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This article is based on a true story. The names have been changed to protect the individuals involved. It all occurred in a government department where an IT lady had a great idea about converting their computers to GNU/Linux. Let's call her Gillian. Gillian was assigned to research GNU/Linux...

This tutorial will explain you how to boot from a BTRFS filesystem with kernel 2.6.31-RC4 and BTRFS 0.19. BTRFS is a new filesystem with some really interesting features like online defragmenting and snapshots. BTRFS is an experimental filesystem, use at your own risk. The kernel used is also experimental.

Winesharer is my attempt to eliminate some of the file management problems inherent with Wine and the *nix filesystem hierarcy. Currently, Windows applications are installed in each user's home directory which provides security but at a cost of space - especially when the same application is installed multiple times for different users on the same system. By combining Wine with a union filesystem this problem can be eliminated. Winesharer is a collection of unfinished scripts I used to prove the feasibility of this. Now I'm passing the torch to the community so that they can burn this mess and write something that is actually usable.

CentOS is alive. Two days after a core group of developers posted an open letter to primary admin Lance Davis, threatening to fork the open source OS if he didn't discuss his apparent disappearance from the project, Davis has answered their call - and he seems to have quelled their complaints.

It is either a clever bit of strategy or a shambolic u-turn depending upon your view of the company, but Microsoft has now formally abandoned plans to sell the controversial Windows 7 E edition in Europe.

A compiler is software that transforms source code written in a computer language (the source language) into another computer language (the target language, often having a binary form known as object code).

Interoperability with Windows is hard. But somebody has to do it. And if you're going to do something, you might as well try and do it well (and try and have some fun at the same time)

As you may probably know, Linux supports various filesystems such as ext2, ext3, ext4, xfs, reiserfs, jfs among others. Few users really consider this part of a system, selecting default options of their distribution's installer. In this article, I will give some reasons for a better consideration of the file-system and of its layout. I will suggest a top-bottom process for the design of a ``smart'' layout that remains as stable as possible over time for a given computer usage.

Microsoft and Yahoo made a smart deal this week, but I'm wondering why go with Bing, a search technology that's less than 2 months old, and why for 10 years?

In part 1 an examination of creating an ultra simple single port single host port check program was done. In the second part of the series the code was broken out between a header file and source file, input validation added, a usage message defined and a Makefile was setup for simple recompiling. In this part of the series one of the items of the TODO list will be tackled: smaller timeout value for connection test by way of a host pre-check. Which leaves the program with two final TODO items for the next installment:

1. Breaking up the program functionally
2. Detailed error handling
3. Hostname resolution (or not)
4. Any last minute details...

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The cross-platform Qt GUI framework now runs on Wind River's VxWorks real-time operating system, although it currently still requires a separate X11 server to be installed. The Qt developers point out that this version of Qt will probably never run without being customised for each respective version of VxWorks.

Fun with NULL pointers, part 1 took a detailed look at the long chain of failures which allowed the kernel to be compromised by way of a NULL pointer dereference. Eliminating that particular bug was a straightforward fix; it was, in fact, fixed before the nature of the vulnerability was widely understood. The importance of this particular problem is, in one sense, relatively small; there are very few distributions which shipped vulnerable versions of the kernel. But this exploit suggests that there could be a whole class of related problems in the kernel; there is a definite chance that similar vulnerabilities could be discovered - if, indeed, they have not already been found.

Microsoft had to report a 30% slump in sales for the last quarter. Their report to the U.S. SEC includes a rundown of their risk and competition factors. Among their concerns are Linux and open source untertakings, but also their own partners HP and Intel.

This week there were several interesting stories at Phoronix, if you happened to miss any of them. We started off by sharing that proper multi-seat support for Linux / X.Org is on the way with the new VGA arbitration code coming about. With this new implementation, multiple X Servers can be run side-by-side without needing to use Xephyr or any ugly hacks.

Mérida, July 29, 2009 (Venezuelanalysis.com) - This week the Venezuelan Education Ministry began its program, dubbed Project Canaima, to provide primary schools with mini laptops, and incorporate the technology into the education system. While schools are on vacation this week, the ministry will be conducting workshops for teachers on using the computers as educational tools. Starting in September, when the school semester begins, the ministry anticipates providing 50,000 laptop computers to over 1,150 schools nationally.

This fix, courtesy of the fine users of Arch Linux, solved my Xorg problems and cleared the way for me to upgrade from Ubuntu 8.04 LTS to Ubuntu 9.04 — and to the next version of Debian, to Slackware 13.0 ... and just about everything else Unix-like out there on my 2002-era Toshiba 1100-S101 laptop.

You may have seen that the Debian project (my particular GNU/Linux distribution of choice) has decided to schedule fixed time-based releases in future. This has come as a surprise to many — including possibly some Debian developers — largely because of Debian’s long-standing “we ship when it’s ready” policy. So what caused this change of heart and is it a good idea?

A quarterly update of the development of the opentaps Open Source ERP + CRM system

Forget the rumored Apple tablet. A Facebook thin tablet would rule the Earth. While the 'net is abuzz over rumors of the Apple tablet, I'd like to point out a category of device in a form-factor that doesn't yet exist, but would be a killer product. It's also what I believe the CrunchPad tablet should have been designed to be. And that's the "thin^2 tablet". By thin, I mean it's physically thin in dimension, like the iPhone, but it's also thin in the sense that thin-clients are thin when they have nothing but firmware to access a remote server.

Good educational software is hard to come by. And with budgets tight, it is understandable that many schools are turning to Linux and open-source software to save money. Most people have no idea how many outstanding educational applications there are for the Linux operating system. Here are 10 of the best.