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Xandros today announced it is developing software products based on the recently released Moblin Version 2 project for Intel® Atom™ processor-based platforms. The new version of Moblin will enable Xandros to provide customizations with advanced Internet, media, social networking and graphics capabilities for the ASUS Eee PC. A turnkey Xandros software solution employing new Moblin v2 technologies will be demonstrated for the first time at the Intel booth at Computex, Taipei, Taiwan, June 2-6, 2009.

There seems to be something of a military campaign afoot. One that surely shows signs of desperation and anxiety on behalf of the instigator. First we had Asus telling it’s potential customers that “It’s Better With Winblow$” using phraseology such as:

“Windows helps you easily get online and connect to your devices and services - without dealing with an unfamiliar environment or major compatibility issues.”

And now we hear that PC World (IMHO probably the worst place to buy a PC or get technical advice anywhere in the UK) are dropping Linux netbooks too.

Robust development from outside the Sun/MySQL sphere, new storage engines and the return of Monty are just some of the signs that MySQL is healthy, despite may reports to the contrary.

A day after an Asus Eee PC running Google's Android operating system was shown at Computex Taipei, top executives from the company said the project will be put on the backburner.

The Eee PC with Android is not ready yet because the technology is "not mature," said Jonathan Tsang, vice chairman of Asustek, on the sidelines of a press conference at the show Tuesday.

While there are over 60 names on the list of women in open source on the Geek Feminism wiki, there are far more than 60 women making their mark in open source. I work with talented people every day in my role as Vice President of Marketing and Developer Programs at the Linux Foundation, and see first-hand the contributions women make at the technology and business levels.

KDE hackers are working on a netbook user interface for KDE 4. First results are evident.

For over 20 years, Microsoft and Intel have partnered to grow the PC industry. Now, Intel is launching a netbook that will use the Linux operating system and not Microsoft. Could it be the economy and the need for more revenue? Or could it be such a huge revenue opportunity for Intel that they can not let the high price of an operating system slow them down?

An Open XML Validator and a Document-Library are in the making courtesy of Fraunhofer FOKUS. With Microsoft as a development partner supporting its activities, Fraunhofer FOKUS is gearing up to introduce a new Document-Interoperability-Lab focused on ISO/IEC 29500 (also referred to as Office Open XML) and ECMA-376 (Ecma Office Open XML). The Document-Interoperability-Lab is designed to permit organizations to test documents in order to assess whether the development was based on the two Open XML internationally standardized formats.

At Computex, both Novell and Xandros have announced plans to base future operating systems for netbooks on Moblin 2, the Intel developed Linux for Atom processors, recently moved under the aegis of the Linux Foundation. There are also reports that Canonical will announce a Moblin 2 based Ubuntu Netbook Remix. Moblin 2, which was recently released as a "user experience" beta, has won praise for its user interface, based on work by Opened Hand (an Intel 2008 acquisition) and for its rapid boot times.

"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.