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We all know that the simplest function in Linux is fork(). You might be thinking how can such a simple function reboot a linux machine. Well I must tell you that the program I am going to discuss today uses only this fork function and can force a Linux Server which can serve more than 200 computers to get rebooted.

An alpha version of Ubuntu's coming April release is now available and the results are spectacular. Ubuntu 9.04 looks set to live up to its Jaunty Jackalope monicker with the ext4 filesystem already receiving great verdicts.

In this podcast, Digium Director of Global Channel Sales Jim Webster answers five key questions about Asterisks' momentum and the types of partners that are lining up to support the open source IP PBX.

Two different companies this week announced that they have created tools that allow for software written using two different application development environments - the relatively new Ruby on Rails and the relatively ancient (but still respected and used) COBOL - to be deployed on Amazon's Web Services compute and storage clouds.

You've read the book; now see the movie! Oh wait, this is actually a script to find your Google-indexed pages ...forget about that first part ;)

Steve Jobs' leave of absence is complete depressing. But there are dozens of reasons Apple won't fall anytime soon. Here are just five of them.

Developers Francesco Gingoli and Lorenzo Nava have released firmware under GPL for a number of Broadcom 802.11 chips.

Nokia announces that its Qt cross-platform User Interface (UI) and application framework for desktop and embedded platforms will be available under the Lesser General Public License (LGPL) version 2.1 license from the release of Qt 4.5, scheduled for March 2009. Previously, Qt has been made available to the open source community under the General Public License (GPL) license. In addition, Qt will now be available from the new domain, http://www.qtsoftware.com.

Using the SSConverter class that we developed last week, which used the OORunner class from the week before that, this week we'll create a Python function that allows us to use spreadsheets as if they were CSV files by converting them on the fly.

Mitchell Baker, chairperson of the Mozilla Foundation, has presented a plan in her blog whereby Mozilla will have Web world domination by 2010.

Moving towards the 2.0 release with almost monthly beta releases, the KOffice team has once more honoured its promise to bring out beta releases of KOffice until the time is right for a release candidate. So today we bring you this beta with many, many improvements across the board. Incremental as it is, this beta is an important step towards a final release.

This is WFTL Bytes!, your occasiodaily FOSS and Linux news show for Tuesday, January 13, 2009, with your host, Marcel Gagné. This is episode 44. Today we uncover some Vista trash, an ongoing battle between the forces of OO and Go-OO, Shuttleworth and Ubuntu get the New York treatment (Times, that is), Linux goes to CES, Fedora gets a moniker, and Twitter gets bashed.

KDE's Konqueror file manager and Web browser is a powerhouse loaded with useful features. However, sometimes it takes a bit of digging to unearth treasures and to figure out how to make it do what you want. Carla Schroder offers up tips on creating view profiles that stick, and how to open it exactly to the profile that you want.

James Grimmelman compares Google to Sauron. I'm flabbergasted. I had always thought that Google was the Ringbearer and that Mordor was where Gates and Ballmer hung out. Was I misinformed? Or am I just confused? If it's the latter, I have a decent excuse. After all, even though Google and Microsoft have very different public personae, it's getting harder and harder to tell them apart as businesses. Both built their empires through the same strategy: gaining control of the economic chokepoint of the prevailing computing model of their day.

One of the items being worked on by Red Hat for Fedora 11 is making the GNOME volume control and sound preferences area more intuitive and easier to use. With Fedora and most other distributions now using PulseAudio, they are beginning to take advantage of some of the features available through this sound server. Some of this work involves reworking the user interface for controlling GNOME Sound Preferences, which we are providing a glimpse of in this article. Among other benefits, there is finally the ability to adjust the volume level on a per-application basis.

Welcome to this year's 1st issue of DPN, the newsletter for the Debian community. This issue is dedicated to Thiemo Seufer, who died on 26 December 2008 in a tragic car accident. Topics covered in this issue include "Bits from the Debian CD team", "Bits from the Debian Installer team" and "Results from the Lenny release GR".

Today I would like to announce the appointment of Tracy Anne Barlow aka tracyanne to Contributing Editor. Tracy has been a force of fact and opinion in the LXer forums for some time now. Her contributions to the forums quite literally speak for themselves. LXer is lucky to have her. Please join me in welcoming Tracy to the LXer Team.

Yesterday I published "Why Linux makes Windows 7 obsolete" . Okay, that was quite funny and we all had a lot of fun. But let's analyze what actually happened. In the past, editors of the "major" websites complained they couldn't publish a story on Open Source without being "flamed to hell". It appears that nowadays Windows supporters are just as touchy. The point is, they seems to feel they have to defend their choice. That is quite a change from the arrogant attitude they had before. All in all, it was an interesting social experiment.

This guide explains how you can set up LVM-based virtual machines on a Xen host running on Debian Etch instead of virtual machines that use disk images. Virtual machines that use disk images are very slow and heavy on disk IO.

Steve Jobs is taking a five and a half month medical leave of absence from his role as CEO of Apple, saying his health issues "are more complex than I originally thought." Jobs underwent surgery for pancreatic cancer in mid 2004. Since then there has been much speculation about his health, largely due to a significant loss of weight that gave him a somewhat haggard appearance.

[I have a feeling its going to turn into more than just five or six months. - Scott]