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ANALYSIS: The war between open source and Microsoft Windows to be the operating system of choice for netbooks is hotting up, with some major skirmishes last week. But who is winning? Netbooks running open source were the star of last week's Computex show, which saw a flurry of demonstrations of Linux, Moblin and Android-based devices, noted Jim Zemlin, the executive director of the Linux Foundation.

The KDE and GNOME communities are happy to announce the Platinum sponsors of the upcoming Gran Canaria Desktop Summit. Nokia's Qt Software and Maemo will be the main sponsors of the event, which will be held from 3rd to 11th of July 2009 in Las Palmas on Gran Canaria, Spain.

This week I decided to take a look at a lesser known distribution called Wolvix Linux. Wolvix is based on Slackware and, according to the Wolvix site, is geared toward the home user. Wolvix uses the lightweight Xfce desktop environment and provides a somewhat greater range of apps than some of the other distributions. But how well does it really work for home users? Is it worth downloading and installing it to your system? We'll find out in this review. Please note that the version I looked at is a beta.

LinuxCon, the Linux Foundation's brand new conference intended to draw "the best and brightest...including core developers, administrators, end users, community managers and industry experts," is still several months away. What isn't several months away, however, is the deadline for Early Bird registration — if you want to catch that worm, you'll have to get to running.

Linux-Tip Europe is a site designed to provide the Linux users community (not only in Europe) with news and articles that are of interest to them. It works by allowing members of the community to submit news and articles relating to Linux hardware and software. This same community can then decide what tips should be promoted based on what they consider to be the most important or interesting to the community by voting stories up and down. Stories that receive enough votes are promoted to the Linux-Tip Europe homepage.

Every generation has a mythology. Every millenium has a doomsday cult. Every legend gets the distortion knob wound up until the speaker melts. Archeologists at the University of Helsinki today uncovered what could be the earliest known writings from the Cult of Tux, a fanatical religious sect that flourished during the early Silicon Age, around the dawn of the third millenium AD...

After some time in the making, the Source Mage Cauldron team would like to present you with the 0.10.0 stable ISO! This is the latest stable ISO release for installing Source Mage GNU/Linux. It comes with many improvements over the previous 0.9.6 series of ISOs.

Team Tiny Core is pleased to announce the release of Tiny Core V2.0 and introducing MicroCore a 7MB no X environment iso based on Tiny Core. We are also announcing Core Elements specialized mounted extensions to give Micro Core full Tiny Core functionality. Now even more choices to have it your way.

We're proud to announce a new version of xPUD, a small and fast Linux with easy-to-use user interface, is now released. Version 0.9 is full of improvements and exciting new features. We have successfully tested on Asus EeePC, Acer AspireOne, MSI Wind, Lenovo Ideapad, Dell Mini and more. xPUD also runs on virtual machine including VirtualBox, VMware and QEMU.

There is hope for Ubuntu users with Intel graphics. As it appears, the current 2D drivers solve most of the recent graphics problems with Intel chips, according to Ubuntu developer Bryce Harrington in a developer mailing list. Jaunty users should profit it from them as well.

Asus was a Linux netbook pioneer, but now it's a Windows shop all the way. So what happened, and why is their new "It's Better With Windows" ad campaign so bizarre? Bruce Byfield tries to find out.

LXer Feature: 08-Jun-2009

The Käfer and Hogbin book isn't just a "how to use Drupal" book. There are a number of books that introduce Drupal in general (I put in the link just in case you need to know what Drupal is), including Using Drupal (O'Reilly) which I previously reviewed. According to this book's back cover blurb, "Drupal is now the world's number one content management system...As Web Designers and developers adopt Drupal, they need ways to quickly customize the visuals and interactivity with their sites." Is Front End Drupal then a book with just a focus on designing and managing themes, or is there more "under the hood"? Let's find out.

Queries are the database equivalent of filters in a spreadsheet. Just as a filter can limit and reorganize the information displayed in a spreadsheet, so a query limits and reorganizes the information in a database. Either can be an efficient way of finding the information you want, especially when you're dealing with thousands of records.

In my day job many times I've left the "operating room" to inform the worried "relatives" of the "patient's" terminal state without fully internalizing the potential for me to be the next person blind-sighted by a statistical outlier in the MTBF. Now that outlier is me

Want a cool-er ebook reader? How about one that's $50-$110 less than its competitors?

Kernel mode-setting for Intel graphics hardware can already be found in the mainline Linux kernel and will be included by default in the release of Ubuntu 9.10 later this year. While Intel's kernel mode-setting support has been maturing in a steadfast manner, this support has not been moving along quite as fast for ATI and NVIDIA hardware. It is possible we will see ATI/AMD kernel mode-setting along with the necessary memory management support enter the Linux 2.6.31 kernel and potentially see this feature appear in Ubuntu 9.10 as an end-user option, but currently this support is still deemed under development. For those with ATI Radeon hardware looking to test out kernel mode-setting, there is now a Launchpad PPA and a LiveCD available for testing out these mode-setting capabilities atop Ubuntu.

TAIPEI, Taiwan — A young woman in a white cocktail dress sat in a chair with a purple shawl wrapped around her head. She wore high heels, bulky brown sunglasses and a surgical mask. Moments later, the shawl and mask were ripped off and she sprang into song. A model’s floral fingernails tapping a computer with Microsoft Multi-Touch software, one of many touch-screen devices shown. It was all part of a musical revue by Micro-Star International celebrating the release of a new laptop. The rather eccentric display hardly seemed out of place at last week’s Computex trade show — the annual computer industry gala held here in Taiwan’s capital city. This year’s show signified the computer industry’s move far beyond traditional desktop and laptop PCs into more exotic devices. If dancing girls and loud music at an exhibitor’s booth helped attract attention to these strange new computers — or explain them — all the better.

Back at the beginning of this year, we interviewed Paul Sherman, the project lead of Absolute Linux which is a derivative distribution of Slackware. Sherman has just released version 12.2.5 and this week we take an in-depth look into the distro. What does it have to offer? Read on to find out! In the news this past week, Fedora prepares for the grand launch of "Leonidas", openSUSE opens up its development model to allow more community contribution, and SliTaz publishes a roadmap to stable version 3.0. Sun Microsystems has released OpenSolaris 2009.06 and, as many have suspected, it will form the basis of the upcoming Solaris offering. Meanwhile Mandriva Linux, which also recently released a new version, is looking ahead by collecting ideas for the upcoming 2010 release. Finally, for users of the popular CentOS distribution, the community has published its first bi-weekly magazine, collecting interesting information from the world of the well-respected enterprise distribution. Happy reading!

After Christian Ehrlicher announced that he would step down from packaging and bug fixing for KDE on Windows, some articles were written which suggest that KDE on Windows is on hold now that the main developer has moved on. Even though KDE on Windows is only a small project and from the loss of one developer will be felt, we are far from dead. The Windows port has not been a one-man-project and many other people are still involved. KDE on Windows will continue to be developed and packages will continue to be made.