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If you thought the sale saga of Sun Microsystems ended in April, Thursday's news from Washington may have come as a surprise. Months after the ink dried on the deal between Sun and database heavyweight Oracle, the U.S. Department of Justice has finally gotten around to giving its blessing.

The Ubuntu Server operating system has not yet become as widely used as the Ubuntu desktop edition, but it is slowly getting there. A recent Ubuntu global survey showed that only 28% of respondents were from the US, and the majority of these were using the OS only for basic functions such as Web, database and backup servers while only a small minority used it for advanced work such as cluster computing or virtualization. On the other hand, most respondents said they are assigning mission critical tasks to the OS and are planning to add more Ubuntu OS servers in the future.

Learn the new features introduced in Eclipse Galileo for using the new toString() generator. This tip for generating code uses new features introduced in Eclipse Galileo. However, you can use some of the techniques covered here — such as generating getters and setters — in older versions of Eclipse, such as Ganymede, as well.

Ctags generate index (tag) files of the names in header and source files, which speeds up source code navigation in your favorite text editor. Juliet Kemp introduces exuberant-ctags in Vim and Emacs.

The Novell-backed Moonlight project announced a beta of Moonlight 2.0, an open source Linux/Unix clone of Microsoft's Silverlight media framework. Moonlight 2.0 offers improved media streaming enabling media codecs like Ogg Vorbis, Ogg Theora, and BBC Dirac, via a runtime for its sister project, .NET clone Mono. An offshoot of the Novell-sponsored Mono project, which created the Microsoft .NET clone, Mono , the Moonlight project introduced the first version of its Silverlight clone in beta last fall, following up with a final release in February. In May, the project unveiled a preview version of the open source browser plug-in.

Two separate U.S.-based system integrators are shipping Ubuntu 9.04-based netbooks that run on the Intel Atom N270 CPU and offer 10-inch displays and 160GB hard disk drives (HDDs). Denver-based System76 announced a "Starling" netbook, and Berkeley-based ZaReason weighed in with its Terra A20 (pictured).

The fourth alpha of Ubuntu 9.10 was released a few days ago and since I covered it earlier in this article, here I'll briefly overview Kubuntu, the KDE-based distribution of Ubuntu. All the screenshots were taken after a complete dist-upgrade, so the software should be completely up-to-date as of today.

Reading files is no big deal with bash: you just redirect the input to the script or pipe the output of another command into the script, or you could do it inside the script if the file names are pre-determined. You could also use process substitution to pass in the open files (command pipelines actually) from the command line. Another option, the one I describe here, is to just open the files and read (or write) them as you like, as you'd do in other programming languages.

Ubuntu 9.10 Alpha 4 was released last week and with all of its updated packages and changes compared to Ubuntu 9.04, we decided to carry out a fresh round of benchmarks comparing Ubuntu 9.04 to Ubuntu 9.10 Alpha 4. We used a Samsung NC10 for testing with an Intel Atom N270, 2GB of DDR2 memory, a 32GB OCZ Core Series V2 SSD, and Intel 945GME graphics.

The choice of a Linux desktop environment, typically between the "big two": GNOME and KDE, is one that inspires enthusiastic advocacy—some might even say religious fervor—among the supporters of each choice. So, it should come as no surprise that a distribution's default choice of desktop—the one that most new users will end up running—can be contentious, as the supporters of each desktop jockey for recognition of their choice. That battle is currently playing out for openSUSE after a proposal to make KDE the default desktop was made in the openFATE feature tracker; since then, a number of rather lengthy threads on the opensuse-project mailing list, as well as postings on various web logs, have made for a lively debate.

The computer world is notorious for its obsession with what is new - largely thanks to the relentless engine of Moore's Law that endlessly presents programmers with more powerful machines. Given such permanent change, anything that survives for more than one generation of processors deserves a nod. Think then what the Unix operating system deserves because in August 2009, it celebrates its 40th anniversary. And it has been in use every year of those four decades and today is getting more attention than ever before.

Researchers at the Spanish University of Granada are publishing as open source their software simulating the human nervous system, saying this is the only way to allow other teams to become involved. The department of Architecture and Computer Technology last May published Edlut (Event driven look up table based simulator) that can be used to mimic parts of the human brain. Apart from studying how the brain works, tt is meant to aid research into diseases and to test new medicines. The software can also be used to improve robots and other machines, such as accurate control and tool manipulators.

With over 3,000 stories and blog entries to date (according to a Google News search), is there anything left to say about the current XML Patent Wars? Well, yes, there is one thing; they don't really matter.

First look at TonidoPlug Linux-based plug computer. For Linux Pro Magazine readers, the name Tonido will sound familiar. I covered this sleek and user-friendly solution that lets you turn an Ubuntu-based machine into a nifty server in issue 105. Recently, CodeLathe, the company behind Tonido, launched TonidoPlug -- a tiny Ubuntu-based server running the Tonido software.

The Wikimedia Foundation, the organisation responsible for the operation of the Wikipedia free online encyclopaedia, has received $500,000 from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, a foundation established by the co-founder of HP and his wife. According to a press release, this grant acknowledges the important role that Wikimedia projects play in making educational information freely accessible.

And the best part is, you can download these themes directly from PPA launchpad repo itself, which is always the safer bet. This is by far the best collection of themes i have ever seen for Ubuntu.

The Danish Competition Authority has conducted a market analysis of office software so as to give governmental agencies recommendations for public purchases. The results are a definite "live and let live" between the competing standards ODF and OOXML.

Computers get faster and smaller every year, but in the case of servers – the building blocks for many modern businesses – the tasks we expect them to perform have increased to match. We so rely on these servers that we increasingly need to monitor what they do, how they do it and when they hit problems. An under appreciated aspect of modern server designs is that they now incorporate facilities to monitor themselves and report problems: a small computer built into a bigger server to monitor it used to be reserved for very expensive systems, but now even the cheapest 1U Dell server comes with this kind of monitoring and control.

Sony surprised the eBook market last week when it announced it was adopting the open ePub standard. Could this move pressure Amazon to follow suit or is it too big to care.

Asterisk is one of the best telephony solutions which is free to use. There are others such as yate that provide same type of solutions and even more custom ones. Due to the easy of implementation Asterisk has become more popular than anything else. Asterisk is very easy to use and lots of open source and closed source panels provide a GUI for it.