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Aside from the removal of some annoying Vista bells and whistles and the new Peek and Snap window-management enhancements, it is difficult not to notice the resemblance between Microsoft’s much-touted revamped Aero and the excellent, now 3-years old, KDE 3.5.x.

Lead kernel developer Linus Torvalds announced the official release of Linux 2.6.28 on Wednesday. The new version introduces some noteworthy changes that will put the kernel in a strong position for growth and advancement in the coming year. This latest release follows a few months after version 2.6.27, which was released in October.

Ian Tree, the chief architect at IT consultancy Hadleigh Marshall Netherlands b.v. of Eindhoven, The Netherlands, has some free advice for IBM's Software Group: Take the Notes/Domino groupware stack open source with a community-developed programming model. The idea is to keep the Notes client and the Domino server relevant in a world becoming more accustomed to open source products.

Google Maps is a free service that provides browser-based directions as well as maps of particular locations through the Internet. You can zoom in on the interactive maps to show detailed information, providing great user interactivity with the Web site. The maps provided by Google can be used not only directly by customers, but also to develop customized map services and products with the Google Maps API. The latest Google Maps API version, however, is not good at parsing Chinese geography, which makes it difficult to use in applications for a Chinese audience. In this article, we describe a feasible solution, combining other Web services, to parse Chinese geography with the current Google Maps API for a Chinese mapping solution. We'll use the example of the sites for the Beijing 2008 Olympic Games to demonstrate our solution.

Netbooks are popular, hugely popular in fact. Everyone from Dell through to Toshiba has joined the Eee PC goldrush. Everyone but Apple, that is. Steve Jobs has made it clear that he has no real interest in the netbook market, if recent reports are to be believed. One company that did have an interest, long before anyone else, was the British outfit Psion which launched the very first 'netBook' way back in 1999. Then things went pretty quiet from Psion, until now. Even at the height of the netbook media feeding frenzy at the start of the year, when the Eee PC dominated the headlines, Psion was keeping quiet. But now it appears that Psion is getting busy, and vocal, about how it has the trademark on the term netbook and is prepared to defend it.

The Interclue extension is supposed to give you a preview of links in Firefox before you visit them, saving you mouse-clicks and, with a little luck, allowing you to move quickly between multiple links on the same page. Unfortunately, the determination to monetize the add-on and keep its source code closed results in elaborations that make the basic idea less effective, and its constant pleas for donations make Interclue into nagware. As much as the usefulness of the basic utility, Interclue serves as an object lesson of the difficulties that the decision to go proprietary can take.

When you're talking Linux, three big names always pop up: Canonical's Ubuntu, Novell's openSUSE and Red Hat's Fedora. Ubuntu has ridden a groundswell of both consumer and commercial support to its current ranking as the most popular Linux distribution. OpenSUSE, with its business underpinnings, has always been popular in Europe and has been making inroads in the U.S. And it is largely thanks to Fedora that Red Hat has become the biggest Linux company with a major role in community Linux.

LXer Feature: 28-Dec-2008

Welcome to the last Weekly Roundup for 2008, but fear not my fellow news hounds for even as we continue to grow in 2009, LXer will be here to keep you up to speed on all things FOSS. At the end of the year its always about the numbers isn't it? This week we have couple of 7's, 15 tips, the new Ext4 and 3 Debian derivatives worthy as gifts to your favorite geek.

2009 is the year of Linux. So is 2010 and 2011 and by 2012, the last pair of eyes will finally glaze over at the prospect. Zenwalk becomes Zenrun. Lindependence comes to Redmond. This and other predictions may or may not happen next year.

Another search engine; another algorithm. When will it all make sense? ;)

I can do many things with the greatest of ease on the Linux desktop. But, as I discovered while doing my community Linux overview, recording a Linux desktop video isn't one of them. Oh, boy, is it ever not one of them. My first problem was that I'd never done screen video recording before on any platform. I'd heard about Windows screen recorders such as TechSmith's Camtasia Studio and Blueberry Software's BB FlashBack, but I hadn't heard of an equivalent program for Linux.

Psion (the mobile device maker that eventually fell off a cliff) may wind up haunting netbook makers. Apparently, Psion Teklogix holds a trademark on the netbook term and is sending cease and desist letters to some folks. The VAR Guy wonders: Are Linux Netbooks at risk?

pv (Pipe Viewer) - Shell pipeline element to meter data passing through. pv (Pipe Viewer) can be inserted into any normal pipeline between two processes to give a visual indication of how quickly data is passing through, how long it has taken, how near to completion it is, and an estimate of how long it will be until completion.To use it, insert it in a pipeline between two processes, with the appropriate options.

The Linux 2.6.28 kernel was released this past week in time for the holidays. This quarterly update to the Linux kernel brought the stabilization of the EXT4 file-system, the Graphics Execution Manager, a host of new drivers, and a variety of other updates. For some weekend benchmarking we had tested the latest Linux 2.6.28 kernel along with other recent kernels using the Phoronix Test Suite.

On Christmas Eve I suggested what "Jingle Bells" may look like if it were a Linux shell script. Here it is for those who missed out, and some interpretation for those who didn't.

Reminds Me Of The Good Ole Dot Com Days ;)

Almost every year end, most blogs - magazines - publications and so called “Linux gurus” makes mostly positive predictions about the future of Linux and it’s market share. Following this tradition, it’s only fair that I too share with you my Linux predictions for 2009.

The Free Software Foundation have announced that they are to start shipping new, bootable, membership cards in January. The cards resemble a credit card and feature a USB connector and memory loaded with the gNewsense Live! Linux distribution and advocacy tools, such as speeches by Richard Stallman and videos about free software. The FSF online announcement page shows a picture of Richard Stallman's card, member number 0. Associate membership of the FSF, which entitles a member to one of these new membership cards, is $120 per year.

Logitech MX Air promises to let you control your computer from your couch, just by pointing it at your screen. The question is: does it work and does it work with Linux?

How to use SSH Via HTTP Proxy using Corkscrew in Ubuntu. If you want to ssh your vps server or your home computer from your work place (assuming you are using http proxy).You need to use Corkscrew.corkscrew is a simple tool to tunnel TCP connections through an HTTP proxy supporting the CONNECT method. It reads stdin and writes to stdout during the connection, just like netcat.