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Everybody needs diagrams. Most users need to create one more often than they think: that flowchart for a presentation, that sketch of the bird feeder to build this weekend, or a time line. Getting more technical, there are always circuits and blueprints and the like. Stop wasting time with an office app, the GIMP, or a paint program: use Dia, an easy yet powerful made-for-diagrams editor.

Recently Eigen 2.0 was released. You might already have heard about Eigen, it is a small but very high performance maths library which has its roots in KDE. Below, the two core developers are interviewed about it.

Xandros is porting its desktop Linux distribution -- noted for use in the pioneering Asus EEE netbook -- to two ARM-based platforms for netbooks and other mobile devices. The ports are part of a larger push to support ARM-based devices, including 3G-enabled MID-like devices and even smartphones, says Xandros. The two Xandros ports are to the Qualcomm Snapdragon and netbook-focused Freescale i.MX515. The ports will include "a variety" of user applications, and will support both keyboard and touchscreen input, says Xandros. Applications are said to include a browser, push-based email, PIM, instant messaging, a photo viewer, a media player, and a Microsoft Office-compatible office suite.

World of Goo was released for GNU/Linux 2 days ago and within the first day it managed to outsell the previous best selling day via the developer's website by 40%!

Virtualization on the server is being hyped until we're sick of hearing about it. But virtualization on the desktop is very useful for a lot of different uses: development, making screenshots for howtos, testing, having access to applications without rebooting, and many more. Matt Hartley compares VMWare, VirtualBox, Parallels, and several other virtualization candidates, and their fitness for the desktop user.

When GroundWork Open Source launched its 5.3 product release earlier this month, the network management software maker was shocked to discover Ubuntu as the platform of choice for nearly one-third of initial customer deployments. Here's the scoop from WorksWithU, the independent guide to Ubuntu.

Tracey Pilone's recent blog at O'Reilly.com, The Intersection of Algebra and Technology got me thinking about one of my "soapbox" issues; the use of computing in education. One of the biggest proponents of computers in schools is the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation which has provided millions of dollars in technology to education, from Elementary schools to Universities over the years. But is this all a good idea?

A couple of weeks ago Alfresco CTO John Newton posted a question on Twitter asking if SaaS and cloud computing were interchangeable terms. I had been using the terms interchangeably up until that point, but it got me thinking and I decided to do some research and find out.

LXer Feature: 13-Feb-2009

In the weekend of 7 and 8 February, the 9th Free & Open Source Developers' Europe Meeting (FOSDEM) took place at the Université Libre Bruxelles (ULB) in Brussels. Your editors Sander Marechal and Hans Kwint attended this meeting to find out for you what's hot, new in the area of the Linux environment and might be coming to you in the near future. This is our report of the second day covering the talks about Thunderbird 3, Debian release management, Ext4, Syslinux, CalDAV and more. Coverage of the first day can be found in our previous article.

Dell’s Inspiron Mini 9 Netbooks running Windows XP and Ubuntu are on sale. But US newspaper advertisements from Dell and Best Buy show Dell’s Windows XP netbooks to be a far better bargain than Dell netbooks with Ubuntu Linux. Here are the details.

There is a disturbing lack of resistance to Microsoft's market hegemony among anarchists and activists today. It is counter-revolutionary to design revolutionary fliers on a computer running Windows XP, displaying protest pictures on a computer running Windows XP is not a statement of protest, and using Microsoft software to coordinate anti-capitalist action is not anti-capitalist. To many, however, it seems that there is no other choice.

The venerable Debian Linux distribution has experienced a significant new release with its latest update, dubbed Lenny. While Debian is still not the easiest Linux distro to install and use, Lenny makes significant leaps forward and remains one of the most powerful Linux options. Many Linux newcomers stick with popular distros like Ubuntu or Fedora and feel intimidated by the likes of Debian. As Linux evangelist Mark Pilgrim once quipped, Ubuntu "is an ancient African word meaning 'can't install Debian'".

Red Hat and Microsoft are partnering on server virtualization -- a potential win for customers. But equally important to Red Hat, the relationship provides a counter-balance to Novell's ongoing work with Microsoft. Here's the scoop from The VAR Guy.

When announcing Ubuntu 9.04, the Jaunty Jackalope, Mark Shuttleworth had hoped to make this next Ubuntu Linux release perform better and to boot "blindingly quick", in particular with Ubuntu beginning to appear on more mobile devices. Well, with Alpha 4 have been released earlier this month, are Canonical developers and the community in the right direction with making Ubuntu 9.04 boot quickly? We have boot-time benchmarks of the latest Ubuntu 9.04 work along with Linux desktop benchmarks comparing it to its predecessor, Ubuntu 8.10.

You don't have to be in Silicon Valley to write code - just ask Linus. But Bolivia may not be the obvious place to look for a thriving free software community. Here's an interview with Brian Reale, founder and CEO of the open source company Colosa, based in La Paz.

LXer Feature: 16-Feb-2009

We start off this week's Roundup with a blast from the past with an article that compared the best Linux distributions of 2000. Its amazing just how far we have come since then. Amazon has unveiled a new slimmer Kindle reader that has more storage and quicker page turns. Priced at a somewhat steep $359, it will keep many who would want to buy it from being able too.

Nils Magnus of Linux Magazine Online pulled together the heads of three Linux distros for an interview and put them in a video: openSUSE's Joe Brockmeier, Debian's Steve McIntyre and Red Hat's Max Spevack.

In my day-job all our Linux boxes (bar 3) are Xen VMs. I wanted a way to take a backup of these with out the risk of the files changing underneath. For performance reasons I am running all of them on Logical Volumes. Within these VMs the DomU OS is once again using LVM for various reasons. This does create some headaches for taking the backup.

After more than 8 months, Inquisitor team presented first public alpha release on brand new Inquisitor v3.1 Live CD - a Live CD dedicated to doing hardware stress tests and benchmarking in a clean, controlled environment. This is experimental build made with Debian package base.

Adobe and Nokia are offering developers a Google-size pile of cash as incentive to write applications for Flash Player and AIR running across different types of devices. The companies today unveil a $10m fund to assist development and marketing of applications that further the Open Screen Project. They are making the announcement at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Spain.