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LXer Feature: 20-Apr-2009

It has been a busy week on our newswire. There was much good news for open source graphics, not quite so good news on the Linux security front, debatable news from Redmond, a flood of news about Ubuntu and much speculation dressed as news about Sun and IBM. And in between all that we had some regular news, tutorials and musings as well.

Here is an overview of the main things from last week.

The OLPC project developers have announced an upgraded version of their XO-1 laptop, the XO-1.5. The One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project is a non-profit organisation who's mission is to provide children across the world with low cost laptops for the purposes of self-education.

Sun Microsystems — and what would happen to it — has been in the news for some weeks, amid rumors, then negotiations, then rumors, again, concerning the flailing company's future. The now-infamous IBM purchase and its spectacular failure earlier this month exponentially increased speculation — speculation that was put to rest this morning when it was revealed that database-giant Oracle will be adding Sun to its solar system.

After weeks' long rumor mill, the word is finally out: database specialist Oracle is buying Sun Microsystems for around $7.4 million. This just two weeks after IBM abandoned its bid to do the same thing.

To activate this nice new feature on Ubuntu Jaunty Server PV Domu installed at Xen 3.4 Dom0 with pvops enabled kernel i still had to activate traditional VNC to get access to Gnome Destop menu option ...

Oracle Corp. plans to acquire Sun Microsystems Inc. for $7.4 billion, picking up what might prove to be a software treasure trove that includes the popular MySQL open-source database as well as Java. Oracle said it will pay $9.50 per share in cash for Sun, or $5.6 billion net of Sun's cash and debt. The move follows Oracle's purchases of a raft of companies in the past few years, including Siebel Systems, PeopleSoft and BEA Systems.

This guide explains how you can install and use Piwik for generating website analytics. The reports generated by Piwik are similar to the ones generated by Google Analytics. Piwik is an Open-Source (GPL) tool that you can download and host on your own servers which means you are in full control over your data. In addition to that, Piwik's functionality can be extended by plugins.

Microsoft Windows remains the dominant desktop operating system with approximately 90% of the client operating system market. If Microsoft's monopoly is ever going to be challenged by Linux, there has to be an easy way for Windows' users to be able to learn about this rival operating system. However, it would be naive to think that a Windows user is going to wipe their Windows partition, write off their years of Windows computing knowledge and install Linux just to see if it has more to offer.

Information technology company Oracle Corp. said Monday it is buying Sun Microsystems Inc. in a cash deal the company valued at $7.4 billion after IBM abandoned its bid to buy the networking equipment maker.

Today we're going to look at preparing your Solaris 10 system for clustering NFS (The Network File System ... the "The" is silent ;) on VCS (Veritas Cluster Server). In many ways, it's the same as setting it up on previous versions of Solaris, but it differs in many ways, as well. Apparently, I spend way too much time looking at this issue in many many ways ;)

I’ve attended my share of Linux installation festivals (installfests), where open source volunteers typically take donated Windows PCs and revive them as Linux systems. Now, the installfest craze seems to have found a new calling: The Asterisk IP PBX market, where open source meets telephony.

I’ve used Evolution, the default email client in Ubuntu, for a couple of years to manage numerous mail accounts. In general, I think it’s a great application. But as with everything in life, there’s always room for improvement. Below, I consider the most chronically frustrating and poorly designed aspects of Evolution, and how they could be fixed.

Blogger Gustavo noticed its very hard to get hold of a laptop from Dell with Linux pre-installed. After a long search he did find Laptops from Dell with Ubuntu pre-installed, but they were very hard to find! On its Spanish, British, French & German sites, Dell lists the Ubuntu pre-installed computers it offers. But not all of them. It shows only Ubuntu netbooks & hides the others, according to Gustavo.

If you want to upgrade From Ubuntu Intrepid (8.10) to Jaunty (9.04) use this tutorial for faster upgrades.We are going to use apt-p2p for this tutorial.apt-p2p is a p2p proxy for apt dowloads, it will act as a proxy between apt requests and a repository server, downloading any request files from peers (if possible), else will fallback to direct HTTP download. In general, apt-p2p save bandwidth, use limited cpu and memory resources and reduce congestion on the ubuntu mirrors.apt-p2p will get the request files from peers, therefore, it will avoid the congestion on the ubuntu mirrors.

The work never ends. Thank God lots of other people have the time, creativity and good-will to share some of the hilarious and expert animation they do. I found this bad boy on YouTube.com and, even though it has nothing to do with Linux or Unix, it does satisfy that Anti-Windows funny bone and is actually worth watching of its own merit.

In this article we learnt how to create and manage user groups and assign permissions to user groups. You have also seen how to create permission modules and functions that are used for implementing a permission system for special groups.

This is a beta website for the Playdeb project. Playdeb is a gaming repository for Ubuntu - aimed to provide titles already available on getdeb.net in an easier to install and update format.

After a business trip to China (stay tuned for details…), the ZaReason team is back in the US preparing to offer Ubuntu 9.04 on PCs and laptops the day Canonical’s latest Linux distribution launches. But that’s not all: ZaReason is preparing to expand its Ubuntu server lineup. Here are the early details.

Now that I've had a week to digest the Open Source Channel Alliance launch, I'm still not convinced that the OSCA will succeed. Here are some thoughts so far on the challenges and opportunities facing the Red Hat and Synnex effort. Read on.

It might seem like something of an odd question, unless your idea of a good night in is a box of popcorn and a copy of some dodgy DVD featuring a Captain Jack lookalike doing unmentionable things to his crew. Yet the answer is that these two things, the illegal file-sharing we commonly refer to as piracy and the porn business, have loads more in common than you might imagine.