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In Tux Radar's second podcast we pondered whether the dodgy economic outlook could actually bring more users to Linux and free software. With everyone afraid to open their wallets, surely software that has an initial zero cost is much more attractive for businesses looking to move on from legacy software, right? And home desktop users -- how many of those will really want to splash out on the much-hyped Windows 7 when it comes out, if things get worse?

Fresh off the Sugar Labs press release is a new version of the Sugar Learning Platform for children. Sugar v0.84 represents the expansion of Sugar beyond the XO-1 - it is packaged in GNU/Linux distributions, it runs under virtualization on Macs, and most of all, its a big step in getting closer to Sugar on a Stick which will boot those older classroom Windows PCs and newer netbooks.

The Wine development release 1.1.17 is now available and includes several new features and bug fixes. Wine, which stands for "Wine is not an emulator", allows Linux, BSD and Mac OS X users to run Windows applications by providing its own versions of Windows libraries, compiled for the platform in use.

Are you tired of frequent seeking or all these mega-piles of CDs constantly growing on your desktop? Is there any place left out there? Do you really need to wait another six months to update your software or get the feature you expect? Well, what I want to tell you is that there is a solution! Let me introduce to you, Arch Linux. In this article I would like to encourage you to give it a try, especially if you’re a beginner since the advantages of using the distro are really worth your effort. I also realize that it might be somewhat problematic to some of you, but you’re not alone – there are tonnes of resources out there on the net, so you can safely accomplish the installation and eventually enjoy one of the best desktop distros available (in my opinion).

This year the annual KDE community summit, Akademy, is being held in Las Palmas, Gran Canaria, Spain, from 3rd to 11th of July. It will be part of a larger event, the Gran Canaria Desktop Summit co-located with the GNOME community's annual summit, GUADEC.

Next month at Phoronix Media we will be introducing version 1.8 of the Phoronix Test Suite. Among a horde of new features, new test profiles, bug-fixes, and much more, there is a Phoronix Test Suite GUI (updated screenshots). The GTK2 GUI is nearly completed already, while additional fine-tuning and new features will come to the interface with Phoronix Test Suite 2.0 later this year.

When I was working on the Annvix project, I was fascinated with how the system booted and services were started. This led to an eventual rewrite of initialization scripts and the use of runit instead of the traditional SysV init. The results were fantastic: a fast booting system with services starting in parallel and a series of scripts to start and stop the system with a small footprint and amazing speed.

There has been a lot of discussion about the ext4 data loss issue, and I see a lot of misconceptions, both about why rename() is used and what guarantees POSIX gives. I’ll try to give the background, and then my opinion on the situation. There are two basic ways to update a file. You can either truncate the old file and write the new contents, or you can write the new contents to a temporary file and rename it over the old file when finished. The rename method have several advantages, partly based on the fact that rename is atomic.

From the Linux (and Linux Journal) perspective, there's an issue with clouds—those back-end Web services that compose Utility Computing. They're proprietary. Amazon owns AWS (Amazon Web Services: S3, EC2 and a growing number of others). Google, Microsoft and other companies own theirs as well. These are open in the sense that most services are substitutable, which makes them utilities. If you don't like storing your data at Amazon's S3, you can park it elsewhere. The documents you create and keep at Google Docs can be put elsewhere as well. Elastic computing is more tricky, but it should be substitutable as well.

We started to study shell programming in school and we use VI to code some scripts. I noticed that all my colleagues using vi on ubuntu are very irritated and seem to envy their friends who use VI on Fedora 10 because it's very easy to use and colorful, it helps to detect syntax errors. Some of my friends started to regret installing Ubuntu instead of Fedora and even blamed me for recommending it. As an Ubuntu fan I looked for a solution for this tiny problem.

A long time ago I used to actually use a separate computer to install and test Linux distributions. I even built some of the boxes that I used to do the testing with but these days I mostly do my work on Macs. I know, I know...I've become a lame Apple whore. Along the way I finally ended up dispensing with testing Linux distributions on separate computers. These days I use VMWare and Parallels to run Linux on my Macs. Why? Well you can constantly be downloading and installing different distributions with a minimum of fuss and hassle. You don't need to tie up an entire machine just to check the latest cool distributions.

Red Hat's application for a patent for an approach to routing messages over a middleware bus has disturbed some who are wondering why Red Hat didn't simply publish. If, as Red Hat claim, this is simply a defensive patent they could instead have published the proposal to establish prior art.

About two-thirds of "IT executives" responding to a Novell-sponsored survey report either "actively evaluating" or "accelerating adoption" of Linux on the desktop, Novell says. About 72 percent responded likewise for servers, although presumably the desktop category includes more evaluators, while servers have more adoption accelerators.

I have decided - after running Foresight for two months - to no longer use Foresight Linux on my systems. Let me say however that I found the experience interesting and dare I say - challenging. Everyone in the IRC channel was great - very friendly - and most tried to be helpful.

I thought it might be helpful and instructive to provide an explanation as to why I am not going to use Foresight any longer, rather than just disappear. Hopefully, in doing so I may contribute to Foresight becoming a better distro that I might want to run in the future. So, here goes ....

Novell and Red Hat will have a seat at Cisco Systems’ table as CEO John Chambers builds out Cisco’s server and unified computing strategy. Here’s the scoop, from The VAR Guy.

To take advantage of the excellent Linux development environment, you need to have the right tools. Here’s a rundown of some of the best ones out there and the features they have to offer. Linux is a great development environment. But without sound development tools, that environment won’t do you any good. Fortunately, plenty of Linux and/or open source development tools are available. If you’re a new user you might not know which tools are there, but worry not. Here are 10 outstanding tools that will help you take your development to another level.

Hadoop, the same software that lies at the heart of successful companies such as Google, Facebook, Yahoo!, and others, has been proven time and again with said companies to be a successful data management server, keeping data secure and fault-free spread across multiple servers. It isn't the easiest piece of software to configure, however, which is why the Cloudera company has just announced a freely downloadable and easier to use custom distribution of Hadoop to bring the power of entities like Google to smaller businesses.

A new report out today from IDC, sponsored by Linux vendor Novell indicates that the current economic downturn is a good thing for Linux adoption. with more than half of the IT executives surveyed planning to accelerate Linux adoption in 2009. This is definitely something we've heard before from multiple open source and Linux vendors, but the IDC report puts some numbers to the premise.

Nick Nguyen, the Mozilla Add-ons Lead, has posted a blog entry prompting developers to participate in a survey about developer platforms. The goal of the survey is to help the add-ons team improve the development experience, while "nurturing new extension developers."

Authentication is a the key component of security-based solutions. In client-server models designed over UNIX® systems, distributed network security is of significant importance. In order to meet the stringent security requirements necessary in client-server models, either multi-layer authentication or multifactor authentication or combinations of both are being used by existing systems.