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Netbooks—the low-power and lightweight mini-notebooks that have surged in popularity—practically beg for some tweaking and customization to increase the functionality of their diminutive screens and relatively wimpy processors. Find yourself the perfect netbook operating system from this fine selection. Earlier this week we asked you to share your favorite operating system for giving your diminutive mobile-computing companion a boost. You shared your favorite netbook OS, and now we're back to highlight the five most popular options.

While there are many open-source games available (just see the recent discussion about the most advanced GPL-ed FPS), most of them are based upon the ioquake3 game engine that in turn is based upon id Software's open-source id Tech 3 engine. There's also games like Nexuiz that use the DarkPlaces engine and then also Warsow that uses QFusion. There have also been projects like XreaL that seek to greatly expand upon the visual capabilities of the ioquake3 engine, but many of these projects go on without ever making it to a release stage. Today there is yet another open-source game engine in development.

The AirJaldi Mesh Router (AJMR) is built around a SBCs (Single Board Computers) which we extract from low-cost popular WiFi devices such as Linksys WRT54G . Most of the SBCs used, utilize a 200mhz MIPS CPU with 4Mb of Flash memory and 16Mb of RAM. However, we also use some lower-scale units and recently also developed more powerful units. The Netgear WGT634U appears to be most suitable for our application but it was recently discontinued. This small SBC draws less power then its bulkier cousins, features a MiniPCI slot for radio card, hosting a great Atheros b/g radio, double the flash and ram of the WRT54G and maybe the greatest feature of all is a USB2.0 port.

The main objective of this blog is to help narrow down the list of Linux- and BSD-based distributions that a new user will feel comfortable using. Distributions that provide the same or better level of user-friendliness than the malware-infested and DRM-riddled operating system that they currently use. With more than 600 distributions listed at Distrowatch (only about 300 of which are active), finding the perfect distribution, or finding the one that fits your particular usage requirements can be daunting.

While it's exciting to have kernel mode-setting, RandR, and EXA / X-Video acceleration for NVIDIA hardware in an open-source driver that is reliable since the mainlining of its DRM code and its adoption in Ubuntu 10.04 and other distributions, Fedora has already employed Nouveau support to various extents in their recent releases.

Welcome to part 5, the final article in our little series on the KDE 4.3 System Settings control panel. I first off want to thank the KDE devs for creating such a great desktop environment (DE) and for simplifying the control panel (now known as "System Settings"). The last time I had to do an article series like this, it took me 10 articles and nearly a month to pull it off. But don't let the fact that it has a more compact control panel fool you. It's just as powerful as ever. But you don't have to work quite as hard to administrate your KDE 4.x desktop. But that aside, let's have a look at the last section in the System Settings control panel and what it has to offer.

Opera 10.50 beta is out, and it’s a real speed demon! In testing that I’ve carried out lately, I’ve found that Google’s Chrome browser has been ahead of the pack now ever since it was released. Now with Opera 10.50 beta out, we have a new pace-setter. I ran Opera 10.50 beta and the latest release of Google Chrome (4.0.249.89) through the SunSpider JavaScript benchmark and Google’s V8 Benchmark Suite v5. My benchmark of choice is Sunspider JavaScript, and it’s the main benchmark that I use. V8 is secondary.

In Mac and Windows, you can easily sync your iPhone/iPod Touch with iTunes, but in Linux, there is no easy way to sync your iDevice’s music library with any of the media player. Even if you are willing to jailbreak your phone, there are still plenty of complicated steps that you need to do to get the syncing to work. With the release of iFuse (and a bunch of other library), things have changed. Not only can you mount your iPhone as an external drive in Ubuntu, you can also use it to sync your music library with Rhythmbox. The following tutorial only works in Ubuntu Karmic (and other karmic-derivative distro).

Out of work? Interested in finding a more challenging job? Facebook, Google, Yahoo, TekSystems and others will have recruiters at the Southern California Linux Expo (SCALE 8x) who are interested in your expertise in Linux, open source and free software. SCALE 8x will offer an onsite job board where prospective employers and recruiters can list openings..

Keith Packard has just made available the first release candidate of X Server 1.8 and confirms that its release schedule is still on track. Snapshots and the Git code for X Server 1.8 go back to last year, but with a planned release by the end of March, Keith has now started working on release candidates.

