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Dear Asus, I write to you as a customer of your Eee PC line of computers. I'd never really considered buying any of your hardware up until you released your Eee PC line of products. When I discovered that the Eee 701 was pre-loaded with (Xandros) Linux and came pre-configured with all the usual applications that I am familiar with on my Linux Desktop I was delighted.

I'm puzzled. Desktop Linux, for the first time ever, has at least 1% of the desktop market. Linux probably has considerably more than that. So, why is Lenovo's Worldwide Competitive Analyst Matt Kohut claiming that Linux has no future on netbooks? Could it be because, as Kohut said, "there were a lot of returns because people didn't know what to do with it." Really? That's odd. Most of the time, you have to ask for Linux by name. Of the big name computer companies only Dell makes it easy to choose Linux and even at Dell, you really should head straight to Dell's Ubuntu Linux site or you can spend a lot of time looking for it.

oFono.org is a place to bring developers together around designing an infrastructure for building mobile telephony (GSM/UMTS) applications. oFono is licensed under GPLv2, and it includes a high-level D-Bus API for use by telephony applications of any license. oFono also includes a low-level plug-in API for integrating with open source as well as third party telephony stacks, cellular modems and storage back-ends. oFono Architecture - Ofono.org

The GoblinX Project is proud to announce the first released of the next G:Standard. The G:Standard 3.0.beta01 (2.9.90) is Released.

Your editor has long been a user of the Tomboy note-taking tool. Tomboy makes it easy to gather thoughts, organize them, and pull them up on demand; it is, beyond doubt, a useful productivity tool. But all is not perfect with Tomboy. Some people have complained about its faults for a while; Hubert Figuiere, instead, chose to do something about it in the form of the Gnote utility. So now, of course, people are complaining about Gnote instead.

Besides Intel, VIA, and ATI/AMD cooperating with X.Org and Linux developers by providing source code and documentation to help with the enablement of their hardware under Linux, another major company has come to the open-source table. No, sadly it is not NVIDIA...

Why does the EU Parliament stick with Office and other Microsoft software ? An Italian EU deputy, Marco Cappato, had the guts to ask. The reply was they were basing on a study made in 2005. He asked to them to make it public, but his request was refused. Nobody believed he could get the EU to make it public. An well known Italian IT website even called that ‘a miracle‘. I’m going no further, I’ll just translate Cappato’s post and attach here the document for the world to see. Up to you to judge how good it is. (not that is that the document is still super-secret, but it has been disclosed very recently and I guess you won’t have many other chances to read it otherwise)

[In the actual study, Gartner claims there are no mature Linux deployments in Europe(!) -- Sander]

Linux users should soon be able to use USB-connected monitors that incorporate DisplayLink's chips. DisplayLink has released Linux versions of its USB monitor source code under LGPL, and has partnered with Novell and the Linux Driver Project to develop drivers for desktops and mobile devices.

Pictures and a link to a site with a few pages - hidden away - with pictures of those old time computers. The ones as big as a house :)

The next kernel version is to provide all that's necessary to convert, for example, a RAID 5 into a RAID 6 and vice versa. There are changes to the block layer designed to speed up the system, and new and improved drivers will offer better SAS support.

When I want to set up a new GNU/Linux computer ... I find it more convenient to create a virtual machine on which I do all of the setting up and then convert the virtual computer to a real one.

In the first piece in this series we looked at the role schedulers play in I/O optimization. But how do you actually select and tune a scheduler to increase I/O performance in practice? Paul Rubens shows us why and how.

Are you having difficulty finding ways to 'go green'? Here are some simple tips to get you started.

Conflicts in the Open Source world — as in the proprietary world — are hardly a surprising phenomenon. Indeed, our community can't even agree over what to call one of its most popular projects — a fight we have no interest in entering, particularly not here. What is perhaps more surprising is when these disputes escalate like a deleted scene from Fatal Attraction — escalate so far that the powers-that-be must intervene.

We have the pleasure to announce the third edition of one of the most important Open Source and Free Software conferences in Eastern Europe: eLiberatica 2009 that will take place on 22nd- 23rd of May, in Bucharest, Romania.

Astro_Mike's tweets from space may be few and far between, but astronauts are known for saying a lot in a few words. Fans of Astro_Mike are hanging onto every character, it seems -- his feed was the fifth most popular on the the microblogging site on Thursday. His latest gem: "From orbit: Rendezvous and grapple were great, getting ready for our first spacewalk."

At first glance, Google Android is set to take over the world — with one research firm predicting a 900 percent growth rate for the mobile operating system, far higher than growth rates for Apple’s iPhone. That’s amazing. Or is it? Let's take a closer look at the numbers.

aTunes is a full-featured audio player and manager, developed in Java programming language, so it can be executed on different platforms: Windows, Linux and Unix-like systems.

The first alpha release for Ubuntu 9.10 was made available yesterday and while it does net yet integrate Plymouth or any other new features, it has picked up a few new packages. Most prominently, Ubuntu 9.10 Alpha 1 features the Linux 2.6.30 kernel and GCC 4.4. There are also other updated packages from Debian like GNOME 2.27, but most notable are the kernel and compiler updates. We have tested out Ubuntu 9.10 Alpha 1 and compared its performance to Ubuntu 9.04. While this is very early within the Ubuntu 9.10 development cycle, the results already may come as a surprise.

Amazingly, this is a "how to program" book that doesn't use JavaScript as the first programming language the newbie experiences. I'm intrigued. Of course, it's a second edition, so using Ruby isn't exactly new for the new person. I never read the first edition, so I'll have to rely completely on the text I have in my hand (uh...sitting beside me, since I'm keyboarding with my hands). Just looking at the TOC, I already like the book, since the "Getting Started" chapter includes how to get started using Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux. Truly an equal opportunity author.