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One of the must-haves in the toolkit of any serious free software enthusiast is a decent partitioning tool. This week we take a look at the newly released Parted Magic 4.0, a live CD for managing hard drives. In the news, Intel hands control of Moblin, a distribution for netbooks and mobile devices over to the Linux Foundation, rumours about a possible purchase of Sun Microsystems by IBM spur speculations about the future of OpenSolaris, Debian announces support for kFreeBSD i386 and amd64 port, and Mark Shuttleworth talks about the upcoming release of Ubuntu 9.04. Also in the news, first hints about a possible major and more adventurous update of the GNOME desktop, version 3.0. Finally, we are pleased to announce that the recipient of the DistroWatch.com March 2009 donation is smxi, a project developing a variety of useful scripts for Debian and Debian-based distributions.

IBM's talks to acquire smaller computer and software rival Sun Microsystems Inc broke down on Sunday after Sun rejected IBM's $7 billion offer, a source with knowledge of the matter said. The collapse of negotiations, if final, is likely to hurt Sun's shares as a buyout was seen as a means of survival for the once-storied Silicon Valley company, which has been losing market share. A deal would also have helped IBM compete more effectively against rivals such as Hewlett-Packard Co.

I have to admit, I am a software junkie. I like good software that works as it should and does it’s job with a minimum of effort on my part. When I first started using a computer at home, one of the first things I started looking for was a software program that would manage my finances and allow me to keep up with what I spend. It is essential for me because although I do not have a lot of different finances to keep up with, I need all the help I can get.

Google's big surprise: each server has its own 12-volt battery to supply power if there's a problem with the main source of electricity. The company also revealed for the first time that since 2005, its data centers have been composed of standard shipping containers--each with 1,160 servers and a power consumption that can reach 250 kilowatts.

A new month and a new set of Linux distribution releases. Check out what’s new and where to get it!

Dr. Tony Shannon; Chair, Clinical Review Board, openEHR Foundation has released details on the Clinical Knowledge Manager to aide in the development and governance of archetypes (clinical knowledge units). His full announcement is below the fold.

KDE4 is a radical rewrite, and it lays the groundwork for a long and sustainable future. The long-term vision for Gnome is conservative and careful. While radical changes are upsetting, Gnome's conservatism could lead to an increasingly crufty and un-sustainable code base. Bruce Byfield gazes into his crystal ball and predicts what the future holds for both.

How to Remove Pulse Audio Ubuntu 8.10 (Intrepid Ibex). PulseAudio (formerly PolypAudio) is a cross-platform, networked sound server project. It is intended to be an improved drop-in replacement for the Enlightened Sound Daemon (ESD).By default Ubuntu 8.10 comes with Pulse Audio and most users start complaining about pulse audio so if you don’t want to use Pulse Audio you can remove.

This article overviews 8 of the most popular image viewers available in the Ubuntu repositories.

Individuals wanting to learn about the Linux operating system have a large selection of books to choose from. There are many thousands of informative Linux books which are in-print and available to download or buy at reasonable cost. However, as many users are attracted to Linux for the very reason that it is available under a freely distributable license, some will also want this to extend to the documentation they read.

Linux, being the chameleon that it is, has the ability to support many different file systems, either natively or with “outside” help. Besides its native ext2 (and more recently ext3) file system, it can also handle DOS’ FAT16 and FAT32, Windows’ NTFS4 and NTFS5, OS/2’s HPFS, and Macintosh’s HFS, just to name a few. Given the recent push to add journaling capabilities, Linux has seen even more file systems being offered closer to home, such as Red Hat’s own ext3, Namesys’ ReiserFS, IBM’s JFS, Silicon Graphics’ XFS, etc.

If you've ever struggled to play a file you downloaded from the hinterlands of the Web, you clearly didn't try opening it with VideoLan's VLC media player, a free, hugely popular, and open-source media player. VideoLan released on Thursday version 0.9.9, a bug fix release that corrects a few issues with the previous version. The best media player just got better and is rapidly approaching 1.0 status.

The Overo Fire COM is the top of the line in the Overo series from Gumstix.com , at least at the moment. It contains not only built-in Wifi 802.11b/g capabilities but also BlueTooth capabilities on board. Coupled with the TI OMAP-3530 processor it is a powerhouse machine for both embedded applications and for personal general purpose linux computing!

Reports surfaced late this evening that computing giant IBM — which has been in talks for some time to buy Sun Microsystems — has pulled its $7 billion offer to buy the struggling company. According to reports, IBM withdrew the offer after Sun's Board of Directors made "onerous" requests following IBM's decision to lower its offer for the firm. IBM initially offered $9.55 per share, but dropped that offer to $9.40 — less than a $1.00 premium on Sun's current stock price — due in part, it says, to the discovery that far more senior employees than originally expected are covered by "change of control" contracts. Such agreements cover senior executives — who often face replacement on acquisition — should the company be bought or otherwise come under the control of someone other than its Board.

Picture a world where your social interactions don't require a conscious effort on your part to open an app, but one where the computing power is ubiquitous and device interaction happens effortlessly. That's a world that Andrew Lippman of the MIT Media Lab described last week at at the Wednesday keynote at AIIM.

SUSE studio is a web front-end to customize and build your own personal distribution in as many ways you could possibly think off. There are other similar services and applications that helps you make custom distribution but none of them are as extensive in customization options as SUSEstudio or as easy.

It comes as both a surprise and not a surprise that the New South Wales (NSW) state government chose a "safe bet" of Lenovo and Microsoft to supply many thousands of taxpayer-funded laptops to secondary school students. Was Linux ever on the short list?

7 interesting applications which you may find cool to use while in command-line.

This short guide shows how you can pass through USB devices (such as a USB flash drive) to VirtualBox guests on an Ubuntu 8.10 VirtualBox 2 host. USB support is available only in the VirtualBox PUEL (closed-source) edition, not in the OSE edition, so make sure you have the PUEL edition installed.

The Fedora project has announced the availability of the Fedora 11 beta release. Fedora 11 includes several compelling new features such as support for kernel modesetting, Ext4 by default, and faster boot time.