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Ubuntu's commercial backer won't fluff its own cloud, but Canonical isn't eschewing online services in the battle against Microsoft. Canonical has begun beta tests of a web-based service that'll let you store and synchronize files on your Jaunty Jackalope PC with other Jackalope-powered machines. Called Ubuntu One, it's designed to provide you with access to your files using a web interface when you're away from your main machine. The service also promises to let you share documents with others.

Gyachi is a Yahoo! client for Linux operating system that supports almost all of the features you would expect to find on the official Windows Yahoo! client: Voice chat, webcams, faders, 'nicknames', audibles, avatars, display images, and more.

Is a certification required to get a job?

Linux has gained in popularity among server and device vendors as being a good general purpose operating system. When it comes to device vendors which often have different chip architectures and needs than a general purpose operating system provides, there is a need for customization which adds time and expense to a project. Embedded Linux vendor MontaVista is now taking aim at that issue by splitting apart its Linux distribution into what it refers to as Market Specific Distributions (MSDs).

This is a very interesting read, but you may not know why you're reading it at first, or even exactly what you're reading. The title suggests that you'll learn the "Google way" of doing things and this is largely true. It also suggests that the "Google way" is a unique set of operations, philosophies, and processes that have resulted in Google's incredible success and that perhaps, by learning "the way", you may be able to replicate that success in your own efforts. Is that true? Probably not.

Yesterday's debut of the New York Times' "Times Reader 2.0" marked the news-reading software's shift to Adobe's AIR technology. Earlier versions of the program for Windows and Mac ran on Microsoft's Windows Presentation Foundation and Silverlight.

Ubuntu is five years old. The release of Jaunty Jackalope coincided with the fifth anniversary of a meeting that Mark Shuttleworth called of a dozen or so Debian Developers in his London flat in April 2004 to map out his project to create a distribution that was capable of taking Linux to the masses. During the five years since that meeting Ubuntu has sprung from nothing to become the most popular Linux on the street.

Although designed as a free course management system, Moodle is powerful enough to be used for many other purposes -- including the management of a cub scout pack.

For as long as I can recall, ATI/AMD video cards have typically had decent support in Linux. It's not hard to pick out points in time where drivers were slow to come (R300 sticks out in my mind), but that was not due to the lack of effort by the open-source community as it was the difficulty reverse engineering a chip with no documentation. Intel seems to be the one getting most of the press these days regarding their open-source graphics support, but AMD is putting forth its own notable effort as well. They have multiple full time employees working on open-source support and have released specifications and programming documentation for their entire range of chips. The past few months have seen a flurry of activity in graphics related development, and a fair amount of this is centered around AMD hardware.

This guide explains how to set up WebDAV with Apache2 on a Debian Lenny server. WebDAV stands for Web-based Distributed Authoring and Versioning and is a set of extensions to the HTTP protocol that allow users to directly edit files on the Apache server so that they do not need to be downloaded/uploaded via http://FTP. Of course, WebDAV can also be used to upload and download files.

Having recently purchased Sun Microsystems, Oracle has now bought virtualisation specialist Virtual Iron for an unspecified amount. The purchase gives Oracle another server virtualisation solution, including Virtual Iron's management software. In a statement Wim Coekaerts, Oracle Vice President of Linux and Virtualisation Engineering, said "With the addition of Virtual Iron, Oracle expects to enable customers to more dynamically manage their server capacity and optimize their power consumption.

The Swiss Federal Office for Construction and Logistics (Bundesamt für Bauten und Logistik, or BBL) is reported as having purchased Microsoft licenses in the order of 42 million Swiss francs (about $38 million). Because no public bids were tendered, open source organizations are now requesting a review of the decision.

The founder of btrfs talks about features, terabyte raid arrays and comparisons with ZFS.

Before Linux.com went dark late last year, it was one of the most visited open source news aggregation and discussion sites. In March, work got out that the Linux Foundation had taken Linux.com over, and was committed to making it bigger, better and richer than before. After months of effort (and some pretty impressive Web design work) the Linux Foundation delivered on that promise last night. The results are pretty cool, and different from anything else on the Web.

Learning from other people's code The reason I want this debugging feature so hard is that I like to learn from other people's code. The thing I like so much about running an open source OS, is that I can just read the sources for programs on my system and try to figure out what they do and how they do it .

Dell has announced a lower-cost version of its popular Mini 10 netbook, which runs Ubuntu Linux. The Dell Inspiron Mini 10v sells for $300, offering a 1.6GHz Intel Atom N270, 10-inch display, 120GB or 160GB hard drive, and a 1.3 megapixel webcam, the company says.

In a recent blog, Sun developer Malte Timmermann took a position on the security concerns of the Ecole Superieure d'Informatique, Electronique, Automatique (ESIEA) in Paris-Laval, France. The subject was the vulnerability of OpenOffice, involving document macros, for example.

What’s in a look? Before Apple started making immensely slick, sexy hardware, the main issues were always “specs”, “graphic cards”, “memory”. Then, the game changed. People started buying Apple computers because they looked good — inside and out. Their computers (and gadgets) are immensely appealing. Their operating system, OS X, is a pleasure to look at. When the iPhone was announced, I knew it was going to be the equivalent of Naomi Campbell in the cell phone world. And I was right. Are iPhones just too sexy to compete against them? Read the full story at Free Software Magazine.

From the 'yet another Linux news site?' files: Linux.com has been relaunched under the direction of the Linux Foundation. The Linux.com site was acquired by the Linux Foundation earlier this year from SourceForge for an an undisclosed sum. The goal of the site is supposed to be a community hub that lets the Linux community participate and contribute their knowledge, in the pursuit of being a Linux guru.

Over time, many people have complained about the X Window system; the X Window system, or Xorg in its current most popular implementation, is the layer between applications and the graphics adapter. It has some fantastic features (like the ability to run application over the network) and some shortcoming. One thing is sure: it has evolved over the last year or so, immensely, especially as far as 3D and hardware acceleration. In this article I will explain has X Window has changed, and what to expect in the near future. Several significant things happened, and they all depended on one another. But first, some background. Read the full story at Free Software Magazine.