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Fedora might not be getting a complete makeover or flashy new features in version 10, out today, but some welcome enhancements under-the-hood make this a worthwhile upgrade. If you've never given Fedora a try, now is a great time. The tenth revision slick and stable and it has a rock solid feel to it that, for our money, trumps even Ubuntu's latest release. Fedora 10 has many of the features we loved in Ubuntu - the latest version of GNOME and the new NetworkManager utility, for instance. As a bonus you also get the always excellent RPM package system, the new Empathy instant messenger framework, PackageKit and host of other Fedora-specific tools.

How to figure out if your local filesystem is the thing that's giving you heartburn today ;) Today we're going to take a look at some quick and easy ways to determine if you have a problem with your local filesystem on SUSE Linux (tested on 8.x and 9.x). Of course, we're assuming that you have some sort of an i/o wait issue and the users are blaming it on the local disk.

Increasingly we're seeing big business jump on the Linux bandwagon, as companies wake up to the money that can be made out of a community of developers working for free. Someone has to protect that community from being exploited, and if you're a Fedora contributor, that someone is Max Spevack. Linux Format magazine caught up with Max to ask him about the way the Fedora world is turning.

Although OpenOffice.org comes with a decent online help, it can only get you that far.

The Utah-based SCO Group has been cleared to appeal a court ruling that might lead to a revival of its dispute with IBM over copyright claims to the freely distributed Linux operating system. Utah Federal Judge Dale A. Kimball has signed a final judgment in a case involving Novell, in which he had awarded Novell $2.5 million for some of the revenues The SCO Group obtained in licensing the Unix computer operating system.

Some videos you download might not have such a high audio volume, even with alsamixer set to 100%. There’s a trick for this. Start your video with mplayer -softvol -softvol-max 300 video_file.avi to boost your volume 300%. Substitute 300 with any number ranging from 10 to 10000. Be careful not to break your speakers.

In October, MSI's Director of US Sales delivered an interesting statistic that Linux netbooks were returned four times more often than Windows versions. It didn't seem, perhaps, an unreasonable number, but it was a bit ambiguous what data it was pulled from.

The Fedora Project today will take the wraps off the open development Fedora 10 release, six months and twelve days since Fedora 9 came on the scene and more or less in sync with the six month development cycle that the project has established for the code base that eventually becomes Red Hat Enterprise Linux. According to Paul Frields, Fedora's project leader, the bits comprising Fedora 10, code-named "Cambridge," will be distributed starting at 10am Eastern time today. And while the software has lots of nips and tucks, and lots more people contributing to the project than even a year ago, the release will probably be seen as incremental by most users.

Here's my 10th tip in the "OpenLDAP Quick Tips" series: "You want to stay up to date with the latest version of OpenLDAP to benefit from bug fixes":

How many web browsers do you run? If you're like me, you regularly use Firefox, Internet Explorer, Chrome and Safari. Each of those browsers, of course, has its own underlying rendering engine: Gecko (in Firefox), Trident (in Internet Explorer), and Webkit (in Chrome and Safari). Today, a Japanese startup called Lunascape has released an alpha version of its Lunascape browser.

Thanks to the taglist vim plugin, vim users have access to a decent tag browser. Taglist is built on exuberant ctags so it support a large amount of languages. Unfortunately however, when the exuberant ctags people replaced their old PHP lexer with a brand new regexp-based parser the quality of parsing PHP code decreased dramatically. Ctags suddenly could not distinguish real class and function declarations from mere mentions of the words “class” and “function” in multi-line comments. This is because the ctags regular expression parses is inherently line oriented. In this article I have two patches that greatly improve PHP support in exuberant-ctags. I will also show you how you can apply these patches on a Debian-based system.

With Fedora 10 scheduled for release today, many users are thinking about how they are going to upgrade. A complete upgrade is something you do no more than twice a year, so the details are easy to forget. Also, the Fedora upgrade process, which centers on pointing to a new repository, is more complex than, say, the equivalent Debian process, in which repositories remain constant and only their contents change with a new release. But an even stronger reason for the uncertainty is that a Fedora system can be upgraded in at least four ways, each of which has its advantages and disadvantages.

One emphasis of XSLT 2.0 is better support for internationalization, especially sorting and comparing text. This seemingly simple task is quite complicated in some languages; for example, accented characters can be considered the same or different depending on context. Are Á , À and A the same letter? Sometimes the answer needs to be yes, despite the fact that they are three different code points. The simple string comparison functions found in most languages (including XSLT 1.0) aren't up to the task. This article demonstrates how to write a custom collation function and invoke it from an XSLT 2.0 stylesheet.

vzdump is a backup and restore utility for OpenVZ VMs. This tutorial shows how you can use it to clone/back up/restore virtual machines with vzdump.

Ask not what Linux can do for you-- ask what you can do for Linux. Carla Schroder cuts through the misconceptions that plague Free Software and reveals what it's really about.

Cynthia, the daughter of my friend Sue, has cerebral palsy and uses a small touchscreen with picture icons to speak. Sue explained that this is a costly piece of equipment at $6,000, with a $400 fee when it needs service - expenses that many middle-class families with special needs children in even the developed world cannot afford. I had just received my OLPC through the Give One Get One program and had a sense of curious excitement about this new platform, and little idea of the possibilities. "Hi Matt, what's that thing?" asked Sue. The green laptop had caught her eye. After I explained, she immediately thought, “Could this help my daughter?”

This is WFTL Bytes!, your occasiodaily FOSS and Linux news show for Monday, November 24, 2008, with your host, Marcel Gagné. Stories for today include the end of the road for SCO, (honest, finally, really) first tenuous hops from Ubuntu's Jaunty Jackalope, a brighter than bright future for ASUS, Google and Apple netbooks, and why you aren't safe online.

Over the past month, two things struck me as indicative of our current time in space, and both are related to the availability of technology. I live and work in Washington, DC, where we have had issues with the homeless in the past. This has lead to a number of laws and a certain cynicism about their presence. But lately I have noticed fewer of them. At first I simply thought it was the natural cycle. We got cold quickly this year and that tends to drive them indoors. Then I thought it might have something to do with the inauguration and a cleaning up of the city so that it will look good for the camera. But I was accosted the other day, and I began to think that it might be in reaction to technology.

Perhaps you're tired of getting beat up by malware, high prices, lack of interoperability, and poor performance. Maybe you're intrigued by the idea of software that is open, friendly, and that doesn't treat customers like criminals. Maybe you're just curious. Whatever your reasons for wanting to give Ubuntu Linux a try, Eric Geier shows you several easy ways to give this polished, powerful system a test drive. You don't even have to install it to your hard drive.

Novell now claims to have more certified software partners than rival Linux providers. The chest pumping represents Novell’s latest thinly veiled attack against Red Hat. But take a closer look at Novell’s claims and you’ll see why Red Hat may take issue with some of Novell’s statements. Here's the analysis, only from The VAR Guy.