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"Be polite. Be helpful."
-LinuxChix motto

When attending conferences, working with various open source teams, and generally interacting with people in the open source world, we see women as a small representative minority. The disparity leaves us wondering: "How do we better activate 50% of the population?". The question, "How do we include more women?" has been asked many times and answered in many ways. Cathy Malmrose, CEO of ZaReason, a Linux hardware company, stated, "possibly the most immediately effective solution is to showcase women internationally and their contributions. Simply talking about what women are doing all over the world creates an atmosphere of acceptance, encouraging more women to try contributing, no matter where they are located or what their situation is. Our goal is to normalize the experience of having women on open source projects".

When the Computex show opens in Taipei on June 2, among the announcements will be a series of Linux notebooks with ARM processors.

On Friday my housemate and I went down to what used to be the Tiger Direct retail store in Raleigh. It turns out that Tiger Direct bought out what was left of CompUSA and has renamed their stores. I guess the CompUSA name is better known as a brick and mortar retail computer store. The main reasons for the visit were for my housemate to upgrade the RAM in her Dell laptop from 1GB to 2GB and for me to buy an SD card to use in my Sylvania netbook. Some of you may have already noticed that I am now writing regularly for DistroWatch Weekly which means I am trying out different Linux distributions on a regular basis. It might be nice (not to mention less risky and somewhat easier) to install to the SD card rather than my hard drive when first checking things out.

Jim Wong, President of IT Products at Acer, was speaking at the Computex Trade Show when he said that an Android netbook would make an appearance during the third quarter of 2009.

Anyways, whenever virtualizing a non-Windows operating system which utilizes the X Windowing system over VirtualBox, it may be beneficial to have some flexibility on supported resolutions for the GUI. For example, I was using OpenSolaris 2008.11 and VirtualBox seems to create a “virtual” monitor where the operating system (specifically X) is unable to read the monitor’s EDID information to obtain supported resolution information (among other things). As a result of this, by default X assigns 800×600@60 and 640×480@60 as supported display formats. When you are working on a wider screen that supports something larger, this makes for an uncomfortable computing experience; especially with limited graphical space on the virtual client.

OpenBill 1.2, a Java-based invoicing and contract management application, has been released by South African developer Jumping Bean. The new release includes both a number of bugfixes as well as a few key feature additions.

In course of the last decade, every once in a while Microsoft has been known to have accused Linux of infringing one of its patents or another. Despite the said multiple claims for years that elements of the open-source operating system violate its patents, Microsoft had restricted itself till 2009 to supporting legal action against Linux (for instance, the infamous alleged funneling of money by Microsoft to SCO so as to fuel the latter’s lawsuits against IBM and other Linux-user companies). Simultaneously with such actions, Microsoft has not restricted either its alliances with the said companies, including its partnerships with Novell and Red Hat.

There are plenty of general server admin articles available on the internet. Unfortunately, few of them delve into the subject of performance administration, especially from an introductory Linux perspective. Yet, it is exactly this kind of information that new Linux administrators require to ensure they are effective at their job.

This guide explains how you can set up an AoE target and an AoE initiator (client), both running Fedora 10. AoE stands for "ATA over Ethernet" and is a storage area network (SAN) protocol which allows AoE initiators to use storage devices on the (remote) AoE target using normal ethernet cabling. "Remote" in this case means "inside the same LAN" because AoE is not routable outside a LAN (this is a major difference compared to iSCSI). To the AoE initiator, the remote storage looks like a normal, locally-attached hard drive.

As open source projects mature, they tend to join or create a foundation to manage the project's financial and software assets, provide a marketing and legal entity, and help to set the direction of the project. As non-profit organizations, foundations have a specific structure defined by the jurisdiction in which they were formed. This structure typically includes a volunteer board of directors and sometimes paid staff such as a secretary or executive director. As Executive Director of the GNOME Foundation, I am often asked "what do you do?". This article will introduce the structure of the GNOME project and its Foundation, describe how the Foundation works to support the GNOME project, and discuss the roles of the people within the GNOME Foundation.

SanDisk Corp. today announced the general availability of two new solid state disk (SSD) drives for netbooks that it said increase random read/write rates by as much as nine times over its first generation netbook SSDs.

