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If you are using an OS based on the Synaptic Package Manager, you must have noticed by now that when trying to install a new package through Synaptic, it draws in miscellaneous packages that are needed for the program to work. These packages are called dependencies. Yet, you might have not noticed that when removing the first-original package, Synaptic doesn’t automatically remove the dependencies that were installed with it.

Reviewing a book in its Fourth Edition is both easy and hard. It's easy in the sense that, unless the book has completely changed, it is still essentially the same as prior editions. If it has done well up until now, chances are it will still do well. Of course the idea for the publisher (assuming the book has done well) is to at least make sure that the book maintains its reputation and hopefully get even better. For me, that translates into, once a good review, always a good review...maybe. The hard part is to pick out the bits that may have changed and evaluate them as part of the current mix. If the book hasn't changed at all and assuming Ubuntu has, then my review changes and not for the better. If the book has changed, how does it stack up to Ubuntu's changes? Does the book still meet the needs of the audience?

I am always surprised by Nicholas Negroponte, he really keeps me on my toes with his pronouncements, and today is no exception. In an interview with Vivian Yeo, where he proudly trumpets his success in selling XO laptops, he also says that the Sugar Learning Platform was OLPC's biggest mistake. Let's start off with the good news. Negroponte tells us that over 900,000 laptops are in the hands of children from 31 nationalities. He claims another 230,000 are being shipped, with a backlog of 600,000 XO's. OLPC Peru is the bulk of the laptop sales, with 350,000 deployed and a commitment for 2.2 million total XO laptops.

Wikipedia’s decision to support Ogg Theora for video uploads may be the last chance to break the proprietary video monopoly embodied in H.264. Microsoft, Google and Apple have all built H.264 support into their products because it readily adapts to Digital Rights Management, without which studios and other video rights owners have been unwilling to make content available online.

In their recent Mozilla Labs "Design Challenge Summer 09" competition, Mozilla posed the question – "How can we create, navigate and manage multiple web sites within the same browser instance?". Out of the 128 submitted concepts, four "Best in Class" honors were chosen and a "People's Choice" award was bestowed. The peoples choice award went to Faber Ludens for his CubeZilla concept, in which sites can be arranged into equal segments on each face of a cube and rotated, in a similar way to a Rubik's Cube.

There’s no question that Ubuntu dominates the desktop-Linux world. With commanding market share and a huge user community, it’s by far the most well supported and documented open-source platform in the desktop world. On servers, however, the situation is different–and Canonical needs to address it if it wants to become a real player in the server market.

KDE and GNOME developers drafted a secret storage API designed to be a common interface for desktop applications that need to store passwords and other confidential data.

The hype over this operating system has been so heavy that failure would be a heavy blow. Google introduced Chrome OS July 7, promising a lightweight, Linux-based operating system for netbooks that will enable speedy Web applications. The move was a major shot at Microsoft, whose Windows desktop operating system Google intimated was antiquated. We at eWEEK have already provided 10 reasons why we are excited about Google's Chrome OS. But in the tradition of weighing the cons with the pros, there are some concerns about the new Chrome OS as well.

In an historic move, Microsoft Monday submitted driver source code for inclusion in the Linux kernel under a GPLv2 license. The code consists of four drivers that are part of a technology called Linux Device Driver for Virtualization. The drivers, once added to the Linux kernel, will provide the hooks for any distribution of Linux to run on Windows Server 2008 and its Hyper-V hypervisor technology. Microsoft will provide ongoing maintenance of the code.

iRedMail is a shell script that lets you quickly deploy a full-featured mail solution in less than 2 minutes. Since iRedMail 0.5, it supports Debian 5.0.1 and Ubuntu 8.04 & Ubuntu 9.04 (both i386 and x86_64). iRedMail supports both OpenLDAP and MySQL as backends for storing virtual domains and users. The OpenLDAP backend of iRedMail allows you to integrate all kinds of applications. This guide shows you how to integrate pure-ftpd into the iRedMail ldap backend on CentOS 5.x, passwords will be stored in ldap and you can change the password through webmail.

Version 1.2.3.of GeeXboX is released. GeeXboX is a free embedded Linux distribution which aims at turning your computer into a Home Theater PC, or Media Center.

Canonical developer Karl Fogel has announced that the open sourcing of Launchpad has been delayed. Originally, Launchpad, the software and site that drives Canonical open source and project collaboration, was to go open source on the 21st of July. Canonical now say this will be at some time in "July / August 2009".

Audacious is a GTK music player similar with the older XMMS (X Multimedia System) player. Ubuntu 9.04 ships with Audacious 1.5.1, which is a little old. However, you can easily install and set up the latest Audacious (currently 2.1) following the steps below:

When Red Hat had its IPO in 1999, many (myself included) saw it as the real coming of age of Linux. While there is little doubt that IPO was a big event for Red Hat and Linux, perhaps an even more important one from a milestone point of view will officially occur this Friday. As of Friday July 24, Red Hat will join the S&P 500 index. In my opinion this is a major milestone for Red Hat and for Linux.

Old dogs may struggle with new tricks, but they seem to be able to figure out new licenses. In a shocking move, Microsoft announced Monday the release of Hyper-V Linux Integration Components (LinuxIC). The news reflects Microsoft's continued interest in lobotomizing its virtualization competition through low prices, but also the recognition that it must open up if it wants to fend off insurgent virtualization strategies from Red Hat, Novell, and others in the open-source camp.

The Sims 3 runs fairly well with WINE. My test rig (E6550, 8800 GTS, 2 GB RAM) performs good on medium-high settings. Since the installation process can be quite hard with Vanilla WINE, a PlayOnLinux script has been created by NSLW, that makes the installation very easy. I thought I just create a short guide on how to install The Sims 3 with PlayOnLinux.

Do we actually own anything any more? Every we time buy, download or use software we have to agree to licenses that means that even though we may pay for them, we are only paying for their use not their ownership.

Last month Radu-Cristian Fotescu, who writes the Planète Béranger blog, posted about running CentOS 5.3 on the desktop, describing his experiences as "simple pleasures". Mr. Fotescu has a well earned reputation for negativity, particularly when it comes to Linux distributions. He has been positively effusive about CentOS 5.3, going so far as to create his own repository of additional or updated desktop software for CentOS and Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.x, and sharing it with the community. As a result I began toying with the idea of running CentOS on my Sylvania g Netbook Meso.

LXer Feature: 20-Jul-2009

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