LXer Weekly Roundup for 28-Nov-2010

LXer Feature: 28-Nov-2010 In the Roundup this week we have all kinds of Open Source goodness for you including the news that Novell has been acquired by a company that may or may not have ties to Microsoft, how to wake up a Linux server remotely, Part 1 of how a KDE 3.5 user moved to KDE 4.4, ARM's co-founder says Intels days of dominating the desktop are numbered and on a personal note today is the 5 year anniversary of the day my relationship with Linux got serious. Enjoy!

What's Microsoft's role in the Novell-Attachmate deal?: Seattle-based Attachmate Corp. is buying Novell for $2.2 billion, the companies announced on November 22. At the same time, Novell announced the “concurrent sale of certain intellectual property assets to CPTN Holdings LLC, a consortium of technology companies organized by Microsoft Corporation, for $450 million in cash.” So far, Microsoft is saying little about its role in the deal.

Novell Agrees to be Acquired by Attachmate Corporation: Novell, Inc., the leader in intelligent workload management, today announced that it has entered into a definitive merger agreement under which Attachmate Corporation would acquire Novell for $6.10 per share in cash in a transaction valued at approximately $2.2 billion. Attachmate Corporation is owned by an investment group led by Francisco Partners, Golden Gate Capital and Thoma Bravo. Novell also announced it has entered into a definitive agreement for the concurrent sale of certain intellectual property assets to CPTN Holdings LLC, a consortium of technology companies organized by Microsoft Corporation, for $450 million in cash, which cash payment is reflected in the merger consideration to be paid by Attachmate Corporation.

How a “Welded-to KDE3.5 User” Began a Move to KDE4.4 - Part 1: In this first part of a two part guest editorial and tutorial Dr. Tony Young (an Australian Mycologist by trade) shares his trials, tribulations, successes and disappointments in working with the new version of KDE. As a long time KDE 3.5 user he decided to see if he could get KDE 4.4 to look, feel and work the way he was used to KDE 3.5 working. Hang on everyone, its going to be a bumpy ride..

Linux Backup Server: Remote Wakeup, Automatic Shutdown: At last I can write this up for you, my fine readers. Today we're going to learn about using Wake-on-LAN to wake up a server remotely, and automatic shutdowns. My master plan for my backup server is to automate everything-- wake it up, run backups for all the computers in my house, and then everyone shuts down for the night.

Wayland VS X - Some Perspectives: The Linux world has been very talkative for the last few weeks with the news that Ubuntu plans on switching from the classic X server to Wayland for it's graphics environment. What is Wayland exactly and why the change?...

Top Five Linux Deployment Mistakes: The days when Linux is an unknown quantity in a business are largely over — but that doesn't mean that every organization has tons of experience deploying Linux. Even if your organization has deployed Linux before, there are some common mistakes to be aware of. Here's five things you need to watch for when planning a new Linux deployment.

The best open source netbook distro of 2010 revealed!: Linux User & Developer magazine reviews four of the best netbook distros currently available in a bid to uncover the ultimate open source user experience for your netbook computer…

Intel Is Dead on the Desktop, Says ARM Co-Founder: Its days are numbered and the downfall of the Wintel monopoly has been forecast for some time. Intel has indeed lost significant ground to ARM chips, and Microsoft faces equally annoying competition from the likes of Google's Android, which is climbing onboard practically every computer that isn't a desktop PC or server.

Moving Desktop Windows users to Linux: More than a year ago I wrote a post concerning my personal experience. I manage our computer systems at work and never tried to convert user Pc's to Linux, instead sometimes I showed them some of the nice stuff and played with them when their windows system crashed, or simply because network printers stopped working.

Goodbye Fedora, welcome back Debian, Part 1: I really did like Fedora 13. I liked it enough to solve more than a handful of problems. I liked it enough to use a proprietary graphics driver for the first time (didn't like that; not only was it outside the package-management system and hard to update, it didn't perform so well either). I love the Fedora community, the openness that's everywhere, the lack of pretense. But just as everything was roses, furry kittens and such when I first ran Fedora 13 with the 2.6.33 Linux kernel, it started to go dark with the change — in mid-cycle, mind you — to the 2.6.34 kernel.