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It's getting to where a fellow can't enjoy a nice relaxing boot time these days. The latest perpetrator of the conspiracy: Linux application tool vendor MontaVista, which said today that it is demonstrating an embedded Linux system that boots in just one second. MontaVista's Linux demo goes from a cold boot into a sample, "fully operational" vehicle dashboard application in a single second, the company said. It will be showing off the speedy boot performance at the Virtual Freescale Technology Forum this week.

In 1996 when KDE was first announced, it had only a handful of developers and the project could manage the source code without using a revision control system. More and more developers have begun to contribute to KDE over the years, and while there has been some attrition, the total number of active developers working on KDE has been steadily growing. In order to get a pulse from the current developer community, Simon St. James and Arthur Schiwon produced and plotted two basic metrics that show the continued growth within the KDE community.

A group called PlanetWatt has released a Beta 3 version of a new lightweight, power-sipping distro based on Ubuntu. The low-power WattOS is built from scratch using the Ubuntu MinimalCD and Ubuntu 9.04, and uses the lightweight LXDE environment and OpenBox, says the group.

Akademy 2009 was held as part of the Gran Canaria Desktop Summit in Las Palmas de Gran Canaria last week. During the week the KDE community attended conference presentations and was engaged in meetings, informal discussions and of course a great deal of coding. This article provides an overview of what's happening in the KDE universe and what can be expected for the future.

So Google wants to be a player in the operating system market and Microsoft wants to be a search player? Meh.

Microsoft and Red Hat have launched hosting and cloud partner programs within weeks of one another. But the partner programs are as different as closed source and open source.

jQuery makes writing a good JavaScript-based Web application easy and straightforward, but there are a few extra steps required to turn your good Web application into a great Web app. This article details some of the steps to give your Web application the final layer of polish.

The Linux and Free/Open Source Software world is chock-full of heavy-duty applications and suites for the enterprise, and many of them are cross-platform, running on Linux, Mac OS X, Unix, and Windows: collaboration/groupware, business intelligence, point-of-sale, data warehouse, document management, e-commerce, accounting, human resource management, content management/Wikis, and much more. Cynthia Harvey presents a list of 101 excellent FOSS enterprise applications and suites.

The Mandriva Linux Online team is proud to announce the second version of the MLO live CD, a lighlty modified version of Mandriva One KDE4 2009.1.

Important changes in this new edition: the live CD is available in the English and French Languages. It is oriented for the beginner and principally aimed at introducing and integrating Windows users.

One of the most unforgettable quotes on Earth — witnessed live by some six hundred million people — wasn't uttered here. "That's one small step for [a] man, one giant leap for mankind," the famous words of astronaut Neil Armstrong upon becoming the first person to set foot on another world, have a lasting legacy not likely to be met until human exploration eventually reaches our planetary neighbors.

If your wife has been upset with how much time you spend on our forums, that you subscribe to Phoronix Premium, or that you always occupy her computer by running the Phoronix Test Suite on it, fear no more! Just send her over to the newest web property that's managed by Phoronix Media, Foodstruments. Foodstruments is a portmanteau for "Food Instruments" and this is a site that features cooking gadget reviews, inexpensive cooking tools, and other products for the home and kitchen...

IBM's Power servers topped a list of most reliable x86 and Unix machines in a new survey, clocking in at only 15 minutes of unplanned downtime per year. Linux distributions running on x86 servers also performed well, as did Sun's Sparc machines and HP's Unix boxes. Windows Server machines performed worse than most competitors, with two to three hours of downtime per year, but have still improved dramatically over previous surveys.

Juliet Kemp is one of my favorite authors. She writes a regular "Tip of the Trade" column for Serverwatch.com, and a regular monthly howto column for LinuxPlanet.com. Today I have assembled some of my favorite Tips all in one handy-dandy article: the magic sysreg key, proc and processes, fuser, cracking passwords, iptraf, UUIDs, and more.

Actually, CS 19889 is in Xen 3.5 Unstable. However, attempt to install mentioned DomU at Xen 3.5 Dom0 via standard pygrub profile aborts with message cannot find kernel “/boot/platform/i86xpv/kernel/amd64/unix”. Setup bellow has been tested with 2.6.30.1 xenified (aka Suse) kernel and 2.6.31-rc1 pvops enabled kernel been built via rebase/master branch of Jeremy Fitzhardinge git repository. The root cause of the problem is ZFS v.16 utilized by SNV_117 DomU for it’s image device unsupported by Xen 3.4.1.

The race for the fastest Linux boot has been going on for about a year at this point and now we've got a new winner. Embedded Linux vendor MontaVista today is announcing the demonstration of a 1 second Linux boot. In contrast the fastest production Linux releases today are in the 20-25 second range. To be fair, MontaVista's Linux with the 1 second boot is embedded and designed specifically for the Freescale Semiconductor MPC5121e hardware built on Power Architecture technology. That's not to say they can't get the same performance on other architectures, it's that is the hardware on which the first 1 second boot is being demonstrated.

This article explains how to set up a two-node load balancer in an active/passive configuration with HAProxy and heartbeat 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 heartbeat, 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.).

Last week Google announced their intention to release an operating system based on Linux. The reaction of some people on reddit was: "No, another neutered, watered-down, crapitized "linux". Linux will once again be viewed as a sub par, 'specialized' OS." Well, this is not possible because Linux is not really an operating system, it is a kernel. And it is actually very successful as a specialized operating system's kernel.

A place dedicated to the Linux user. Learn new Linux tips and tricks every day. Not only for the advanced but also for novice users who wish to learn how easy life with Linux can be and how customizable the operating system is. Learn how to change the color of your Linux prompt, set the clock from the Linux command line or minimize any GNOME application in the system tray.

I love zeal. Zeal is enthusiasm, it's zest, it's drive, it's initiative. Zeal builds communities. Unfortunately, in some individuals, zeal turns to zealotry, and zealotry does just the opposite. This a long posting, but it provides an excellent example of what I'm talking about, and I hope you'll take the time to read it.

Recent early development releases of the popular distributions provide a preview of what's to come, while some lesser known distributions reach new milestones. A new version of the KDE desktop is due by the end of the month.