guide to hacking the Linux kernel, Phoronix reviews power and memory usage in the various desktop environments, Former Sun chief open source officer Simon Phipps joins the OSI board, Jack Deslippe explains why he no longer uses Apple products and last but not least my editorial on why Windows users have no Choice. Enjoy!