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This is a story of hubris, nemesis and very bad language. Mine. We all like to have our egos flattered and I’m no exception, so when two old acquaintances told me their Windows laptops were infected with viruses I knew they were about to put the bite on me. They did. Could I fix them? Well, my vanity was flattered of course but it was to be a salutary experience that got me to thinking about whether it will ever be possible to wean users off Microsoft products. Read the full story Free Software Magazine.

Will ARM-powered smartbooks make all the difference for Linux? There's no unanimity of opinion in the FOSS world, except perhaps the general agreement that the $200 units Freescale and Qualcomm debuted at Computex are, well, interesting. Unlike Windows, most Linux software is "only a recompile away from running on ARM," noted Slashdot blogger Peter Brett.

Currently, there's a lot of hype around Android on ARM-based netbooks, a type of netbook arriving later this year. However, despite the obvious choice for Android and other Linux systems, NVIDIA has openly stated their preference for... Windows CE. ARM and Asus are also quite sceptical about Android on ARM netbooks.

You may know that we used to have a cafepress store which sold t-shirts and stickers. It was completely commission free and we made no money from it - which made the stuff as cheap as possible. Well, it seems that Canonical is enforcing their intellectual property rights over the Ubuntu name. The store is now closed and you will no longer be able to buy any Ubuntu Satanic merchandise. This saddens us. We are big fans of Ubuntu and have a lot of respect for Canonical. However, they need to understand that a phenomenon such as Ubuntu is only as strong as its community and alienating that community over the sale of a couple of lousy t-shirts is not the way to go.

Last night, I enjoyed the nice feeling of using simple, already “obsolete” technology—that is, CentOS 5.3 on my laptop. My antiquated scanner Genius ColorPage Vivid4 still works very well, and I only needed to add a small firmware blob, the same way I was doing it in the past with SuSE and with Debian. Scanning with Xsane was faster than scanning in Windows. I don’t know why. Small operations on the resulting images were accomplished faster in gThumb than in GIMP. OpenOffice.org 2.3 worked very well, despite being “obsolete”. And it even generated a surprisingly small PDF from the final 100 MB document. Amazing. And fast. Nothing crashed. At all.

Last month, Eric Geier introduced us to an open source wireless mesh solution from Open-Mesh. In Part 1, we reviewed solution and configured the basic settings. In Part 2, we reviewed the captive portal options and set up the internal one. Now we're going to experiment with the CoovaOM captive portal. Then we'll touch on how to get Web filtering up on the mesh network. Finally, we'll install and test the system.

LinuxCertified Inc, a leading provider of Linux training and services, today announced its next Linux Device Driver Development Course class to be held in South Bay, CA from June 29th to July 1st.

Kai Hendry has announced the release of Webconverger 4.9, a Debian-based live CD and web kiosk designed for deployments in places like offices or Internet cafés where only web applications are used. What's new? "Shows a new Iceweasel (Firefox) security update 3.0.11; back to Xpdf despite printing dialog problems, because it's lighter and integrates better with the browser (no EULA to agree to every time); Webconverger base 4.9 featuring wireless essid with spaces fix and a compose key option; known to work flawlessly with Eee PC 900. Known issues: hard drive installer is not present on the ISO edition (or any edition for that matter)."

BlankOn Linux is a Linux distribution developed by Indonesia Linux Movement Foundation (Yayasan Penggerak Linux Indonesia / YPLI) and Indonesia Ubuntu Community which aim to fulfill the need of computer user in general. Using the easiness and stability philosophy of Ubuntu Linux as the base distribution, BlankOn Linux developed as an open source project and developed together to create a unique Indonesia Linux distribution. Jakarta, June 16th, 2009 - Today the BlankOn Developer team officialy release BlankOn 5.0 with the code name Nanggar, the culture that is brought up to this version is from Batak culture. The name Nanggar is taken from Batak language which means “Hammer”. Some of the new unique features in Nanggar are the Contextual Desktop which developed by BlankOn Developer Team, with the ability to change the theme and the wallpaper of the desktop based on the computer clock or based on the current weather condition.

Coders have reacted with disappointment and frustration to Microsoft's decision to cease development of a connector to Oracle in its .NET Framework, a move that looks like another budget cut. Microsoft has said it will no longer develop OracleClient, or System.Data.OracleClient, with the the up-coming .NET Framework 4.0. It will still be included with the framework but will be "marked as deprecated."

The compact and flexible nature of the Linux Kernel, plus the fact that it and all its support code is modular open source, means it lends itself very well to stripped down small and efficient distributions. This article explores a few of these distributions and explains just how useful they can be

Linux kernel development continues to roar ahead, and 2.6.30 is cram-full of excellent new features: Tomoyo, the learning framework for SELinux, NILFS (new implementation of a log-structured file system), IEEE 802.11w enhanced wireless security, and fastboot, which is a speedier boot process in the kernel itself. Sean Michael Kerner reports.

Xandros-owned email and groupware vendor Scalix released Scalix ActiveSync 1.0, a push email and synchronization add-on to Scalix Server that implements Microsoft's Exchange ActiveSync protocol for wireless message synchronization. Scalix also released Scalix Server 11.4.4, touted for its over 200 improvements.

Going back to 2007 we have been talking about Valve Software and Linux games after they were hiring software engineers to port Windows-based games to the Linux platform. Late last year we also got some confirmation of a Steam Linux client through some Linux shared libraries that had mistakenly shipped with the Left 4 Dead game client along with some other information we received through the grapevine. Well, now there may be another sign of impending Linux support by Valve Software. In fact, it's listed right on the Valve Software web-site!

It's interesting to note that Dell is planning to offer small and medium businesses (SMBs) preconfigured hardware and open source software bundles. The bundles seem targeted at the Asia Pacific region. This news comes days after a Forrester study found "only 9 percent of enterprises said they were 'very concerned' [about the security of open source] compared with 45 percent for the SMBs."

In this wide world of Linux, there are primarily just two package management systems which reign: RPM and Deb. Most binary distributions use one or the other and there has long been tension between the two. So which system performs better?

Larry the Free Software Guy has strapped himself into the driver's seat in test-driving Fedora 11 on three different desktops -- GNOME, KDE and Xfce -- and the results range from reuniting with an old friend to receiving divine intervention.

While every Fedora fans enjoy the newly released Fedora 11 Linux-based operating system, the developers are working hard on the next release, Fedora 12, due for release in November-December 2009. Make sure you visit our website, starting with August 8th when the first alpha will be released, as we will do a full coverage of the Fedora 12 development process. Without any further introduction, let's have a look at the release schedule..

One of the questions I see the most in forums and sites like Yahoo Answers is : "What is the best Linux distribution for beginners?" or "What is the easiest Linux distribution?" Well, unlike what you may think these questions are not that easy to answer, as the easiest Linux distribution is not necessarily the best for all beginners because other factors like the availability of support and commercial applications availability have to be taken into account.

One of the topics of ongoing interest in the kernel community is that of maintaining quality. It is trivially obvious that we need to maintain and even improve quality. It is less obvious how best to do so. One broad approach that has found some real success is to increase the visibility of various aspects of the kernel. This makes the quality of those aspects more apparent, so this tends to lead to an improvement of the quality.