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In Part 1 I talked about the messy state of Linux documentation, and how telling users to rely on Google is not documentation. Good documentation is equally important as good code. Today we look at the different types of documentation, from man pages to glossy books.

Motorola has been involved in open source phones for years, but the Droid running Google Android represents its first opportunity for a home run in some time.

GMPC, or Gnome Music Player Client is a lightweight client for MPD, extendable through plug-ins: alarm, album view, AWN applet, dynamic playlist, fullscreen info, jamendo, last.fm, libnotify, lirc, lyrdb, lyricsplugin, lyricwiki, magnatune, wikipedia info, taglib (for editing tags) and so on (in the latest version). Even though through plugins, GMPC becomes a fully featured music player and manager, it's still one of the fastest applications of this kind: currently it handles a play queue with more than a 1.000.000 songs without a problem. I have a collection of almost 40.000 songs and GMPC uses about 30 mb of RAM with all the plugins installed (the author says that for it's database of 32.000 songs, it used 11 MB of RAM but I guess that was either an older version, or he didn't test it using all the plugins). This article will cover installing the latest version of MPD and GMPC in Ubuntu (as well as setting everything up).

The developers of Ubuntu are actually working on softwares that will be included as default in the future ubuntu10.10 Lycid , one of the news is that a backup tool will be included by default.

Tablet PC support and multi-touch stand out in latest Fedora Linux release. The Fedora Project [http://fedoraproject.org] on Tuesday released Fedora 12, the latest version of its open source Linux operating system and the last of the "big four" Linux releases for 2009. Over the past month all of the major Linux makers have released new versions of their systems including OpenSuse 11.2, Ubuntu 9.10 and Mandriva 2010.

This tutorial shows how you can set up a Kubuntu 9.10 desktop that is a full-fledged replacement for a Windows desktop, i.e. that has all the software that people need to do the things they do on their Windows desktops. The advantages are clear: you get a secure system without DRM restrictions that works even on old hardware, and the best thing is: all software comes free of charge. Kubuntu 9.10 is derived from Ubuntu 9.10 and uses the KDE desktop instead of the GNOME desktop.

We’re here today to talk about Google Chrome OS. We aren’t launching it today and not beta today. But we’ve made progress. As of today the code will be completely open. We’re excited to announce this.

The Fedora Project has announced the latest version of its popular open source Linux distribution. Nicknamed Constantine, Fedora 12 has quite a few impressive new features and demonstrates that the project has gained a renewed sense of direction. In the build-up to the release of Fedora 12, the Fedora community has focused its energies not just on new features, but on where Fedora is headed in the future. As the saying goes, a camel is a horse designed by committee. The Fedora Project's goal is to ensure that this distro remains a horse. To that end, the Fedora community has spent a fair amount of time defining its target audience. Unlike some distros that focus on trying to please as many users as possible, Fedora wants to make sure it pleases its intended audience.

HP is partnering with a Linux vendor for the operating system used on ProCurve ONE, though Hilton declined to specifically disclose the name of the vendor. The fact that Linux is being used on ProCurve ONE doesn't mean it's just another Linux server on a network. "Don't think of ProCurve ONE as a server that is open where users can put any application they want on it," Hilton said. "It is a server, but its primary function is to be able to port pre-certified application onto it. So the operating system is of less importance. The fact that we're using Linux is something that helps our partners but it's not necessary a benefit to the end-user, they just see an application running."

It's often difficult to notice when you're in the midst of making history. Some fine people in San Francisco went about their unremarkable lives in 1967, only to discover years later that they were at ground zero of the "Summer of Love." In the summer and fall of 1999, I spent some time working next door to four noisy, Mountain Dew-swilling misfits working on a renegade project within VA Linux Systems. Little did I know that their efforts would become known as the world's largest open source development site.

Italian firm NSEC is offering IBMs Open Office variant as a VMware ThinApp on a credit card sized USB device.

Red Hat released Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization for Servers on November 3rd. A couple of weeks before the release, I emailed Red Hat media relations contact Kerrin Catallozzi and asked for an interview with some Red Hat employees regarding Red Hat Enteprise Virtualization. It took a several weeks to get the answers back mainly because the official product release happened... and after I had the chance to download, print and read the documentation, most of my questions had been answered... and I ended up coming up with all new questions. Kerrin found Andy Cathrow (Product Marketing Manager) and Jim Brennan (Senior Product Marketing Manager) of Red Hat to provide the answers.

Verizon Wireless sold 250,000 units of its Droid by Motorola phone, according to eWEEK, which has also given the Droid a rave review. Meanwhile, the rumor of a Google-branded Android phone refuses to die, Palm's CEO trash-talks the Droid, and tomorrow Google will unveil its Linux-based Chrome OS, say various reports.

Microsoft has been ordered to stop selling Windows XP in China after a court ruled that certain fonts in the operating system infringe on a Chinese firm's intellectual property. On Monday, Beijing's 1st Intermediate People's Court decided that Microsoft had overstepped a deal with Zhongyi Electronics to include the company's Chinese fonts in Windows 95 by also slipping them into eight other versions of Windows without permission. The alleged font-pas includes Windows 95, 98, 2000, and XP — but not more recent releases: Vista and Windows 7. The court has ordered Microsoft and its China-based ops to immediately stop producing and selling the infringing operating systems, according to the English-language version of state television broadcaster,

As part of the CrossOver Games 8.1 release, and its support for Left4Dead 2, CodeWeavers felt it was important to put superior firepower into the hands of their users! Any customer purchasing CrossOver Games or CrossOver Professional until November 25th will be automatically registered to win this loaded CodeWeavers Gaming PC.

In its latest entry, WorksWithU reports on Dell's plans for the next Ubuntu LTS, 10.04, due (as its numerical designator hints) in the fourth month of 2010 (aka April). What interests me more than the entry itself are the comments that follow.

Goggles Music Manager is a music collection manager and player that automatically categorizes your music files based on genre, artist, album, and song. Basically, it's a simple music player that does it's job and works really fast. Other than it's speed, I was also impressed with how little system resources it uses: 8.7 MB of RAM (on my system) and never more than 2% CPU (my music collections is something near 40.000 songs).

Samsung may be sponsoring the Enlightenment window manager project and Enlightenment may be a component in Samsung's bada mobile operating system. The Enlightenment project, which has been around since 1997, announced today that it was working with a "top-tier electronics maker" which "produces millions of mobile phones, televisions, sound systems and more".

Some critics say Asterisk — the open source IP PBX — is for hackers rather than real telephony customers. EUS Networks begs to differ. The New York-based solutions provider, which works closely with Digium, has launched an Asterisk-based IP telephony solution for a hedge fund client’s trading room floors. Here’s the scoop.

The previous article on the LAMP Server enables you to get started but you will need to do some configuration with MySQL before you go to far. This article and the next several articles will help you create a database and learn how to monitor it as well as backup and restore.