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LXer Feature: 20-Jan-2009

It seems a Belkin employee was caught red-handed looking for people to write positive reviews of one of their products. Our own Paul Ferris discusses his observations and some of the bigger social issues that 'Astroturfing' exposes.

[Here is a link for those who may be unfamiliar with what 'Astroturfing' is. - Scott]

A few weeks ago, Breaking News brought LinuxJournal.com readers an unusual story, entitled "The Blue Screen of Megadeath," which we described as "scar[ing] the living daylights out of us." The story revealed that, in an effort to cut costs, all submarines of the UK's Royal Navy — including her four Vanguard-class subs armed with some 4,800 kilotons of nuclear weapons each — had been fitted with a stripped-down version of Windows XP. Now, just weeks later, fresh news out of the Admiralty suggests we were more on target — no pun intended — than even we knew.

While Red Hat has been working steadfast on developing Fedora 11 (codenamed Leonidas), today they have announced a new Fedora project. Moksha is a new project of theirs and it is described as "a generic platform for creating live collaborative web applications." Moksha is currently made up of a set of Python and JavaScript APIs designed for web developers.

In this issue we take a look at Arch Linux, the minimal Linux distribution that packs a big punch. In the news section, openSUSE puts out a call for build developers and opens their feature tracker to the community, Fedora updates its artwork guidelines for Fedora 11 'Leonidas', Gentopia closes its doors, and Android Fanatic releases a Debian installer for Google's mobile device. Also in this issue, Ubuntu comments on the reasons behind the unavailability of restricted software in the distribution, while Singapore airlines rolls out Red Hat Linux to every one of its seats. Finally, we include a link to an article comparing three of the most popular mini distributions - Damn Small Linux, Puppy Linux and TinyMe.

The second pre-release of Mandriva Linux 2009 Spring is now available. This alpha 2 version concentrates on updating to the major desktop components of the distribution, including KDE 4.2 RC 1, GNOME 2.25.4, Xfce 4.6 Beta 4, X.org server 1.5, Python 2.6.1

IBM kicked off its annual Lotusphere event dedicated to its Lotus Notes and Domino groupware and collaboration environment this weekend, having already launched Notes and Domino 8.5 at the recent Macworld. First up at the Orlando, Florida, event was a peanut butter-and-chocolate combination of the Notes and Domino groupware software from IBM with mySAP Business Suite, SAP's flagship business-applications suite.

I have a number of concerns about a recent article about games [as] the key top Linux adoption. It nearly screams for scrutiny, as a it presents opinions and broad stereotypes as fact, contradicts itself and makes conclusions that have the capacity to hurt, not help the community. Read the full criticisms at Freesoftware Magazine.

ClipGrab is a free GUI Video downloader from the famous online video sharing websites like youtube, veoh, Dailymotion, MyVideo and many other. ClipGrab is very simple (basically just one window to work on). Clipgrab downloads the file and saves it by default to FLV (Flash Video) however can convert the downloaded video on the fly to Windows Video (WMV), MPEG4, MP3 (Audio), OGG Vorbis (Audio).

New Zealand telcos want to delay the introduction of new copyright laws to police internet privacy by up to two months while they iron out "controversial issues".

Yahoo is struggling on multiple fronts. But take a closer look and you may discover that Zimbra -- the open source email system Yahoo acquired in 2007 -- is attracting more and more IT channel partners and hosting partners. Here's the scoop, only from The VAR Guy.

In this article we discuss the Binding Components and their role within the JBI Container. We also see how the Binding Component provides transport and protocol independence for other JBI components. We see how this enables the JBI container to provide a highly decoupled framework allowing developers and integrators to build resilient SOA applications.We continue to discuss the different binding components (namely file, FTP, SOAP, JDBC, JMS and SMTP) that are installed into the application server with the NetBeans Enterprise pack.

Free Software Awards - Trophees du Libre 2009

The second alpha for Mandriva Linux 2009 Spring (2009.1) is now available. There is information about the new release in various places:

Why are Unix installations hemorrhaging while Linux is enjoying the time of its life?

Microsoft is putting Windows 7 on a diet so that it runs more effectively on Netbooks -- and beats back competition from mobile Linux. So far, Windows 7 seems to run far better than Vista on Netbooks, according to early reviews. Here's the scoop from The VAR Guy.

Windows will never exert itself in the slightest to co-exist with other platforms, but Linux comes with a variety of excellent secure graphical remote desktop applications, so that you can run your Windows PC from Linux, and Linux from Windows. Come on in and let Eric Geier show you how.

The third alpha of Ubuntu’s forthcoming 9.04 distro, dubbed Jaunty Jackalope, has been released. Alpha 3 includes the Linux 2.6.28-3.4 kernel and comes loaded with support for using the Ext4 file system. However, Ext3 is expected to remain the default file system for Jaunty Jackalope.

A good to-do list manager can make all the difference to your productivity. While there isn’t a shortage of to-do managers available for Linux, Tasque obviously pronounced “task”) has a couple of advantages over many other tools.

Evgeniy Polyakov has released a patch to the kernel's out-of-memory (OOM) killer function, which was designed to prevent a system freeze in an OOM condition by sacrificing one or more processes. The patch "tames" the function by defining the specific process to kill.

SCALE Early Bird Registration Expires today; new events added to Expo