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Thanks to Mike Dailey a very interesting discussion has been sparked on Linux and open source in the enterprise. For anybody wanting to follow the entire discussion here's how it goes.

One might well think that, at this point, there has been sufficient discussion of the design decisions built into the ext4 "delayed allocation" feature and the user-space implications of those decisions. And perhaps that is true, but there should be room for a summary of the relevant issues. The key question has little to do with the details of filesystem design, and a lot to do with the kind of API that the Linux kernel should present to its user-space processes.

LXer Feature: 30-Mar-2009

It looks like Google's Chrome browser came out on the winning end of browser hacking contest, so I figured why not back it up with 11 Free Ways to Beef Up Your Web Browser. Eric S. Raymond speaks heresy at a LUG meeting, RMS doesn't want us to fall into "The Javascript Trap" and by the way, your distro sucks.;-)

EU officials warned social networking and search engine sites such as Facebook and Google on Monday to better protect consumer rights amid growing concern that users are being lured to hand over too much personal data.

Being 39 years of age, Linus Torvalds was born on the 28th of December 1969 in Helsinki, Finland. Though the fact that he graduated the Helsinki University with a Master's degree in computer science may not seem very interesting, you should know that the University's decision to hold a UNIX course during his years there was one of the things that led to the creation of Linux.

Dolphin was intended to replace Konqueror as the default file manager in KDE 4. The scope of Dolphin was to only provide a compact and easy-to-use file manager, without all the features and uses Konqueror has. And (I think) it succeeded. In the beginning most of the users were reticent regarding this idea, since Konqueror provided anything one could possibly ask from a file manager. Besides, most KDE fans thought Dolphin looks too much like with Nautilus and may be limited regarding usability and configuration. However, I see in Dolphin an appropriate manager for day-to-day use.

Are Flash cookies dangerous? Of course they are-- to your privacy and personal data security. Carla Schroder shares some additional helpful information submitted by readers on what Flash cookies really do in part 3 of this series, and more cool Linux ways to manage them.

Destined to become the default file system for the more popular Linux distributions, ext4 is out of experimental mode and gearing up for production environments. Here’s what you need to know.

More than 50% of IT executives in a recent survey said that they were planning to accelerate Linux adoption in 2009. "As organisations fight to cut costs and find value in this tough economic climate, Linux adoption will accelerate," said Michelle Beetar, country manager for Novell South Africa.

A plan by IBM to launch an industry-wide 'open' cloud computing strategy has seemingly backfired amid accusations of closed deals. Google pulled out after signing up and Amazon said it would not get involved. Microsoft criticised the plan, saying it was given two days to sign up to a "secret" manifesto with no input.

Amarok always had the reputation of being the most popular and powerful audio player available on the Linux platform, and it really deserved that position. I myself am a fan of Amarok for over three years now, and there was nothing I could think of which Amarok 1.4 did not have. For this review I used Amarok 2.0.2 (which was released to the public on March 5), included in Kubuntu 9.04 Beta (with all the upgrades to date) and I scanned several Ogg Vorbis and FLAC albums, all of them with correctly filled-in tags.

Free and open source software is all about sharing so, prompted by a reader who emailed me last week to ask about books on Linux, I spent some time over the weekend doing research. The result is a short list of books that users - from newbies to gurus - can download and read at their leisure. There are many more books than just these available online but, although many publishers provide versions of their books for reading online - notably Open Books from O'Reilly which is well worth checking out - I chose to limit the list to books that could be downloaded in full. I also chose a wide range of books, from introductions to Linux, books on implementing open source in schools and in Africa, to books that defined the evolution of free software.

If Red Hat has done this well for themselves -- not just financially, but in terms of clout, respect, and being a consistent leader in their industry -- what could compel them to think they could do better by being bought? As Jim Whitehurst himself put it, Red Hat benefits by being an island (or, rather, a "Switzerland") unto itself. Being someone else's property wouldn't give them any particular advantage that they don't already have or which they can't grow on their own -- the right way.

Amarok is a pretty nifty, versatile and advanced music player for the KDE desktop. However the current version in the *buntu 8.10 repos is hopelessly outdated and (IMHO) totally bugged. There's also the Amarok Neon Project, which aims at providing daily SVN builds for *buntu however lately they have not been updated. So, if you want to be up-to-date with latest Amarok development you either wait until the Neon Project provides binaries again or you compile it on your own. If you want to compile it on your own, you require KDE 4.2. There are also PPA repos for that, use my generator http://repogen.simplylinux.ch to get the according info.

Microsoft Corp and Dutch navigation device maker TomTom NV said on Monday they had reached a settlement after more than a year of squabbling over software patents.

While Microsoft continues to warn about the legal and economic perils of relying on Linux and similar systems, Mr Ramji's role is to make sure open-source programs in use can work in conjunction with Microsoft software. That way, just because a company is using the MySQL open-source database, it will not feel compelled to put it on top of the Linux operating system.

There have been questions about Sun's leadership of the JCP for years dating back to at least 2002 and percolating still with the soon to be finalized JavaEE 6 specification as well. With IBM (NYSE: IBM) owning Sun, leadership of the JCP could shift and that would be a change welcomed by members of the executive committee of the JCP as well as Java stakeholders outside of the JCP. "Sun's inability to invest in the JCP combined with its desire to maintain control is stifling the innovation and investment in Java," Rich Sharples, director of product management at JBoss, told InternetNews.com.

The search for 'Active' distributions on distrowatch listed 296 distributions as of today. The explosion in the number of distributions increased the chance of getting a more personalized Linux but this resulted in lack of standards among the distributions as every distribution started using different package management/hardware detection/configuration tools.

Microsoft is criticizing the drafting of what it has characterized as a secret "Cloud Manifesto" that sets guidelines for interoperability among cloud-computing networks. In a blog posting attributed to Steven Martin, Microsoft spilled the beans on a document it said has been drafted privately and that it was asked to sign without revisions. "Very recently we were privately shown a copy of the document, warned that it was a secret, and told that it must be signed 'as is,' without modifications or additional input," according to the post.

Last week Intel had pushed out a second alpha release of Moblin V2 and now it boots even faster, which means they are down to the point of being able to boot in just a few seconds. Beyond a very quick boot process, they have already incorporated kernel mode-setting and other newer Linux/X.Org technologies while also working to build a desktop environment around the Clutter OpenGL tool-kit. Moblin is certainly turning into an interesting Intel creation, but how does its performance compare to other mobile-focused Linux distributions? We have benchmarked Moblin V2 Alpha 2 and compared it against what is likely their biggest competitor in the mobile space, Ubuntu Netbook Remix, and the LPIA-based Ubuntu MID edition. Which of these mobile operating systems is the fastest? We hope to find out today.