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Microsoft TechNetMicrosoft Unified Messaging Kurt Roeckx has been appointed to the post by Debian leader Steve McIntyre. As required by the project constitution, McIntyre made the appointment in consultation with the acting secretary, Bdale Garbee. Manoj Srivastava, the former secretary, resigned on December 18, following dissatisfaction among project members over the options offered in a vote about the release of Lenny.

During a presentation on Saturday at the Southern California Linux Expo (SCALE), Mozilla evangelist Chris Blizzard discussed some of new features that will be included in the next version of the Firefox Web browser. He demonstrated how several emerging standards-based Web technologies can be used together to produce impressively sophisticated Web applications.

When you tell someone, "I'm going to buy a car," you usually hear, "Which one?" Ford, Toyota (NYSE: TM), Mitsubishi, Honda, Saturn? Two-door, four-door, mini-van? And so on. Likewise, if you say "I want to run Linux," you'll get the same question: Which one? There's no one "Linux" in the same sense that there's no one "car". There are things common among all cars as there are among all Linux distributions: all cars have an engine, and all Linux distributions share the Linux kernel and many of the GNU utilities.

Marvell announced today a new type of computer. It's about the size of an AC to DC converting wall outlet plug, but is really a full SoC with a 1200 MHz CPU, built-in 512 MB Flash, 512 MB DRAM, Gigabit Ethernet and USB 2.0 support. It runs small versions of Linux, consumes about 5 watts max while allowing remote users (presumably those authorized by the owner) to access data stored on the device from remote locations including local intranets or over the Internet. The $49 device opens up a wide array of extremely low-power, low-volume, always on applications.

A service outage that impacted users of Google services including Gmail for approximately 75 minutes early this morning, is calling attention to a potential kink in the cloud: While an estimated 113 million Gmail accounts were forced to resort to Google's new offline mode, introduced last month, a number of Google service users were also forced to wait, since Gmail also serves as the company's central source of service authentication.

Unison Technologies is fulfilling its promise to offer free unified communications software on Ubuntu. An announcement could emerge as soon as this week. Here's what the news means to Canonical's Ubuntu Server Edition strategy.

Linux Magazine Online takes you out for a walk at FOSDEM 2009 in Brussels.

Red Hat shows up for the virtualization showdown with a big announcement.

In early January we had delivered Linux Solid-State Drive Benchmarks of an OCZ Core Series V2 SSD, which was a low-cost low-capacity single-cell drive. The increased performance and decreased power consumption compared to a 5400RPM Serial ATA 2.0 hard drive was nice for a netbook, but how are the higher-end solid-state drives performing? In this article, we have a high-performance Intel X25-E Extrene SSD on a System76 notebook running Ubuntu Linux.

How-to build a Linux-based Nokia N810 Internet Tablet GPS application.This series of articles (3) shows how to build a global positioning system (GPS)-aware application using the Linux-based Nokia N810 Internet Tablet and its built-in GPS receiver. You will find that developing for the Nokia N810 is a real joy. The developer tools and community forums provide a wealth of resources to get the job done, as well as these articles.

Howto install nginx webserver in Debian. Nginx (pronounced “engine x”) is a free, open-source, high-performance HTTP server and reverse proxy, as well as an IMAP/POP3 proxy server. Written by Igor Sysoev in 2005, Nginx now hosts between 1% and 4% of all domains worldwide .Nginx is known for its stability, rich feature set, simple configuration, and low resource consumption.

xTuple, which develops commercial open source ERP (enterprise resource planning) software, has quietly generated a profit without taking venture capitalist money, reports The VAR Guy. Here's the scoop.

Android may give Linux a boost on netbooks, but according to Dell, its Inspiron Mini 9s with Ubuntu have already seen a steady sales stream coupled with low return rates. While MSI told us a few months back that Wind netbooks running SuSE Linux saw 4x higher return rates than that of XP machines, Dell has had quite the opposite experience with its Inspiron Mini 9 offering with Ubuntu. “A third of our Mini 9 mix is Linux, which is well above the standard attach rate for other systems that offer Linux. We have done a very good job explaining to folks what Linux is,” says Dell’s Jay Pinkert.

New features are coming soon. Be careful not to activate them before their time. We had a very strange situation happen that, in fact, completely crippled two of our M4000 servers. The XSCF cards on them experienced an "issue" and that meant that both servers were, for all intents and purpose, out of commission. And, I don't know if the phrase "for all intents and purposes" really does the situation justice.

Gmail went down over night and the vultures are circling, but being down for a couple of hours doesn't mean that cloud computing is a failure. All software fails from time to time and being in the cloud doesn't make it immune.

LXer Feature: 24-Feb-2009

Once more unto the breach my friends, Richard M. Stallman (RMS) has laid another profound thought process out there for us to digest. This man is definitely deserves everyone's respect. Whether you agree with him or not, he has given the whole planet gifts that it does not even realize for the most part. While not the creator of the concept that the code for software should be free, he is without a doubt the one who codified the concept. He laid out exactly what it means for software to be free, in such a fashion that even most laymen could understand it. This alone should earn him the respect of the planet, however, it does not stop at that point.

[This is a response an article that hit our newswire last week. - Scott]

I want you to know that your comments and emails on the last article asking how the two ISO standards (26300 and 29500, commonly known as ODF and OOXML) are doing these days on the openness graph have been read and appreciated. They are useful. There is room for more commenting, including personal experiences you've had struggling to interact with governmental agencies that make little or no allowance for users of Linux. You can comment on the article itself or email me privately. And now comes news that there is a chance to have input into the next major version of ODF, for now being called 'ODF-Next'. There is a call for proposals that went out Friday from the ODF technical committee, and here's where you go to read all about it and to leave your comments. You can comment here too, of course, but you must input there if you wish your input to be registered and considered. What would you like to see in the feature set of the next major release of ODF? What capabilities does ODF need?

This tutorial shows how you can install Xen 3.3 on an Ubuntu 8.10 host (dom0). Xen 3.3 is available from the Ubuntu 8.10 repositories, but the Ubuntu 8.10 kernels (2.6.27-x) are domU kernels, i.e., they work for Xen guests (domU), but not for the host (dom0). Therefore we need to build our own dom0 kernel. This guide explains how to do this with a 2.6.27 kernel.

Even before the proverbial ink was dry on last week's interoperability deal between Microsoft and Red Hat, Linux competitor Novell laid off a still unknown number of employees involved with the open source openSUSE community. The openSUSE community has included volunteer developers in addition to paid employees of Novell, a major rival to Red Hat in the Linux space which forged its own interoperability pact with Microsoft in late 2006.

LXer Feature: 24-Feb-2009