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A few weeks ago I discussed the main features of the Chrome browser and Google’s motives; at that point I was like the poor child, nose pressed against the window pane, looking inside at the sumptuous feast at the master’s table. I, like all GNU/Linux users, hadn’t been invited. Same as ever. Crossweavers decided to gate crash the party and bring their own drink too. In short, in just eleven days from the launch of Chrome they built a version running under Wine, and although their products are proprietary and they usually reciprocate by giving code back to free software like Wine, this time they gave it away for free. Thus did Chrome become Chromium and I had a chance to download and install it. Reader, I benchtested it. Read the full review at Freesoftware Magazine.

The Yahoo-owned open source messaging software firm Zimbra announced Tuesday that it's taking its act into the cloud. Universities and other educational institutions can now access the Zimbra Collaboration Suite via Yahoo's worldwide infrastructure. Formerly, Zimbra was managed by users on-premise; however, now they can choose a delivery method.

New Linux users may be content with automatic updates and the package information shown by desktop tools, but more experienced users are generally more cautious and demanding. Experienced users, for instance, may want to assess the risk of an upgrade by studying its dependencies before they begin, or to overcome a package conflict by using versions from an older repository. Because of Debian's long history of providing for advanced users, this sort of information is available from several different sources -- from the apt-cache command, from distribution Web sites, and, in Ubuntu, with the new Ubuntu Simple Package Crawler. Unfortunately, no single source has all the features you are likely to want.

I'd like to show you some of the links I gathered in the past to make my Linux Desktop look Cooler. And by Jean-Luc Picard, what a wondrous list it is! There are also short description, where deemed necessary. My favorites are in bold letters.

In this two-part article series, to turn street addresses into their geographical coordinates for storage in the database, you will call the Google Geocoder Web service from PHP. You will then produce XML data from MySQL using stored procedures, and an XSLT stylesheet to transform the data into a KML overlay to view in Google Maps and Google Earth.

Intrepid comes with pretty much bleeding-edge packages: GNOME 2.24.1, OpenOffice 2.4.1 (OpenOffice 3.0 is now available, but it is not included in 8.10), Firefox 3.0.3 and GIMP 2.6.1. Although Firefox 3.1 Beta 1 is out, 3.0.3 is the version which ships with Intrepid, and I guess it's a smart choice considering there was enough time to test this release.

Linux on a Mainframe? Get real. That's just what IBM has done.

Open standards are critical in ensuring that the South African government both avoids vendor lock-in and promotes democracy. This is according to South Africa’s minister of home affairs, Nosiviwe Mapisa-Nqakula. In a prepared speech for the opening of the recent Second International ODF conference in Pretoria, Mapisa-Nqakula said that the department of home affairs was “forging ahead to make open standards a priority” to ensure future ability to process and share documents “using formats which have significant impact on the efficiency, interoperability and accessibility of public services”.

This is a series about the Linux OS on netbooks, but we need to remind ourselves that these devices aren't personal computers. The personal computer is a machine you work on. Netbooks are essentially machines you work through, out into the Cloud. It shouldn't matter what the operating system is. Or the hardware. Ideally, all your apps and your data are 'out there' in the Cloud, independent of any hardware or software you might use to access them. But design goals seldom accurately second guess the actual use to which things like these are put. We are treating these netbooks as low-cost PC - we are messing with the operating system and expecting to tailor them to our individual requirements.

Back in July we shared Red Hat's intentions to replace RHGB with Plymouth, a new graphical boot process that is able to benefit from the latest Linux graphics capabilities. Red Hat engineers had primarily designed Plymouth around a forthcoming feature we've talked about quite a bit known as kernel mode-setting, which provides end-users with a cleaner and flicker-free boot experience. In September in The State of Kernel Mode-Setting we then shared more information on Plymouth along with a brief video. Most recently we published another video of Plymouth that shows the tighter integration between the boot process and starting the GNOME Display Manager. Today though we are looking at Plymouth and its different plug-ins along with providing a few more videos.

With Moblin 2.0, Intel is integrating in an open source technology called Clutter. Clutter is an open source animation framework that allows for the development of applications in the same way you would develop games. The underlying complexity is abstracted such that intricate UI can be built with a minimum of code. "Because it's developed like a game engine, all the graphics happen on the GPU (define), freeing up CPU do to application work," he said. "When combing with Atom and the various GPU's we use in Moblin supported platforms, you end up with advanced UI platforms. We really think it will create a huge opportunity for application innovation on top of Moblin."

Google, Microsoft and Yahoo and a group of human rights and public interest organizations plan to introduce Wednesday a global code of conduct that they say will better protect online free speech and privacy against government intrusion.

Online retailers have begun to flog HTC Google Android phones to Australian consumers, with the first copies having turned up on the Australian website of auction giant eBay site, although Australian telcos don't seem to have prepared for the imports.

Using Ubuntu as a Xen guest is now a supported option included in the standard server kernel and is a choice when building virtual machines with python-vm-builder. Install Ubuntu Intrepid Server HVM DomU and create PV DomU profile to load image has been created.

In the past five years, the mettle of mobile Linux has been tested -- and it has deservedly earned a shining new reputation as a real technology of choice -- an embedded operating system and a flexible platform for truly open innovation. Linux has even gained the status of the de facto operating system for the growing Mobile Internet Device market.

In July, CodeWeavers – whose software lets Mac OS X and Linux users run Windows programs without having to Microsoft for a Windows OS license – launched the Great American Lame Duck Presidential Challenge to encourage President Bush to make the most of his remaining days in office by accomplishing a major economic or political goal by January 20, 2009.

GreenSQL (or greensql-fw) is a firewall for MySQL databases that filters SQL injection attacks. It works as a reverse proxy, i.e., it takes the SQL queries, checks them, passes them on to the MySQL database and delivers back the result from the MySQL database. It comes with a web interface (called greensql-console) so that you can manage GreenSQL through a web browser. This guide shows how you can install GreenSQL and its web interface on a Debian Etch server.

I’ve slammed Sun, praised Sun, abandoned Sun, and returned to Sun during the company’s current business turmoil. Despite all the challenges at Sun, I still believe managed service providers will build hosted services around Sun’s MySQL database. Here’s why.

Codeweavers is giving away Crossover Professional and Crossover Games.

fdupes is a simple Command Line utility to find and list duplicate files in the specified directories. fdupes can also delete the found duplicate files if instructed. fdupes can follow Symlinks and can be instructed to ignore hardlinks. fdupes can also show the size of the duplicate files. fdupes is a simple and very efficient tool, easy to use.