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Red Hat's Fedora community Linux distribution has now tallied its user base, and it's a number that on the surface would make it the largest installed base of any Linux distribution, with at least 9.5 million users and possibly as many as 10.5 million. Fedora competitor Ubuntu Linux currently claims to have 8 million users. "The total number of users has always been an incredibly difficult number to measure," Paul Frields, Fedora's project leader, told InternetNews.com. "If you total up all the unique IP's ... on Fedora 7, 8 and 9, it adds up to about 9.5 million boxes right now."

The economy is falling as fast as temperatures in November. Recession seems certain, if it's not already here. The stock market's performance resembles Disney World's Space Mountain roller coaster. And every open source vendor, every Linux project, will be touched in one way or another. Matt Asay of Alfresco, which makes a Linux-based open source content management system, sees different effects on the open source software (OSS) community in the short and long term. "Short term -- the next few weeks -- everyone, whether commercial or proprietary, is going to find life unpleasant," Asay says, adding that the last several months have been the "most unpleasant quarter I've ever been through."

Virtual memory in Linux goes well beyond simply having a swap file or partition; it touches everything from file caching to some network functions. Charlie Schluting is our guide on this excellent tour of Linux virtual memory management.

For two years now Novell and Microsoft have been playing with the idea of interoperability between Linux and Windows. They hope to strengthen their partnership further through their announcement of the Advanced Management Pack for System Center Operations Manager 2007 R2 and a beta of the Moonlight Firefox rich media plug-in.

In this tutorial, develop a Facebook application in Adobe Flex that displays a slideshow of a user's Facebook photo albums. The Flex application will use the Facebook REST API to fetch the photos of the selected Facebook album and dynamically generate the slideshow.

The new version of Ardour – the most advanced digital audio workstation for Linux – was announced today. The public release of Ardour 2.7 includes, for the first time, public versions for OS X (Intel and PPC).

Novell Inc.'s latest pitch to lure Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) customers to migrate to Novell's SUSE Linux Enterprise appears to be a tough sell. Last week, in a deal similar to bank enticements that target new checking account customers, Waltham, Mass.-based Novell offered existing Red Hat customers two years of Red Hat support and updates with every three-year premium SUSE Linux Enterprise subscription, at no extra charge. The total cost is $3,748 per server, compared with $3,507 for Red Hat Enterprise Linux and $6,747 for RHEL's Advanced Platform including clusters and virtualization.

Check Your Mysql Server Performance with MySQLTuner. MySQLTuner is a script written in Perl that will assist you with your MySQL configuration and make recommendations for increased performance and stability. Within seconds, it will display statistics about your MySQL installation and the areas where it can be improved.

MySQL GUI Tools is a suite of graphical desktop applications for working with and administering MySQL servers. The suite consists of three tools: MySQL Query Browser, MySQL Administrator, and MySQL Migration Assistant (available only on Windows). We'll look at the first two to see how well they let us manage MySQL without using the command line. You can install MySQL GUI Tools via the package management systems on Ubuntu, Debian, or Fedora Linux. On Ubuntu and Debian the package name is mysql-admin; on Fedora, it's mysql-gui-tools. Pre-built binaries and the source code are all available on the project's site.

An old-but-useful trick. It’s about customizing nautilus to display a context menu that has a few of your chosen scripts to weave their magic on the selected object. And the procedure to do this is summarized in just two steps

Local geek gets confirmed as Ubuntu contributing developer. Tectonic asks him where it all started.

PCLinuxOS Magazine, November 2008 (Issue 27) is available to download. You can find it at the PCLinuxOS Magazine website. If you'd like to be informed immediately about our releases, please signup for the Magazine-Announce mailing list .

I like Linux netbooks. I like them a lot. They're lightweight, they're solid performers, they're cheap, and it looks like they're soon going to be cheaper than ever. According to Mike Elgan, starting on Black Friday, the Friday after Thanksgiving, you'll see new, solid brand-name netbooks going for as little as $199. We're already seeing Best Buy offering the Asus Eee PC 900a for $299. Will we see the Asus Eee PC 1000, which I like, for $399? We just might.

In addition to VIA announcing a register documentation drop and driver partnership, S3 Graphics, which is a VIA Technologies joint venture company, has announced a new graphics card. Earlier this year S3 announced the Chrome 440 GTX, but today's press release christens the Chrome 500 series. The Chrome 500 series is compatible with OpenGL 3.0 (and Microsoft DirectX 10.1) and is quite an affordable graphics card.

This howto describes a method to install a Squid 3 server as an anonymous proxy. An anonymous proxy is a tool that attempts to make activity on the Internet untraceable. It accesses the Internet on the user's behalf, protecting personal information by hiding the source computer's identifying information. Simply say to hide your IP.

Beat the IT budget blues with these 5 ideas. You'll save money and enjoy great performance and peace of mind.

I've been using a T-Mobile G1 for about a month now, and while it's the best phone I've ever owned (yes, I bought it), I haven't yet found myself sayingI love this phone. I like it plenty, don't get me wrong, but like any device, it's got things about it that are frustrating and other things that are pretty cool.

An easy way to keep track of user groups in passwd to cap off the business week. Today we're going to shoot out another quick scriptlet that might be useful (or distracting ;) from time to time. It’s a bit of a follow up on our post from earlier this week on using bash to produce fancy user names for folks logged into your machine, although it’s a little bit longer.

Dismissed, dismissed, dismissed. $2,547,817 in converted monies, over $918,122 in interest on it, and $625,486.90 for the constructive trust against The SCO Group. That's well over $4,000,000 that SCO will no longer have for bogus litigation. If they are indeed ordered by the court to pay, it will reduce their equity by roughly half. My money is on Darl McBride never being allowed to try this stunt again.

LinuxPlanet Classics: The popularity of Ubuntu Linux has attracted millions of new Linux users. Helping inexperienced computer users, whether as part of your job or just on a friendly basis, can be demanding and frustrating. But it is an essential part of building community, and just being a decent person. Michael Hall has some helpful pointers for keeping perspective, keeping your temper, and keeping your sanity.