I recently read an article about some “Papercuts” a user experienced with Ubuntu 9.10, and it inspired me to write about my thoughts regarding the latest Ubuntu release, four months after its release. Ubuntu 9.10 was reviewed right here on this site. At the time, I found that the temporary theme wasn’t the greatest thing that I’ve ever seen, though it was a worthy upgrade to anyone using 9.04. However, since then my experiences with it have changed my view considerably. While I almost completely switched to Arch Linux for all of my computers, my wife is still an Ubuntu girl, and probably always will be. She just loves it, and all of her computers run it. She recently purchased a netbook that came with Windows 7, and she immediately wanted me to wipe it and put Ubuntu on it. While I offered to install the UNR version (Ubuntu Netbook Remix) on it she made it clear that she just wanted standard Ubuntu, and that’s what I did. In addition, I inherited a netbook as well, though I decided that I would give the UNR edition a try.

We are pleased to announce the Plasma Javascript Jam Session. This friendly competition will reward creators of the most original, interesting and beautiful Plasma widgets (Plasmoids) written in Javascript with some great prizes and community recognition.

We all know that lots of companies use open-source software. Trying to get a handle on what open-source programs they use can be a little harder. That's why the recent report from OpenLogic, an open-source software support company, on both their growth and what programs businesses are asking for help with is interesting. In general, OpenLogic is continuing to grow while many other businesses are stuck in the bad economic times. According to the company, "OpenLogic's new customer growth was strong as bookings increased 86% over 2008 ... [while] renewal bookings grew by 40% over 2008."

Heartbeat automates all the moving parts and can work as well with the MySQL master-master active/passive solution as well as it can with the MySQL & DRBD solution. It manages the virtual IP address used by the database, directs DRBD to become primary, or relinquish primary duties, mounts the /dev/drbd0 device, and starts/stops MySQL as needed.

If you look back on the history of OpenOffice.org, it makes the 3.2 release that came out on Thursday the 11th even more impressive. Nearly 10 years in the making, OpenOffice.org has evolved from a clunky proprietary offering that struggled to import Microsoft Office documents to a productivity powerhouse that is faster, supports a fully open document format (ODF) and handles most proprietary formats with grace.

IBM unveils its entry in the growing market for clustered network-attached storage (NAS) systems, the Samba-based SONAS, capable of handling billions of files and petabytes of data.

I was happy to read From Windows to Linux: A Sound Decision, by Sam Varghese, which ran earlier this week on IT Wire. Mr. Varghese interviews Geoff Beasley, the owner of Laughing Boy Records, and "a producer, composer, arranger and performer." Because it confirmed what I've felt all along, that Linux is a superior audio production platform. I don't have the skills of people like Geoff Beasley, so I wasn't confident in making that claim. In my own experience, audio production on Mac OS X starts out easier than on Linux or Windows. You don't have to fuss with hardware and system tuning, just hook up your audio gear, load up your software, and away you go. AppleScript is a great scripting language for GUI applications. There are three downsides: cost, inflexibility, and inconsistent application quality. It's the same old bushwah from the beginning of time: Most audio production software runs on both Mac and Windows, and rarely equally well on both, but better on one or the other. Sometimes a lot better. (I'm puzzled why vendors don't mind supporting two completely different platforms, but don't want to bother with OS X's close cousin Linux.)

GNU Screen is one of the most useful utilities you can have at your disposal if you spend any time at all working at the command line. Screen allows you to manage multiple shell sessions from one terminal window or console, view multiple shell sessions at the same time, and even log into the same session from more than one location at a time. The screen utility is a "window manager" that allows you to organize and work with multiple shell sessions in a very powerful way. Utilizing screen, you can manage shell sessions in all kinds of useful ways. This tutorial will show you how to display two or more sessions simultaneously in the same window, "detach" from a session and log in later, and even log into the same session from more than one system.

By now, you should have already heard of the popular Wine software that allows you to install Windows applications in Linux. There is also another paid application – CrossOver that utilities Wine and comes with a simplified GUI to help you get the job done easier. Now, here’s another software that is as powerful as Wine and as user-friendly as Crossover, and best of all, it is free.

Google has announced the availability of version 5.0.307.7 of Chrome for Mac and Linux, the latest betas of its Chrome WebKit-based browser for each platform. According to the developers, Chrome on both platforms features stability improvements to plug-ins, such the Adobe Flash Player, and is now even more reliable.