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Big week for Google and Microsoft as Google announced its new unified communications platform dubbed Wave and Microsoft announced the Zune HD and a new search engine they're calling Bing. Wave looks the most interesting as it will be open source and Google is encouraging developers to create extensions.

The openSUSE Project is happy to announce the second milestone release for openSUSE 11.2 is ready for download. This release includes Firefox 3.5 beta 4, KDE 4.3 beta 1, GNOME 2.26, and hundreds of other updates from Milestone 1. This is a Milestone Release, which means that it may not be suitable for production systems. This is one in a series of releases leading to the official openSUSE 11.2 release, scheduled for November 2009.

Canonical's popular Ubuntu operating system continues to win followers around the world, and Ubuntu User is the first print magazine specifically for this rapidly growing audience. "Ubuntu is popular with software developers and IT professionals, but it is also a hit with hobbyists and other desktop users who are looking for an alternative to Microsoft Windows and don't want the restrictive hardware policies of Apple," says Joe Casad, Editor in Chief of Ubuntu User.

At its I/O conference yesterday (27th of May) Google gave developers a preview of a new communication and collaboration product called Google Wave. Google will invite selected programmers to contribute to this project even before the software is released and plans to make Wave freely available as open source software in a few months.

Linux on MIPS based systems isn't new. Red Hat Linux 7.1 ran on MIPS based servers back in 2002. Nowadays Debian has well established and stable MIPS ports. GnewSense has a MIPS64 big-endian port in development. Though still not finalized it is functional and available now and designed specifically for MIPS64 netbooks and notebooks currently being produced in China.

This tutorial explains the installation of a Samba fileserver on Fedora 10 and how to configure it to share files over the SMB protocol as well as how to add users. Samba is configured as a standalone server, not as a domain controller. In the resulting setup, every user has his own home directory accessible via the SMB protocol and all users have a shared directory with read-/write access.

Q. My netbook came with SUSE Linux, but I want to use Ubuntu Linux. What’s the easiest way to change?

A. Swapping in Ubuntu Linux is not that difficult, and there is even a version called Ubuntu Netbook Remix that is optimized just for smaller hardware like a mini-notebook PC.

I don't believe that the desktop Linux market share is barely 1%. I think it is a lot higher. I have no good data to share; I base my assessment on experience and knowing the industry. There is something else that is even more persuasive, and that is how Microsoft behaves. If Linux is so insignificant, why do they pay so much attention to it?

This anniversary version of Calculate Linux Desktop, the first version of which was exactly 2 years ago. released May 29, 2009

When the cheap laptops known as netbooks first came out over a year ago, computer makers were able to offer them at low prices in part by shipping them with the free Linux open-source operating system, rather than Microsoft's Windows. Since then, Windows netbooks have taken over most of the market after Microsoft began pushing Windows XP aggressively to netbook makers and consumers realized Linux netbooks didn't work well with some popular applications and devices.

One month ago we provided benchmarks of the Btrfs file-system and found that while it contained many features to make it a next-generation Linux file-system, its disk performance was rather displeasing. We had found the EXT4 file-system ran faster in a number of the tests and even EXT3 and XFS had their own advantages. Besides offering features like snapshots and online defragmentation, Btrfs has a mode that is optimized for solid-state drives. Will the Btrfs SSD mode cause this new Oracle-sponsored file-system to be the best for non-rotating media? We have benchmarks in this article, but the results may not be what one would expect.

So I thought of a reasonably trivial program I could write which would still be interesting enough and which can be build upon for a while to build some skill in perl GUI programming. I think it would be nice to be able to build a GUI for linux command line programs, that could have some value in the future. As that could quickly become to complex for my purpose and it would probably drive me to start messing with the code for the utility I want to write a GUI for, I chose instead to start writing a GUI for native built in shell commands.

Still using Microsoft Office 97 because you can't justify an upgrade? Check out the free alternatives to that and other commercial software.

An I/O controller is a system component intended to arbitrate access to block storage devices; it should ensure that different groups of processes get specific levels of access according to a policy defined by the system administrator. In other words, it prevents I/O-intensive processes from hogging the disk. This feature can be useful on just about any kind of system which experiences disk contention; it becomes a necessity on systems running a number of virtualized (or containerized) guests. At the moment, Linux lacks an I/O controller in the mainline kernel. There is, however, no shortage of options out there. This article will look at some of the I/O controller projects currently pushing for inclusion into the mainline.

You have likely seen a few commercial Media Center products in stores. Not surprisingly most of these are built on Windows Media Center software, or use proprietary software which of course inflate the overall price. In my opinion, Open Source software can be used to build a far superior HTPC/Media Center than any commercial software product out there. So I've written this guide in an effort to help you save some money and point you in the right direction when building your very own HTPC/Media Center. Check out the Guide To Building An Open Source HTPC / Media Center on Ubuntu.

The Wall Street Journal today (May 28, 2009) published a review of multiple Linux netbooks running Ubuntu, Mi and Moblin Linux. Overall, I think the review offers fair, balanced coverage of what’s right — and wrong — with the Linux netbook market today. But there was one line in the review that I found completely misleading and shortsighted. Here's the scoop.

It's been the better part of a year since the Large Hadron Collider — the massive particle accelerator operated by the European Centre for Nuclear Research (CERN) — was in the headlines, and even then it wasn't good news. The LHC has suffered from everything from poor craftsmanship to hackers to death threats from a paranoid populace — but it looks like the Device of Doom or Discovery will be back online and launching us into the future, or oblivion, by the time Santa makes his annual appearance.

The US Military is by turns cutting edge and clueless. On one hand, they embrace cloud computing and social media tools, yet think it's worthwhile to upgrade from Windows XP/Office 2003 to Vista/Office 2010 when Windows 7 and Office 2010 release are imminent (and it would make more sense to move large numbers of employees to Linux and OpenOffice and save the tax payers a few bucks). Like any large organization, they make good and bad decisions when it comes to technology.

It would appear that spam has managed to hit a new low by reaching a new high, and what a high: up 5.4 percent on the previous month to peak at representing some 90.4 percent of all email by volume. That really does suck elephants through a straw backwards, only 1 in every 10 emails not being some unwanted junk mailing. Sigh.

In part 1 ace coder Akkana Peck taught us how to use Python and PyGTK to bring up a window and draw lines and circles. Today we'll expand on that humble beginning and draw some pretty graphics.