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While watching David Hollow of ICT4D Collective present his evaluation of OLPC Ethiopia at the recent Africa Gathering I was struck by his observation that teachers were banning XO laptops from their classrooms. David found a clear perception by teachers and even parents, that the XO laptop is a toy, not a tool, and children's usage of these computers was actually a detriment to their education. Teachers disliked them enough to ban them from the classroom and parents discouraged their use at home, thinking the laptops were taking away from study time.

With Linux being used as the foundation for numerous smartphone and mobile internet devices, it is tempting to suggest that this movement is going to open the doorway to desktop Linux. Tempting, but not accurate. Linux, the kernel and its immediate subsystems, has never been healthier and its openness has made it relatively easy for developers and manufacturers to get an operating system onto a new class of mobile devices. However, consider the two leading strains of mobile Linux; Android and Moblin. Both start with Linux at the core, but if you move up to the user interface, they diverge.

This article explains how to set up a two-node load balancer in an active/passive configuration with HAProxy and keepalived on Debian Lenny. The load balancer sits between the user and two (or more) backend Apache web servers that hold the same content. Not only does the load balancer distribute the requests to the two backend Apache servers, it also checks the health of the backend servers. If one of them is down, all requests will automatically be redirected to the remaining backend server. In addition to that, the two load balancer nodes monitor each other using keepalived, and if the master fails, the slave becomes the master, which means the users will not notice any disruption of the service. HAProxy is session-aware, which means you can use it with any web application that makes use of sessions (such as forums, shopping carts, etc.).

Canonical's Usability and Design team has announced their first major project, One Hundred Papercuts, which aims to eliminate 100 small usability issues before the next release.

In yet another bizarre twist in the interminable legal dispute over source code allegedly illegally copied from UNIX System V into Linux, the SCO Group, which claims ownership of the disputed code, has secured a last-gasp reprieve from the threat of liquidation. Immediately before the crucial liquidation hearing in the bankruptcy court, SCO CEO Darl McBride signed an agreement with a company by the name of Gulf Capital Partners, backed by well-known investor Stephen Norris. Caught out by the surprise development, all parties have agreed to postpone the liquidation hearing until the 16th or the 27th of July.

Novell has taken two more steps to bolster its SUSE Linux partner program. Arrow Enterprise Computing Solutions is now a Novell Authorized Training Partner in North America. The move comes as Novell strives to migrate Red Hat Enterprise Linux customers to Novell SUSE Linux. Here’s the scoop from The VAR Guy.

Looking for ways to overcome indexing bottlenecks at Craigslist lead to an investigation of Sphinx, a powerful, free full-text search engine that works extremely well with MySQL.

Here we bring you yet another set of Screen Shots, but this time it is of Linux Mint 7 ( Gloria ). Let me start off by saying this... I've been using/managing Linux for almost 11 years now and I want a desktop that just works.. I am so out of that phase on making things work together ( Unless it is programming ). Linux Mint has done that for me, so I really want to say THANK YOU to Linux Mint Staff and Users for all the work you guys have done and for taking the time to make my life easier.

When IBM announces its Smart Business cloud computing strategy on June 16, Canonical’s Ubuntu Linux distribution will be along for the ride. Here's the scoop from WorksWithU, the independent guide to Ubuntu.

Developers have released the Linux kernel version 2.6.30, adding support for new file systems as well as performance improvements and new hardware drivers. The Linux kernel is the core used by GNU/Linux operating system distributions from Red Hat, Novell Suse and others. The new release was finalized last week, and was publicised in a newslist post from Linux developer Linus Torvalds on the next day.

In March, the ever-innovating Linux Foundation announced a new program aimed at bringing the brains behind Linux together with developers-to-be in order to supply the increasing need for Linux talent. Now the program is going online, with the first two courses set to call roll by mid-month. The original sessions of the Linux Foundation Training Program, held at the annual Collaboration Summit, took the form of in-person, hands-on training, a method that provides students an unmatched learning opportunity, but limits the number of students the program can reach. The addition of online courses takes the program to the students, complementing the continued on-site courses offered at Linux Foundation events, local training sessions in select U.S. cities, and by request, specialized training for corporate developers.

Version control systems play an essential role for developers. First up, they allow developers to safely store successive versions of source code. Besides providing a secure backup of the source code, this type of software lets developers revert back to a stable release if subsequent code changes have unforeseen consequences.

In part 1 Eric Geier introduced us to Open-Mesh, and showed us the basic setup for covering a wider area such as a farm, warehouse, or neighborhood. Now we'll discover the captive portal options offered by the Open-Mesh routers so we can display a disclaimer or terms of service, or require a payment or account.

No one can watch everything all the time in the fast-paced IT sector. But it's pretty hard to do something - or not do it - and get it past the readers of El Reg. Recently, a reader told us that server maker Hewlett-Packard was no longer offering support for the Debian distribution of Linux on its servers. And according to HP's website, that appeared to be the case. But as it turns out, HP is still supporting Debian (in a sense). What it doesn't offer is formal support for Ubuntu. And it has no plans to.

LXer Feature: 15-Jun-2009

See how to write simple Plasma applets that improves the KDE 4 Linux desktop. KDE 4 includes many exciting new technologies, including Plasma, a feature that forms the desktop shell of KDE 4. See how to write simple Plasma applets (known as plasmoids) to greatly improve the desktop experience and how to turn a plasmoid into a simple memory monitor.

Follow-up post to recovering files with unrm and Lazarus. This time exploring the graphical web-based interface.

Ubuntu creator Mark Shuttleworth is itching for a clean fight with Microsoft on netbooks. Shuttleworth once told The Reg he can't wait for Windows 7 on this sub-laptop class of machines because it'll finally give Ubuntu the opportunity to compete fairly against Microsoft's operating system in this emerging market.

Even everyday users find themselves in the file manager constantly. We need to make that experience as functional, efficient and user-friendly as possible. Right now I don't think it is. Why are we adding an extra step of adding scripts? "Oh, you mean I have to go out, find them, drag them home and put them in a file folder I can't see normally? I thought you told me that everything ELSE was gears and pulleys. Now I have them in my home file? And why are there "hidden" files in my home directory? What is there that I am not supposed to see?"

Ahead of the UK Ingres Users Association conference, Ingres held a two day code sprint last week to bring together customers and Ingres engineers to develop new features for the Ingres database. The results of the work on the Sunday and Monday appear to be impressive.