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The Compiz project, which makes a free compositing window manager, suffers from a lack of participants, direction and leadership, at least according to developer Kristian Lyngstol.

The past year brought some exciting advancements for the Linux operating system and open source software. Open technology continues to become more pervasive and the Linux kernel is now widely used in a multitude of mainstream products ranging from set-top boxes to mobile phones. With 2008 coming to a close, we wanted to take a minute to look at some events of significance to the open source software community.

It seems like a bit of a mystery how open source software ever sees the light of day. The idea of a large number of people working for glory and the greater good rather than recompense seems too idealistic to be true. In the early days this is exactly what happened, but now commercial companies have arisen, or switched over to open source, to act as the marketing arm of these communities. There are now a large number of paid workers at Red Hat, Novell, Ingres and other open source businesses and these corporations are beginning to act in ways that mirror their closed source counterparts.

There are 10 sorts of distributions in the world. Those that have specific releases, where it is better to reformat and reload with each new release and rolling distributions. Even still the specific release distributions can, in some cases, be upgraded to the newest release when it becomes available but this does not always work. The biggest advantage (or disadvantage depending on your viewpoint) is that stable (sic) versions of programs are chosen for that particular distribution release and are maintained throughout the life of that released distribution.

I just ordered my first computer yesterday: 4GB RAM, a 250 GB SATA 3gb/s hard drive, a 2.53GHz Core 2 Duo processor, a Nvidia 9800 graphics card, and a comfortable 20? monitor. But while these were all expensive (especially the video card), none of them compared to one item on the list: Windows. That’s the hope that Linux companies must look forward to.

Writers at VentureBeat decided to test the idea that Android would make an ideal operating system for netbooks by porting the, Google developed, open source operating system to their Asus EEE PC1000H. Using information from the Android Porting Google group, and encouraged by the news that a Google developer had ported Android to an EEE PC701, the writers set about the porting work and managed to get it up and running after a number of hours work.

This laptop belongs to a good friend and she loved it when I told her that we can give a new life to her laptop using GNU/Linux. This is an Toshiba Satellite Sro 435CDS built around 12 years ago. Specs? Pentium 120, 32 MB ram, 4 GB Hard. Yes this laptop has been upgrade a few years ago to highest supported specs.

The Boston Globe has an article on the difficulties President Obama will face with spending $50 Billion in Health IT: "As Barack Obama prepares to spend billions on health information technology as part of his plan to revive the US economy, some specialists are warning against investing too heavily in existing electronic record keeping systems...If America's physician practices suddenly rushed to install the systems of their choice, it would only dramatically intensify the [tower of] Babel that already exists," wrote David Kibbe, a senior adviser to the academy and a longtime proponent of health information technology, and Bruce Klepper, a healthcare market analyst..."

Last quarter AMD introduced their "Shanghai" Opteron processors that join the ranks of Intel's Harpertown Xeon CPUs that are 45nm quad-core server/workstation parts. Initial reviews of these new AMD Opteron processors have been very positive, but how do these chips perform with Linux? In this article we have our hands on a few of the fastest Shanghais, the AMD Opteron 2384 clocked at 2.7GHz, as we see how well they compare to the older "Barcelona" Opteron processors.

Steven Edwards of the Bordeaux Technology Group released Bordeaux 1.6 for FreeBSD and PC-BSD today. Bordeaux 1.6 comes with added support for Google's Chrome Web Browser, Google Earth, Google Picasa. Additionally, Cellar support has improved; you can now delete and install into an existing Cellar.

The Southern California Linux Expo opened registration for its 2009 event on December 30th. The event will take place February 20-22nd, 2009, in Los Angeles, California. The SCaLE organizers have filled the available speaker tracks, and this year's events include co-hosted mini-conferences, such as the Women in Open Source Conference (a continuation of last year's discussions to encourage women of all ages to become involved in FOSS), and the Open Source Software in Education Conference (focusing on FOSS in the K-12 setting).

The last day of the four-day 25C3 congress in Berlin ended with an edge of suspense. In keeping with the theme of the congress, speakers had "nothing to hide" about well-known and new vulnerabilities in two of the most important Internet security protocols, SSH and SSL.

Using Truecrypt you can create an encrypted share for Samba. This is a scenario where you have Windows users who need to log into an encrypted directory that is mounted on a Linux Samba share. Of course you can also create encrypted volumes for Linux users.

With the number of netbooks on the market continuing to increase each month and more of these mobile devices switching to solid-state drives for their reliability, extended battery life, and faster performance, SSDs are becoming quite common and finding themselves meeting many Linux hosts. How though does the real-world performance differ between hard disk drives and solid-state drives on Linux? We have run several tests atop Ubuntu on a Samsung netbook with a HDD and SSD. In addition, we have also looked at the encryption performance using both types of drives.

Like other Operating systems, there are some great Instant messengers for Linux. These IM’s comes with features like any other, including custom emoticons, web-cam support, nudges, themes, plugins, customizations and lots more. Here’s a list of 10 Best Instant messengers for Linux, I hope it comes in handy.

When you splashed out for a new swanky mouse like Logitech VX Nano, you sure want to make the most out of your investment, which means making its programmable buttons work.

Leah Duncan loves cheese and salami. And given that fact, the Australian Linux community is probably lucky that she didn't like the micro-organisms used in the making of such foods enough to complete a degree in Microbiology some years ago.

Our Yahoo search index rank script with an important fix!

Security and updates, which are often the same thing. There is no longer any doubt that hackers and malware writers are going after open source projects as they once went after Windows. Vulnerabilities are being found, discovered, created, exchanged. The best protection against vulnerabilities is to keep software updated, but most open source lacks update services. That’s one part of the Windows license that is worth paying for, and there does not seem to be an open source equivalent.

After eight years in business California-based MadTux, an online retailer specializing in systems preloaded with Linux, has closed.