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Have you ever wondered on what operating system Java works the best? While by no means is it a conclusive multi-platform comparison, for this article we ran a number of Java benchmarks on both Windows Vista Premium and Ubuntu Linux to see how the Java Virtual Machine performance differs. In addition, when running Ubuntu we had tested Sun's official Java package as well as the OpenJDK alternative.

Like me, you've probably read articles on how free software, or open source, is going to thrive in 2009, and how businesses everywhere are going to survive the recession by migrating to it.

The Linux Foundation has selected a new CTO, Ted Ts'o, who has been known as the first North American developer of the Linux kernel, the foundation said on Thursday. Ts'o has served as a foundation fellow and chief platform strategist. He is considered one of the most highly regarded members of the Linux and open-source community, according to the foundation. He replaces Markus Rex, who has returned to Novell to work as acting general manager and senior vice president of Novell's Open Platform Solutions business unit.

This is WFTL Bytes!, your occasiodaily FOSS and Linux news show for Thursday, December 18, 2008, with your host, Marcel Gagné. This is episode 39. Today's stories include an attack from a giant open source chameleon named OpenSUSE, a channel-enhanced Mandriva, a virtually new VirtualBox, an attack from 200 billion spam messages, and a knight in shining black armor to fight off at least a few of them.

See if you can figure out what the encrypted script is :) Today, since the holidays are bringing me so much joy (heavy, heavy sarcasm ;), I thought it would be fun to write a post that makes use of some of the principles we've posted on this blog over the past year and combine them to create a treasure hunt of sorts.

The past couple of years have seen an explosion of open source programming languages and utilities that are geared toward children. Many of these efforts are based around the idea that, since the days of BASIC, programming environments have become far too complex for untrained minds to wrap themselves around. Some toolkits aim to create entirely new ways of envisioning and creating projects that appeal to younger minds, such as games and animations, while others aim to recreate the "basic"-ness of BASIC in a modern language and environment.

This course covers the OpenSUSE operating system step-by-step providing an in-depth look at the popular Linux operating system. Users can work at their own speed through over 130 screen shot filled course pages which include the desktop, file system, terminal, printing, package management, system monitoring, OpenSUSE applications and much more.

It doesn't pay to pinch pennies on computer power supplies, because inferior power supplies cause slowdowns, lockups, crashes and worse. Here are some tips for how to pick quality power supplies.

The British Royal Navy is actually boasting of rolling out a new "next generation" installation of Windows 2000 and XP on their entire fleet of 18 nuclear submarines, and they're so pleased with it they want to do the same to their battleships...In my younger days I had big dreams of being a successful fiction writer. As you can see, real life is far stranger and more implausible. This has to be a hoax. Please, make it be a hoax.

OpenSUSE 11.1 rolled out today, sporting more than 230 new features, many updates, and a brand new license. The newest release is also the first built entirely on the openSUSE Build Service.

Ubuntu Linux 8.10, aka Intrepid Ibex, is the most popular Linux distribution available for installing on your PC, thanks to its steadily improving hardware compatibility and installation software, along with a wealth of free applications and utilities that run on any version of Linux. But even though the bad old days of disappointing Linux installations are mostly over, putting Ubuntu on your PC can still be tricky if you haven't done it before. Many PC users have never had to boot their computers from a CD or had to partition a hard disk. And most of us take for granted that the OS will include drivers to handle crucial hardware devices such as graphics cards and wireless networking controllers.

I interviewed Joe 'Zonker' Brockmeier, who is the Community Manager for openSUSE and I asked him about his role in bringing this release to light and how the open source community drives this type of project.

While GNOME remains the Linux desktop of choice for Linux enterprise distributions, on openSUSE KDE is dominant among the user base. 70 percent of the openSUSE user base uses the KDE desktop. Though OpenSUSE 11.1 includes KDE 4.1, Novell developers actually backported a number of features from the upcoming KDE 4.2 release.

It's that time of the year again. No, not Christmas -- it's the time of the year we get the latest versions of our favorite Linux distributions. Version 11.1 of openSUSE is being released today. Designated as a point release, there are enough new goodies to warrant a new install or upgrade.

Ubuntu's default installation is pretty secure, but the wise computer user knows that security is something that requires continual attention. Fortunately, Matt Hartley shows how easy it is to keep on top of prudent security measures and useful applications: firewall, secure remote networking, anti-malware, and more.

Red Hat Inc. today unveiled a new service aimed at making it more cost-effective for its customers to run and maintain one version of Red Hat Enterprise Linux for a longer period of time, reducing management and administration costs, the company said. Extended Update Support (EUS), a new maintenance option, allows customers to standardize their IT environments on a version of RHEL for 18 months instead of six months, the current time frame for Red Hat's maintenance contract, said Gerry Riveros, product marketing manager for EUS.

Database relationship is hard to maintain even for a mid-sized PHP/MySQL application, particularly, when multiple levels of relationships are involved because complicated SQL queries are needed. CakePHP offers a simple yet powerful feature called 'object relational mapping' or ORM to handle database relationships with ease.In CakePHP, relations between the database tables are defined through association—a way to represent the database table relationship inside CakePHP. Once the associations are defined in models according to the table relationships, we are ready to use its wonderful functionalities. Using CakePHP's ORM, we can save, retrieve, and delete related data into and from different database tables with simplicity, in a better way—no need to write complex SQL queries with multiple JOINs anymore!

This is WFTL Bytes!, your occasiodaily FOSS and Linux news show for Tuesday, December 16, 2008, with your host, Marcel Gagné. This is episode 38. Today's stories feature a whole mess of speculation. Does Windows need a package manager a la Linux? Can Apple do small? Will USB 3.0 do Linux first? Wherefore art thou, Palm new-ness? Who stole my Linux netbook? Will you believe the truth if you heard the lie first? It's all speculation.

The first in a two-part "Eclipse's Rich Client Platform" series, this tutorial explores the basic design goals of the Eclipse Rich Client Platform (RCP) and how it fits within a developer's toolkit. This tutorial also demonstrates how to construct a basic RCP application.

Let's take a look at three projects that are aimed at showing calendar information through a Web interface: WebCalendar, VCalendar, and CaLogic. These projects run on a LAMP server and provide a Web interface to calendar events. For testing when one or more calendars are required I'll use the US Holidays and UK Holidays from the publicly available iCalendar files at icalshare.com. All installation and testing was done on a 64-bit Fedora 9 machine.