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In case you needed extra evidence that Microsoft worries about the Linux threat, here's more: Microsoft is advertising for a Director of Open Source Strategy, and the job is aimed at combating Linux on the desktop, not on servers.

Microsoft is readying a new cloud service called My Phone that enables users of Windows Mobile 6 or later to sync contacts, calendar appointments, photos, and other information with the My Phone web site.

One of the largest mobile operators in the world, Telefonica, joined wireless Linux foundation LiMo on Monday and committed with five other major operators to sell phones using its software this year. Vodafone, Orange, Japan's NTT DoCoMo, Korea's SK Telecom, and the top U.S. operator Verizon Wireless will also introduce phones using LiMo software in 2009, the operators said in a joint statement ahead of Mobile World Congress trade show next week in Barcelona.

A simple tip to avoid a lot of headaches with Symantec VCS NetBackup support. Today's post is a little trick that anyone running Veritas/Symantec NetBackup (Linux or Unix) on VCS - Veritas Cluster Server - should know. As the title suggests, doing this one little thing will almost guarantee you more responsive support from Symantec (given the highly specific situation outlined in the first sentence, of course ;). The funny thing, though, is that many people have this problem already; they just may not have had to deal with Symantec, with regards to it, yet.

My HP6449US laptop was working quite nicely when I decided to do some modification to the Simply Mepis beta I had installed a couple of months ago. That beta shared the hard drive with Simply Mepis 7 and Vista, for a choice of three in my multi-boot set up. SM 7 was the first item in my grub menu, followed by Vista and then SM 7.9.95-rc2. Actually, I had been spending most of my time with the SM release candidate, and rarely ever booted into SM 7 anymore. Vista just takes up room, and I don’t know why HP even elects putting that OS on a good laptop.

Here in New England, where I practice law and have been representing startups for thirty years, we have a mixed blessing. The advantages won't surprise you, but some of the disadvantages might.

LXer Feature: 08-Feb-2009

At the beginning of the week Debian went into a deep freeze until their announced release date for Lenny on Valentine's Day. A group of developers have brought the dark horse of file managers Midnight Commander back from a deep sleep. Jimf exposed me to midnight commander, it was way over my head at the time and in a related article Carla Schroder says you "You Get What You Pay For" that talks about projects having a hard time making ends meet. Both of which I will be talking about again soon..

rpmorphan is a free opensource utility to find orphaned packages on your openSUSE installation. rpmorphan determines which packages on the system has no other package(s) depending on their installation, and lists these packages.

Walter Leibbrandt and Friedel Wolff of South African localisation specialists Translate.org.za attended this weekend’s Fosdem 2009 conference in Belguim. They sent Tectonic their thoughts on the two-day European FOSS gathering.

The differences between Linux and windows are chalk and cheese in respect to how the two operating systems are put together. While the end result of putting together these operating systems are pretty much the same functionality. It is the way they are put together which ultimately determines the true underlying nature of these layers between man and machine.

I am thinking the unthinkable…..I am considering changing from Ubuntu 8.10 for my desktop to Debian 5. I have been running the Debian 5 Lenny candidate for awhile and have bee very pleased with the stability and features. It actually functions and acts more like the distribution I need and work on than Ubuntu. Not so say that Ubuntu is bad, just that I typically do not need or use the latest applications. I mainly work on my Linux desktop for about 60 hours a week. So I really need something I can count on. Again, not that Ubuntu has let me down, it has never really crashed on me but I do struggle with bugs from time to time. I use my GUI desktop to work from as I manage Linux servers, either Ubuntu or CentOS.

Microsoft's recent survey proclaimed nearly half the population believe it is ok to use pirated software for personal use. This diminishes the argument by Linux advocates that you can use their operating system without any cost. Yet, you can't confuse free as in cost with free as in freedom. Here's what FOSS really means.

Over the past 4 months we have continued to receive a steady stream of emails from individuals recommending games that were not included in our previous free game articles.

Apple is pinning its hopes of continuing smartphone market dominance with a $99 cheapy iPhone, But will this be enough to combat the Open Handset Alliance with no less than 40 new Google Android handsets coming our way?

Sometimes I sit back and wonder about the direction technology has taken, especially with regards to operating systems. I think back to my Apple days and even when I got my first PC running MS-DOS with Microsoft Windows 3.11. Obviously, some of you can go even further back in history while others not far at all. But when I think about it, I think of how simple things were and by the end of the day, it all still worked! As the years had gone by additional “fluff” has been added to these simple computing machine, now adding complexity into the equation.

FluxFlux-Se has been released today. FluxFlux is a PCLinuxOS Remaster & provides a fully configured and ready-to-use live system containing all typical programs for the average user.

A UPnP media server can serve your media files (video / audio / pictures) over the network to any compatible player. In linux, few players can play media off these servers natively, but many require a plugin / library called “coherence”. This works, BUT you will see that many times Totem will stop detecting the server suddenly.

The first X.Org talk at FOSDEM 2009 was on version 1.3 of the Resize and Rotate extension. Matthias Hopf talked about RandR 1.3 and then Keith Packard demonstrated the transformations and panning operations using this soon-to-be-released version of RandR. Among the features for RandR 1.3 are querying state without output probing, multi-monitor panning, display transformations (translation, scaling, rotation, projection), and support for standard outputs.

This tutorial provides step-by-step instructions on how to install Xen on a Debian Lenny (5.0) system (AMD64). Xen lets you create guest operating systems (*nix operating systems like Linux and FreeBSD), so called "virtual machines" or domUs, under a host operating system (dom0). Using Xen you can separate your applications into different virtual machines that are totally independent from each other (e.g. a virtual machine for a mail server, a virtual machine for a high-traffic web site, another virtual machine that serves your customers' web sites, a virtual machine for DNS, etc.), but still use the same hardware. This saves money, and what is even more important, it's more secure. If the virtual machine of your DNS server gets hacked, it has no effect on your other virtual machines. Plus, you can move virtual machines from one Xen server to the next one.

Back in May 2000 the first issue of Linux Format magazine hit the news stands. One of its features was a group test of Linux distributions, reflecting the state of play in Linux flavours at the time. If you fancy a trip down memory lane or just a quick look at how beautiful Linux wasn't all those years ago, we've dug out the original article complete with screenshots - read on!