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On Friday, I received an article that was published by C|NET and reprinted on CNN entitled California lawmaker wants to blur Google Earth. I spent the weekend driving around my county with a set of maps and a GPS device, plotting and ground truthing a variety of sites where we can put operators for an upcoming drill and I finally got around to reading the article and it really has me wondering if Assemblyman Anderson has taken leave of his senses.

Low-cost and lower-power don't mean you have to settle for second-best; open source and netbooks go together like milk and cookies. Cynthia Harvey has 21 open-source ways to turn a netbook into a tiny, productive powerhouse.

GNOME 2.26 is set for release for March 18th and if you’re wondering exactly what the developers have cooked up for their latest bi-annual release, well you’ve come to the right place. Techpark6 has been running the Release Candidate for the last two weeks to figure out what changes are in store for GNOME 2.26.

ASUS is among the few tier-one hardware vendors that understands Linux. Of the dozens of ASUS products we have tested over the years, it is hard to remember a product from ASUS that did not work well with Linux. ASUS was even the first motherboard vendor to ship with an embedded instant-on Linux environment known as SplashTop and they continued their adoption of this lightweight Linux desktop with their notebooks and a massive number of motherboards. Earlier this year ASUS also struck a deal to put Phoenix HyperSpace on some of their products, which is another Linux-based environment. On top of these other Linux efforts, ASUS also ships a modified version of Xandros Linux on their very popular Eee PC series. Their recently introduced Eee Top series, however, is not Linux friendly at all with the current generation of Linux distributions. The ASUS Eee Top ET1602 is a mighty fine piece of hardware at an exceptional value, but it does not know how to play with Linux without taking some advanced steps.

This guide explains how you can install and use KVM for creating and running virtual machines on a Debian Lenny server. I will show how to create image-based virtual machines and also virtual machines that use a logical volume (LVM). KVM is short for Kernel-based Virtual Machine and makes use of hardware virtualization, i.e., you need a CPU that supports hardware virtualization, e.g. Intel VT or AMD-V.

The Android platform has sorely needed an application that opens Word and Excel documents, and QuickOffice is the first to offer one. It lacks editing capabilities, as well as the ability to view PowerPoint files, and it doesn't support ODF either. Still, it's got promise.

Fresh from the disappointment of failing to deliver Australia's first Android phone, Kogan has announced a range of netbooks using the same brand name. The Agora Netbooks start at $A499, and like many such devices use an Atom CPU, in this case the 1.60GHz N270. Another interesting point is Kogan's choice of operating system: the Ubuntu-based gOS. If gOS isn't to your taste, support is available for those wishing to install a different operating system. According to Kogan officials, Ubuntu Netbook Remix, KDE4, Windows XP and Windows 7 all work "very well" on the Agora Netbook.

Free and open source software continues to gain traction in the South African government with more than 90 percent of CIOs and IT managers in favour of using OSS in their departments. And Arno Webb, head of the State IT Agency's (Sita) open source programme, says that while open source migrations have been slower and not as widespread as originally hoped, government is now firmly on a path to wider open source use. We speak to Webb to gauge government's open source progress.

Following two release candidates, the official version 2.3 of the open source Ruby on Rails web framework has now been released. Although David Heinemeier Hansson, creator of Rails, had originally said in 2007 that there would now only be evolutionary changes in Rails, version 2.2, with its introduction of i18n API, multithreading and experimental support for Ruby 1.9, was a comprehensive release and now version 2.3 introduces further substantial changes.

One of the hottest open source startups is Cloudera, which is based on the clustering/cloud computing software Hadoop. Here's an interview with one of its founders, Mike Olson, formerly of Sleepycat, about Hadoop, his new company, and why cloud computing is neither a threat nor an opportunity for open source.

With the pressure of the recession bearing down on companies, several industry experts expect adoption of open source software to grow, as a result. Michael Barnes, VP of software and Asia-Pacific research, Springboard Research, told ZDNet Asia in an interview, there has been increased interest over the past three to four months in open source.

Enjoy the slogans. T's not published under the GPL ;)

Novell's SUSE Linux appears to be one of the more popular versions of the open-source OS for netbooks, but it does not work on ARM-based devices and Novell said it did not have plans to support the chips.

Recently we’ve seen some surprising comments about Red Hat’s stand on software patents and, in particular, about one of its patent applications related to the AMQP specification. It looks like clarification is called for. Our views and our position, as expressed in our work for patent reform, our Patent Promise, and our work with the AMQP project, have not changed.

Once upon a time, Xen was the hot virtualization story. The Xen developers had a working solution for Linux - using free software - well ahead of anybody else, and Xen looked like the future of virtualization on Linux. Much venture capital chased after that story, and distributors raced to be the first to offer Xen-based virtualization. But, along the way, Xen seemed to get lost. The XenSource developers often showed little interest in getting their code into the mainline, and attempts by others to get that job done ran into no end of obstacles. So Xen stayed out of the mainline for years; the first public Xen release happened in 2003, but the core Xen code was only merged for 2.6.23 in October, 2007.

The H went to Qcon and sat down with Patrick Curran, chair of the Java Community Process for a chat about how the JCP is changing and looking for more transparency in all aspects of its work.

In Tux Radar's second podcast we pondered whether the dodgy economic outlook could actually bring more users to Linux and free software. With everyone afraid to open their wallets, surely software that has an initial zero cost is much more attractive for businesses looking to move on from legacy software, right? And home desktop users -- how many of those will really want to splash out on the much-hyped Windows 7 when it comes out, if things get worse?

Fresh off the Sugar Labs press release is a new version of the Sugar Learning Platform for children. Sugar v0.84 represents the expansion of Sugar beyond the XO-1 - it is packaged in GNU/Linux distributions, it runs under virtualization on Macs, and most of all, its a big step in getting closer to Sugar on a Stick which will boot those older classroom Windows PCs and newer netbooks.

The Wine development release 1.1.17 is now available and includes several new features and bug fixes. Wine, which stands for "Wine is not an emulator", allows Linux, BSD and Mac OS X users to run Windows applications by providing its own versions of Windows libraries, compiled for the platform in use.

Are you tired of frequent seeking or all these mega-piles of CDs constantly growing on your desktop? Is there any place left out there? Do you really need to wait another six months to update your software or get the feature you expect? Well, what I want to tell you is that there is a solution! Let me introduce to you, Arch Linux. In this article I would like to encourage you to give it a try, especially if you’re a beginner since the advantages of using the distro are really worth your effort. I also realize that it might be somewhat problematic to some of you, but you’re not alone – there are tonnes of resources out there on the net, so you can safely accomplish the installation and eventually enjoy one of the best desktop distros available (in my opinion).