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The Open Database Alliance (ODA) has been launched. The consortium, founded by Monty Program AB, the company created by MySQL founder Monty Widenius, and MySQL specialists Percona, has been created as a focal point for all companies, organisations and individuals with an interest in MySQL and the future development of the open source database.

A Hilarious Linux Mastercard Spoof T-Shirt

Canonical is preparing to launch a new Web service called Ubuntu One, which will bring cloud synchronization & collaboration features to the Linux desktop.

Ivan Krsti?, the former director of security architecture for the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project, has joined Apple. In 2007, at the age of 21, Krsti? was cited as a Young Innovator by the MIT Technology Review. While working for the OLPC initiative, a non-profit organisation whose mission is to provide children across the world with low cost laptops for self-education, Krsti? designed the Bitfrost security specification. He believes that the OLPC Bitfrost system is a fool-proof way to defeat malware attacks and that it "defeats the entire purpose of writing a virus".

If you've ever used fillable PDF forms, you've probably noticed that you can't save a copy of the form once it has been filled in. Being sneaky, you probably might try to print the form to a file (PostScript) and then use ps2pdf to convert it to a PDF. But, this doesn't work either, because ghostscript gives you an error saying the file can't be redistilled. This article shows you how to protect your own PostScript using the same technique.

VMware has signed an agreement with Dimension Data which it says is a step towards meeting a rising demand for virtualization technology skills amidst a shortage of IT skills in the Australian market.

This document describes how to install a Postfix mail server that is based on virtual users and domains, i.e. users and domains that are in a MySQL database. I'll also demonstrate the installation and configuration of Courier (Courier-POP3, Courier-IMAP), so that Courier can authenticate against the same MySQL database used by Postfix.

The Fedora 11 preview release announcement went out on April 28. Around the world, Fedora users responded by downloading, testing, pondering the ext4 filesystem, and generally feeling a little "jaunty" themselves. One Fedora developer, though, had a moderately strange response which might be a little hard to understand out of its full context:

I'm sorry, I can't hear you. Can you turn it up a bit? What do you mean, it won't go any louder? The _last_ release used to go louder."

Anybody who has been sufficiently distant from the disturbance on the fedora-devel mailing list can be forgiven for wondering what is going on here. In short: changes to the PulseAudio volume control widget shipped in Fedora 11 have made it hard for some users to get sound out of their systems in the manner to which they have become accustomed, and they're not happy about it.

LXer Feature: 14-May-2009

People always tout this year or that as THE year of desktop Linux. It won't happen. Rather, it'll take time to evolve.

Earlier this week we delivered benchmarks of Ubuntu 9.04 versus Mac OS X 10.5.6 and found that the Leopard operating system had performed better than the Jaunty Jackalope in a majority of the tests, at least when it came to Ubuntu 32-bit. We are back with more operating system benchmarks today, but this time we are comparing the performance of the Linux and Sun OpenSolaris kernels. We had used the Nexenta Core Platform 2 operating system that combines the OpenSolaris kernel with a GNU/Ubuntu user-land to that of the same Ubuntu package set but with the Linux kernel. Testing was done with both 32-bit and 64-bit Ubuntu server installations.

The Android smartphone platform is poised to grow nine times over by year's end, if new predictions from Strategy Analytics are correct. While that growth rate may dwarf those of heavies like Apple and RIM, Android's base is presently much smaller. Even with dramatic growth, will Android sales ever approach BlackBerry or iPhone numbers?

Sun Microsystems has released the OpenSolaris programme for CommunityOne West. The event, which aims to bring together students, developers and decision-makers to talk about open source issues, will take place in San Francisco from the 1st to the 3rd of June. Begining with the presentation of the latest version 2009.06 of OpenSolaris, the event will have over 70 sessions.

It has been two or three weeks since we were last presented with a new display driver from NVIDIA for Linux, whether it be in their 180.xx or 185.xx series, a stable release, a beta release, or any of their legacy driver updates. This timespan is quite long compared to the past few months where they have released as many as five Linux drivers per month.

In one of RIAA’s high profile cases the Free Software Foundation backed defendant Joel Tenenbaum, much to the dislike of the music industry lobby. John Sullivan, Operations Manager at the FSF explains in a guest post why they think these cases impact not just music, but also free software and its technology.

The SystemRescueCD developers have announced the release of version 1.2.0 of their Linux distribution. The latest release of this lean system, mainly intended for administrative tasks, such as recovering data after a system crash, includes a wide range of software updates.

Swiftfox is yet another free browser which is an optimized build of the Mozilla Firefox web browser. The browser is fully compatible with any existing themes, extensions for Firefox.

The short 3D animation movie will be produced by a team of approx 6 people, working at it for at least 6 months.

The first beta version of the new and shiny KDE 4.3 has been released. The list of new features and improvements is long and impressive as ever. There is a new tree view mode in System Settings, many cool new features, the desktop search becomes more visible to the user, and yet more polishing in user interfaces all over the place make using KDE more fun.

In these days of bandwidth caps and pay-per-kilobyte rates, keeping an eye on your bandwidth usage makes a lot of sense.

In the last article in this series Juliet Kemp looked at how init (the system we've all been using for years to start up our services) works, and how upstart, the new replacement for init, works instead. This article looks at upstart and its scripts in more detail.