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For most of the summer, Microsoft has done a good job of capturing the lion's share of media attention, but this week Google took steps to wrestle that attention away.

Mark your calendars, for 12 August 2009 deserves to be remembered for all eternity. At least it was an important day for me. Because one thing that I was missing on OpenSolaris and in the GNOME desktop environment was GNOME-DO. This application was one of many that truly made me efficient in a GNU/Linux environment. It is unfortunate though that a package of it does not exist in OpenSolaris. Even when installing Mono (pkg.opensolaris.org/contrib) and all the necessary components, I still had problems building the package. One day I may revisit that but in the meantime I decided to concentrate on building and installing the gnome-launch-box. For the most part, gnome-launch-box will do all that I really need it to do.

This is the second course in the Bash Shell course series which will help you understand the basics of working with the vi text editor in Linux. At some time everyone who uses Linux will need a text editor. One of the most important reasons for learning vi is that it is loaded on every Linux distro by default whereas others like nano or emacs are not. So whatever, text editor you choose be sure you load it and use it before you need it.

Break out the Speedos, grab the suntan lotion from the cupboard and crack open a chilled lager: the new summer collection from the top three desktop distro vendors is here. But if you’re thinking of giving a slice of your hard disk to one of these prominent free operating systems, don’t bother.

A steady stream of manufacturers are requesting Linux drivers for their hardware, suggesting growing adoption of Linux operating systems among enterprises. According to Greg Kroah-Hartman, Novell programmer and Linux Driver Project lead, the group of some 400 programmers at the Project receive requests to port existing closed-source drivers to open source drivers for Linux "all the time", and has been "doing a lot of work on this over the past few years".

Black Duck has analysed its database of 200,000 open source programs to see which programming languages are most popular. The database is used by the company as part of their compliance and license management services.

This howto describes how an Ubuntu 9.04 Samba server is integrated with Active Directory, and how to use Winbind; the Linux server sees the domain users and groups transparently. I assume that your Ubuntu server is installed and ready to be configured with Samba.

The issue of how long a Linux distribution will support a release is one that tends to go back and forth. Novell's openSUSE Linux is now revising its policy. Starting with the openSUSE 11.2, maintenance support will be approximately 18 months which is reduction of 6 months from what openSUSE 11.1 and prior offered users.

A few days ago I set myself to install openSuSE 11.1 (LiveCD based on KDE4). The thing is that this particular box has a hardware RAID set up. I had no problem installing other OSs on top of it so I thought it was going to be painless.... It wasn't. When the installer was about to finish, on the part where grub was going to be installed on the MBR, it would fail miserably with an error 21. It would complain about not being able to find a certain device.

We have all read many tutorials and articles about what programs to add to Ubuntu after installation. However I have yet to see an article or tutorial talk about installing the extras that beef up the default programs that come with Ubuntu.

Macs have always used a three-button mouse. The fact that no one has ever SEEN such a mouse is not because mac users are delusional. It is because they love their computers so much that they assume that if a three button mouse is a good thing, then there must be one attached to their box ....

Penguin Computing, a company that provides high-performance computing resources to researchers, scientists and engineers, has begun offering its services in the cloud. Penguin On Demand (POD) became available on Tuesday. The company said the service is intended for those who need HPC capabilities without having to acquire the clustered infrastructure required for that level of computing.

A whole new era for Veterans Affairs VistA has begun with Kevin Toppenberg, MD's new TMG-CPRS 1.0.26.76 (TMG v1.1) client. The new tmg-cprs client enables clinical notes to be rendered in html. This allows mixed typefaces, bold, center, right justification, left justification and italics in clinical notes while maintaining compatibility with Veterans Affairs cprs. Dr. Toppenberg announced on the Hardhats list.

The DNS servers of my ISP is always behaving erratically. The DNS look up times are abysmally large and some times I get an address not found error while browsing. On ubuntu/debian systems the DNS servers are specified in /etc/resolv.conf. I tried to edit /etc/resolv.conf and put open dns servers as default DNS servers. But, my ISP supplies their DNS server address along with IP address for the system via DHCP. Every time my system renews its DHCP lease. my /etc/resolv.conf is also rewritten with their DNS address.

Day Clipboard Utility (free) is a nice little app that takes text or an image that you've copied to the clipboard and captures it into itself upon your request. It will then save said image or text file in its own folder. This whole process can be automated, or you can approve each piece of text or image as it comes in to the clipboard.

A Dell executive said that his company's Linux netbook returns are roughly equivalent to those for Windows-based netbooks, says an industry report. The remarks were in response to Microsoft's COO Kevin Turner, who gave a speech claiming Linux netbook returns were four or five times higher.

When benchmarking development releases of Fedora in particular, they often end up being much slower than the final build and perform lower when compared against some of the other leading desktop distributions. As we have mentioned in previous articles, this is generally due to the debugging support enabled within the development builds of Fedora. To see just what the performance cost is, we have compared the Fedora 11 performance of the normal kernel against the kernel-debug package. Additionally, we also compared the performance when disabling SELinux and system auditing support.

What is the most popular programming language used by open source developers? The answer depends on how you define popularity. According to a new study from Black Duck, a software-license code analysis vendor, C represents more than 40 percent of all code written for open source software. Black Duck made its determination by counting the actual lines of code. While C is the leader by that measure, PHP and JavaScript are on the rise when you look at the broader picture of how open source projects use programming languages.

The openSUSE project, which creates the development version of Novell's SUSE Linux, is getting a handful of full-time Novell developers. You might find it hard to believe that there were not already full-time staffers dedicated to openSUSE, given the importance of Linux to Novell's future. But apparently, this has been the case since Novell formalized and opened up the openSUSE project four years ago.

The truth being they are more trouble than they are worth. Ever since the State Street case set off a gold rush to patent software, and software concepts, Microsoft has been tieing itself in knots. (Here is a fun game. Invite your favorite Microsoft employee to lunch and then show up in this snazzy t-shirt from Zazzle.com. Inspiration for Insanity indeed.)