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A whole lot more comics for your weekend enjoyment

The media has made much of a Microsoft iPhone killer prototype handset being stolen during the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. iTWire ponders if it all might just be a publicity stunt for the failing Windows Mobile OS?

After years of being a Windows user (since 2.0) and an administrator I've learned to ignore the marketing hype surrounding new Windows versions. But I tried out the Windows 7 beta just so I can settle arguments about what it can or can't do.

A new release for Pagico v3.2.2 on Ubuntu, bringing back two important features to the program.

Being worked on as part of Mandriva's next Linux distribution update is a technology they are referring to as Speedboot. Speedboot will be officially introduced with Mandriva Linux 2009.1, and compared to the normal boot process, it begins initializing some processes early on while it postpones other tasks until after the graphical display manager has shown. In essence, the user is logging into their Linux desktop even before the system is fully booted. We have some timed results of Mandriva's Speedboot along with videos showing the differences.

Dell desperately wants a bigger share of the netbook market, but it also wants to be able to call them netbooks and is taking the trademark fight to Psion.

Things you can do with Linux and not with windows Some people install windows on their netbook (or buy one with windows). I think this is not very smart because the only things you could ever really need windows for (games and photoshop) are not likely to run very well on these things. Following a list of some of the things you can do with Linux and not on windows (or very difficult)

Bring us your tired, your poor, huddled masses of people who ignore the obvious.

For those of us who have traveled outside of the world of Microsoft Windows and into UNIX-like operating systems, we should already be somewhat familiar with the X Window System. Some of us even understand its full potential and use it in ways that most have never dreamed of.

VL-Hot, developed for Vector Linux provides an alternative that doesn't require continuous hardware polling. Instead VL-Hot uses udev triggers to pop up the required icons. The Vector Linux developers have VL-Hot working with lightweight window managers like JWM and IceWM provided that the PCMan File Manager is installed. I'm quite surprised that other distributions which aim to be lightweight haven't incorporated VL-Hot.

I know for a fact that either Novell or Red Hat, or perhaps both, will be announcing next week that they'll be shifting their server virtualization offerings from Xen to XenServer. What I don't know is what, if anything, either one of them may be doing beyond that to further their virtualization partnerships with Microsoft. One or the other, however, is going to make a major move. This has been building for some time. Novell, of course, has long had a partnership with Microsoft

I recently joked that we might want to rename OSNews to CourtNews, and with each passing day that silly joke seems to become less silly. This week, it became clear that Psion Teklogix, the company behind various small computing devices back in the '90s, has started an all-out legal offensive to prohibit other companies from using the term "netbook".

The OpenSUSE project, a group that develops a Linux distribution that then feeds into Novell's SUSE Linux, has been hit recently by the layoffs at Novell. Some Novell developers, who were also contributors to the OpenSUSE project, were laid off by the company. This has caused some other contriburors to apparently ask the OpenSUSE board about the future of the project.

Being worked on as part of Mandriva's next Linux distribution update is a technology they are referring to as Speedboot. Speedboot will be officially introduced with Mandriva Linux 2009.1, and compared to the normal boot process, it begins initializing some processes early on while it postpones other tasks until after the graphical display manager has shown. In essence, the user is logging into their Linux desktop even before the system is fully booted. We have some timed results of Mandriva's Speedboot along with videos showing the differences.

Enough with the reading already. These books have pictures. After an exhausting week that isn't over until Sunday Night/Monday Morning, I always like to unwind with some funnies. I found this one over at gocomics.com. It's from a little strip called Adam@home and may be a lot funnier than I think it is ;) I have yet to finish all of them. Lots and lots of words to fuss through ;)

After buying my Asus EEE PC 1000HA, I initially installed Ubuntu Netbook Remix on it. After learning more about (#!) CrunchBang Linux and seeing that they had released an optimized version for the EEE PC called CrunchEEE. I’ve been using CrunchEEE on my EEE PC for the last week and decided to do a review.

Sun Microsystems has announced that in 2009, there will only be a minor release, instead of a major jump from version 6.5 to 7.0, for its open source NetBeans Java development environment. The developers are following their guidelines to release versions that focus on smaller changes and on API compatibility, as intermediate versions.

The Distribution List is a list of users that you can use to send mail to at one time. Instead of having to use CC: or BC: you can have a permanent list to send to. Zimbra offers a graphical interface to accomplish this task. This is a great way to send company mail to one user and it is distributed to the entire staff.

ASUS is considering to install the Linux-based Google Android OS on future Eee PCs.

A new packet capture repository has been launched called pcapr that is sponsored and run by Mu Dynamics. pcapr appears to be a good alternative to OpenPacket and it supports protocol tagging, searching, and packet viewing in the web browser.