"Business gets done between people who get along."
-Bill Joy, co-founder of Sun Microsystems (paraphrased from an interview)

It is easy to focus on the purely technical side of engineering: design, coding, documentation, licensing issues, and the release process. The interpersonal aspects of engineering also have a vital part to play. An important and frequently overlooked part of the successful free/libre and open source (F/LOSS) enterprise are the soft skills of communication, administration, and relationship building.

URL rewriting allows you to tailor URLs for search engine optimization, maintain backwards compatibility with old archives, and make your URLs short and friendly. Sukrit Dhandhania's introduction us to Apache's powerful mod-rewrite for customizing and managing URLs.

PDF Christian Einfeldt Microsoft is at the beginning of a major product launch, called Bing, in an attempt to catch up to Google in search, following the collapse of Microsoft's take-over attempt of Yahoo. While Bing is a re-branding of Microsoft's clunky distant third place "Live Search" search service, Bing is also an attempt to add new features to search. Microsoft calls Bing a decision engine, in that it purports to offer more comparisons in its search results, rather than the simple blue links which have characterized search up to the recent arrival of Wolfram Alpha. But rather than a search engine or even a "decision engine", Bing also appears to be a spin engine, in that it provides partisan answers to controversial topics, such as Steve Ballmer's propensity to throw chairs to blow off stress.

Getting together information The only problem I encountered at first is getting together the information to know exactly what to use and how to use it. I started by reading the sources for some programs I found on my system and debugging them to learn the way they are processed. This was a great learning experience, my knowledge has quickly expanded by doing this. Still there were some important things I really needed to help me trough the learning process. I needed good reference material, examples and a book. Sadly enough there doesn't seem to be any printed book about perl-Gtk, luckily I did find some great tutorials on the perl-Gtk site. I also found some other helpful tools and resources by accident.

Developer Michael Prokop has announced the release of grml 2009.05, codenamed Lackdose-Allergie. grml is a Debian based Linux distribution that's specifically aimed at system administrators and users of text tools, such as awk, sed, grep, zsh, mutt[ng], slrn, vim and many others. The release features several new boot options, including the persistent boot option which allows users to easily store their settings and reuse them on reboot, avoiding the older config framework. The new findiso option searches for ISO files on all disks and the bsd option allows users to boot the minimal MirOS BSD operating system and run the minimalistic hardware detection tool (HDT).

Sun is set to launch the latest version of OpenSolaris, tuning it for the enterprise with a new support contract, processor support, and networking and storage technology. Sun, which is in the process of being acquired by Oracle, is expected to introduce OpenSolaris 2009.06 on Monday at the CommunityOne developer conference in San Francisco. OpenSolaris is the open source version of Solaris, and previously it has been aimed mainly at developers and as a platform for testing features that will later make their way into Solaris itself.

There's been quite a bit of hubub about the KDE project ever since the 4.0 release last year. Critics have slammed the 4.0 series repeatedly, citing the mentality of "Well, it's not good enough to be a full release.". Between the poor publicity, the crashes in Plasma, and the still-developing early features, KDE was definitely not having a good time. Developer blogs were plastered with hateful comments, and one of my favorite devs Aaron Seigo had to temporarily shut down his blog. However, for all the bad rap that the 4.0 series received, KDE has grown wonderfully.

Red Hat has opened Sun Microsystems' annual week of Java activities with an application server strategy targeting fellow open-sourcer SpringSource. The company, which made its name in the Linux business, has added a third server to its JBoss application server and middleware family targeting what it called "mid-sized" workloads. JBoss Enterprise Web Platform slots between Red Hat's existing JBoss Enterprise Application Platform and the Enterprise Web Server, while retaining the enterprise-edition's clustering, caching, persistence, and security the company said Monday.

In my last article about Xorg, I touched upon several points that have been in a state of continual flux in Xorg. Here’s a follow-up on that article, as it seems to have generated quite a lot of interest. However, I didn’t expand much on some features and their implications, so I will do so here. I will, also, touch upon a few improvements other than pure graphics. Read the full article at Free Software Magazine.