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Text versions of the presentations given at the Linux Symposium 2009 are now available as a PDF file. They provide wide-ranging information on current and future Linux kernel-related developments. The spectrum ranges from profiling using Ftrace, through recent changes to the PCI subsystem intended to make suspend and standby more robust, to the latest developments, such as topology patches, in 2.6.31 and the Kernel Shared Memory infrastructure planned for 2.6.32.

Business software maker VMware Inc has agreed to buy privately held SpringSource for $420 million, its biggest-ever acquisition, to beef up a portfolio of programs that help companies run data centers. VMware said on Monday the deal would hurt non-GAAP profitability through at least 2010, but not have material impact on 2009 revenue.

With its novel package manager, Slax makes it simple to install new software and easy to build your own distributions. Ideally, building a custom Linux distribution would be as simple as burning a CD. In practice, though, the process is more complex, typically requiring the expertise of a developer or system administrator. Slax is a notable exception.

Most Linux distributions have 64-bit versions for x86_64 processors, such as the AMD Athlon II or the Intel Xeon. Since these distributions maintain their own package repositories, they usually provide binary packages for all of their supported applications. If you are completely content with your out-of-box Linux installation, you may never need to run a 32-bit program. Some commercial Linux software, particularly games, only provide 32-bit versions. In these rare cases, you will need to configure your 64-bit machine to run 32-bit software.

I am of XO For All and over the next few posts, I will explain my initial enthusiasm for One Laptop Per Child, and why I have lost that enthusiasm and stopped updating XOforall.com I became enthusiastic and optimistic with One Laptop Per Child and the XO Laptop headed by Nicholas Negroponte of MIT ever since I first heard of the project back in 2005. How could I not be? It had a noble goal, it was tangible, and it had some very bright people behind it.

Is security a sword of Damocles hanging over Linux, just waiting for its popularity to reach critical mass? That's one persistent argument in the Linux vs. Windows debates, but it's just wrong, according to those who know Linux well. For reasons both technological and behavioral, they say, Linux really is more secure. "If the anti-malware industry has anything to offer GNU/Linux," challenges blogger Robert Pogson, "let them step up."

VMware said Monday that it will pay US$420 million for privately held SpringSource in a bid to become a bigger player in cloud computing application management and the open source community.

Yahoo! is losing the founder of Hadoop, that increasingly popular open source grid platform based on Google's proprietary software infrastructure. On September 1, after three and a half years with Yahoo!, Doug Cutting will join Cloudera, the commercial Hadoop startup that launched earlier this year. As reported by the New York Times, Cutting announced his departure from Yahoo! this morning at a company meeting.

Robots can be about as complex a machine as you're ever likely to encounter, but roboticists spend a lot of time solving mundane problems that have already been solved countless times by other robot makers. A recent New Scientist article documents the efforts of researchers around the globe that have begun to collaborate on the Robot Operating System (ROS), which they hope will provide a common platform for robot research, letting its users concentrate on advancing the state of the art instead of reinventing the wheel.

Sun's Glynn Foster has announced today on the OpenSolaris Forums that they will be discontinuing the Solaris Express Community Edition (SXCE) builds. For quite some time now, Sun has been providing bi-weekly updates of the latest (Open)Solaris code in the form of an ISO for those interested in testing out the latest work on this operating system.

Since KDE 4.3 has been released, various reviews have appeared on the web. The DOT had a look at some of them. Polishlinux once again offers an extensive review with many screenshots showing what is new in KDE 4.3. According to Korneliusz Jarz?bski, "Finally the day has come, when the curiosity about the KDE4.3 development branch took the better of me.".

The Open Source Automation Development Lab (OSADL) invites participants to the Real-Time Linux Foundation Workshop from September 28 through 30 in Dresden, Germany. Well-known names such as Jonathan Corbet will be present.

In a long posting on the Debian mailing list, Ubuntu sponsor Mark Shuttleworth sets out his position in the dispute over bringing a fixed development cycle to Debian's GNU/Linux distribution. Shuttleworth points out that he has long advocated a model of synchronisation between the various releases of Linux distributions which are based on the same versions of the same core components.

Four years ago, I wrote an article about OpenOffice.org writer called "Fielding Questions, Part 2 - Cross References and User-Defined Fields." I regularly receive mail about it, but these days I have to preface each reply by explaining that the article is obsolete. Repeating the explanation gets old quickly, so I decided that an update is necessary.

Linux offers a wealth of graphical environments to choose from, from lean barebones window managers to massive colorful desktops full of applications and special effects. Which one is for you? Bruce Byfield compares XFCE, KDE, and Gnome.

Verona is about to become famous for more than just Romeo and Juliet and opera: the university of the romantic Italian city is migrating 4000 of its desktops to Linux and open source.

Computerworld’s Preston Gralla blogged the other day that Microsoft, in a Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) filing, admitted that Microsoft is afraid of Linux, specifically Ubuntu maker, Canonical, and one of the grand daddies of Linux distributions, Red Hat. And with Windows 7 now released to the large volume customers, the debate of the desktop is again back in the cross hairs.

This week at Phoronix began by learning that Compiz is now running on ATI R600/700 GPUs when using the latest open-source Mesa / DRM stack. Owners of ATI Radeon HD 2000/3000/4000 series graphics cards are now just a step away from finding "out of the box" open-source 3D acceleration support. On that same day there was also the release of the OpenGL 3.2 specification, but that didn't come as a surprise.

On July 7, internet search giant Google not only announced its operating system Google Chrome OS with much fanfare, it also quietly released Neatx, an open source NX server. According to the announcement, Google has been looking at remote desktop technologies for quite a while. While the X Window System has issues with network latency and bandwidth, the NX protocol compresses X requests and reduces round-trips, resulting in much better performance — to the point that it can be used over network connections with low bandwidth.

The SCO litigation against — well, let's be honest, against anyone they can think of — has gone on and on and on. As 2007 drew to a close, it seemed the end was in sight, after the company was forced to seek bankruptcy protection to avoid being thrashed in court — which eventually happened anyway. Now it seems the end may really be in sight.