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Sander dared us all to top the story of "Why Windows 7 will crush Linux". This is my submission - but not without a grain of truth.

LinuxQuestions.org is proud to announce that voting for the 2008 LinuxQuestions.org Members Choice Awards is now open. The Members Choice Awards allow the Linux community to select their favorite products in a variety of categories. Awards will be given out in 26 categories this year, including Server Distribution of the Year, Desktop Distribution of the Year, Browser of the Year, Office Suite of the Year, Desktop Environment of the Year and Database of the Year. The polls will close on February 12th. This is the eighth annual LinuxQuestions.org Members Choice Awards. Last years winners include Ubuntu, Firefox, KDE, OpenOffice.org and MySQL.

Fonality, a small provider of open source unified communications software originally based on Asterisk (the IP PBX), is expected to announce a distribution deal with Tech Data on January 12. This is the latest in a growing list of channel wins for Fonality, and it reinforces Asterisks’ growing momentum among solutions providers. Here’s the scoop from The VAR Guy.

Search giant Google releases test version of Chrome 2.0 browser for Windows but says Linux and Mac users will have to wait until later this year for native versions for those platforms.

The Firebird project publishes the following roadmap. During this year, Firebird users can expect more supported releases (2.1.x and 2.5.0) and the first alpha of FB 3. Many new features are planned, as described in the roadmap.

Fedora Project Leader Paul Frields has named the winner of the Fedora 11 naming sweepstakes...and the winner is: LEONIDAS. Leonidas (and his band of over 300) beat out Blarney, Brasilia Claypool, Duchess, Euryalus, Indomitable, and Zampone as names for Fedora 11.

Outwardly Sony's DSC-G3 is a 10-megapixel camera with Wi-Fi, but inside lurks the Busybox Linux system.

Nessus is a great security audit tool, and it works quite well with Ubuntu. But, if you install Nessus from the Ubuntu repositories, you're going to be stuck with an older version. If you need the better functionality of the newest version, you'll need to download it from the Nessus.org website. To complicate matters a bit more, there's a 64-bit version of the Nessus server, but there's only a 32-bit version of the Nessus client. So, if you're running a 64-bit version of Ubuntu, you'll need to work a bit of magic to get everything to work properly. (Don't fear, though, it's not that hard.)

We are preparing to release Phoronix Test Suite 1.6 "Tydal" later this month, which is our largest and most significant update to date. Phoronix Test Suite 1.6 has quite a few changes internally as well as a number of new features and added tests. While there are over 200 changes making up this release codenamed Tydal, in this article we are sharing some of the most significant work in this forthcoming release.

LXer Feature: 12-Jan-2009

Sorry for being a day late on posting this. Some new things going on with the kernel like Btrfs put in the mainline and SJVN's review of Linux 2.6.28's five best features. Someone decided to try Linux for a week as their new year Linux resolution and 14 file managers for Linux as well.

Lots of strong opinions about Microsoft out there. There are people who stand behind it staunchly. In their eyes Microsoft can do no wrong and critics like me are simply buffoons who don't get it. Then there are people who hate Microsoft for everything it stands for. In their minds no matter what Microsoft offers, it's going to be bad.

With Ubuntu 8.10 Intrepid Ibex, the way OpenLDAP is used and configured has changed. In Intrepid, OpenLDAP is no longer configured via the slapd.conf file, but via the slapd.d directory that contains ldif files to configure OpenLDAP.

OpenTaxSolver (OTS) is a free program for calculating Tax Form entries and tax-owed or refund-due, such as Federal or State personal income taxes. Updating of TaxSolver has begun for the 2008 tax-year. We are awaiting release of the 2008 forms. As in previous years, we expect to cover US 1040 with Schedules A, B, C, & D, and State-Taxes for California, North Carolina, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Virginia, Ohio, New York, and Massachusetts. Contributions of other forms would be appreciated. Special thanks again to all contributors.

With apologies to my boss, a story in today's Wall Street Journal has me thinking that the future of Linux deployment might perhaps be even better than he predicted. The topic [of the article] was netbooks, and how hardware vendors are scrambling to get some new offerings out the factory doors after the very popular Asus Eee PC came out in 2007 and made a big splash in an otherwise bleak electronics market. It's not just updating product lineups with brand-new netbook solution. An alternative is to get existing laptops to behave more like netbooks. If done right, this is a win-win for hardware OEMs, since with just a little modification, they can roll right into the netbook market.

From the very start, anyone who paid attention to SCO's attempts to throw a spanner in the Linux works, knew that they had no case. Over the years, I've covered their decline from the last major x86 Unix power to an industry joke. And, now SCO's story is almost over. It's garbage time now for SCO. Those of you who follow basketball know exactly what I mean. This is when the winning team, Linux, and its chief champions in the SCO lawsuits. Novell and IBM, can send in the reserves from the end of the bench. SCO's lawsuits are smashed to bits. As the clock ever so slowly winds down, SCO is now dumping what was once its heart, its Unix OpenServer and UnixWare business, and its newer mobile software, to continue its forlorn lawsuits. SCO has filed a new reorganization plan with the federal bankruptcy court in Delaware on January 8th.

Okay it is no secret that Linux has not been able to crack the desktop, either at the home or at the workplace. Not to ignored either is that Windows lost some desktops last year (a little over 3%),but let’s not panic just yet, Windows still owns over 88% of all the desktops according to leading research. Many people might be surprised to learn that I come from a background of Windows, Linux, UNIX and even MAC. In fact, my first IT experience was in a Novell/SCO UNIX environment. Now there are some fundamental issues to why Windows 7 will trump Linux distros like Ubuntu, Fedora and Debian. Therefor, to get those out of the way let’s just spell them out.

[Here's my submission for FUD-of-the-week. It's just too funny. I dare you to top that! -- Sander]

This isn't about a shell script, it's about a really cool technique to apply in shell scripts. Have you ever been worried about multiple instances of a shell script running because they might overwrite or corrupt the data or devices they are working on? Here's a way to prevent that. There's a Unix system call named flock(2). It's used to apply advisory locks to open files. Without exhausting the subject, it can be used to synchronize access to resources across multiple running processes.

Yes, this is a 2009 headline. Who'd have thought? The SCO Group is back in the news with plans to auction off its core products so the proceeds can continue its lawsuits over alleged copyright violations in Linux. Is CEO Darl McBride mad? Personally, I thought SCO was long gone but they’re still alive and kicking.

Google has revealed its goal for releasing Mac OS X and Linux versions of its browser. Also, cutting-edge Chrome sports early work to enable extensions.

When things go wrong with your Oracle DB, someone has to ignore the problem ;)