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One year ago we reviewed the ZaReason Ion Breeze computer that was built around NVIDIA's ION platform with an Intel Atom CPU, but today we are looking at our first ZaReason notebook and it boasts some very high-end hardware. The Verix 1656 is one of ZaReason's highest-end notebooks and its powered by a quad-core Intel Core i7 CPU (with Hyper Threading to make for eight logical cores in this mobile computer), a NVIDIA GeForce GTS 250M GPU, and a 15.4-inch 1680x1050 display. The ZaReason Verix 1656 also has a very nice brushed-aluminum exterior.

Ubuntu founder Mark Shuttleworth is bullish on PCs exposing millions of consumers to Linux – despite the industry succumbing to Jobsian tablet fever. Shuttleworth reckons that Ubuntu is approaching a tipping point among the ordinary PC-buying public, with the distro shipping on a record (for Ubuntu) five million machines this year.

The Free Software and Open Source Foundation for Africa (FOSSFA) recently elected a new executive which will sit for two years until the Idlelo 5 conference in 2012. Tectonic spoke to the newly elected officials about the successes of the past, new challenges and hopes for the future.

Most users interact with OpenOffice.org on the desktop. But what if you need to do a selective restore on the files that store custom gradients or colors? Troubleshoot why an extension won't install? Share resources with other users? For these kinds of tasks, you need to know a bit about where OpenOffice.org stores its files, and what you can do with them.

LXer Feature: 14-June-2010

In this week's LXWR we have Jono Bacon's Ubuntu: meritocracy not democracy, can virtual PCs save desktop Linux? Is Android fragmentation something to fear? The four different types of Linux users and our own Hans Kwint says "Tear down this stair!". Enjoy!

Last week, the U.S. District Court for the District of Utah finally granted Novell's request for declaratory judgment and ruled against SCO's last frantic attempts to keep any of its claims going. Or, to quote Pamela Jones, editor of Groklaw and top expert on SCO's endless anti-Linux lawsuits: "The door has slammed shut on the SCO litigation machine."

Dell reckons Ubuntu offers more protection than Windows online as it convinces consumer PC shoppers they shouldn't be scared of Linux. In a statement flagged here by TheVarGuy.com, Dell picked on security as one of ten reasons why people should buy PCs running Canonical's Linux rather than Microsoft's operating system.

Maverick Meerkat will drop the Mono-based F-Spot image organiser in favour of Shotwell, reducing the number of Mono-based apps in a default Ubuntu install to just one. Change is afoot. Ubuntu developers have already said that Chromium will be the default browser in the Ubuntu Netbook Remix (UNR) 10.10 release and now news is in that Shotwell will be the default image organiser in Maverick Meerkat.

Two and a half years after the KDE 4 series of releases began, many users are still using KDE 3. A preference for the familiar seems to motivate some; while others seem influenced by the rumors that began with the botched 4.0 release. Still others want a feature that the KDE 4 series has yet to implement -- or, sometimes, a feature they have been unable to find because of reorganization.

Swatch isn’t a cleverly designed watch from the 1980s but you’ll think it’s just as handy (and cleverly designed) as one. Like Logwatch, swatch is a perl script that watches your logs but swatch watches them for regular expressions that you configure. Swatch will notify you via mail or the console screen (stdout) when it matches the configured log file entries with your watchfor directives.

Ubuntu-based tablets could hit the market as early as the first quarter of 2011, says a Canonical exec. "The devices world is a really exciting space right now and we're really bullish on it," Canonical VP of alliances and OEM services told Network World.

Last week when releasing the Linux 2.6.35-rc2 kernel, Linus was upset with the number of late merges and other commits that were receiving pull requests in the Linux 2.6.35 kernel development cycle when the work should instead be now about bug and regression fixes. As such, Linus was going to be much more stringent about what he would allow within the Linux 2.6.35-rc3 kernel and he has indeed followed his tighter rules.

Some netbooks, notebooks and desktop PCs are shipped with compact operating systems designed to boot particularly quickly. Among those offering such systems are BIOS and firmware specialist Phoenix Technologies. Its HyperSpace system is said to stand out because reportedly it can use the virtualisation functions of various Intel processors to run simultaneously with the main operating system and not just as an alternative. However, Phoenix has now sold its HyperSpace division to PC market leader HP for $12 million.

We recently touched on one way of being a Linux gamer. Recent news that Valve Software will soon be releasing a Linux client promises to provide another option for Linux gamers. The news couldn not come at a better time as the world will shortly focus on gaming with the upcoming, industry-only E3 conference, the crown jewel of the gaming industry.

Users of free software are nothing if not passionate. Most of them care deeply about the code they use, and will happily plunge into the flamewars that flare up regularly across the Web. The core focus of those arguments is well established by now: against Mac fans, it's about the virtues of true openness and freedom; against Windows fans (do they still exist?) it's about those, as well as security, speed, stability, etc. But there's another aspect that rarely gets discussed, and yet it represents one of GNU/Linux's greatest strengths: the breadth of hardware platforms supported.

Apple, not Windows, is Linux's prime competitor on smart phones, according to a top Linux representative. Jim Zemlin has told suits reading BusinessWeek that with its declining market share Windows is an also-ran in mobile computing and Linux has emerged as the main competitor to Apple.

The Parallel Realities website offers a collection of simple, mostly SDL based action games. They're all fairly lightweight and might make good boredom beaters on a less powerful machine, or failing that, a handy distraction while waiting for something to complete in the background. If amazing graphics are your thing, be warned that the retro styling of all of these games leans more towards nostalgic appeal than an attempt to wow.

Have you ever thought about how you really spend your time at work? If you're wondering where the time goes, the GNOME Time Tracker is a great tool to help you keep an eye on which activities eat up your days.

When you add text to a photo in GIMP, sometimes it comes out looking flat and boring. Akkana Peck explore three ways of adding an extra dimensions to your images and text.

Google's Android will continue to run an unauthorized version of Java for the foreseeable future — something the Apache Software Foundation has warned will fragment the community. Talks between the ASF and database giant Oracle on tests that could certify the open source version of Java running on Android have made no progress, the group told us.