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With the economy in turmoil, a lot of people who are looking to buy PCs are increasingly turning to cheap, low-power mini laptops. And that single move is bolstering what otherwise would be a soft PC industry, according to industry analysts at Gartner. With a strong push from the new slew of mini notebooks hitting the market, worldwide PC shipments reached 80.6 million units in the third quarter this year, marking a 15 percent increase from the third quarter of 2007.

Mozilla on Tuesday released the first beta of the next version of its browser, Firefox 3.1. The beta includes an enhanced Smart Location Bar, a new tab interface and what should be a faster JavaScript engine, dubbed"TraceMonkey." Developers also included improved Web standards in the Gecko layout engine.

Carsten "Rasterman" Haitzler has adapted his Enlightenment window manager to low-powered, small-screen devices like mobile phones. The Linux desktop graphics pioneer has released a pared-down widget set, along with ports and video demonstrations of E17 on OpenMoko's NeoFreerunner phone and Palm's Treo650 (booted into Linux, naturally).

Five more things for the 2009 Linux Wishlist and one thing I'd like to remove.

What is this you say? Besides adding Howto's on issues and projects we come across we'd like your help. For your participation you'll recieve some cool Linuxdynasty swag!

LinuxPlanet Classics: I ran across this funny and true rant about dimwitted tech support that thinks MS Windows is the whole world: "Linux is an older version of UNIX that crashes if you try to use it to look at graphics, or as a web server." This was published in September 2000-- has anything really changed?

Today's information systems give organizations and governments the ability to collect and access metaphorical mountains of information. But, this information is completely useless unless we are able to find and understand the relationships and trends hidden in these mountains. For projects involving complex research protocols, high-end statistical analysis tools such as SPSS and SAS are useful, but they come with high price tags and proprietary licenses. PSPP is an open-source clone of SPSS, one of the most commonly used proprietary statistical packages.

Google's first Android phone has finally made its way into long-waiting hands. The T-Mobile G1 device, expected to be in stores within the coming week, is drawing mixed reviews from early users. The closest thing to a sweeping overview might be that it is a powerful device with a few flaws but plenty of positives and potential, some of which isn't yet achieved.

Meet Yakuake, another pop-up terminal program. Contrary to Tilda (which I have covered recently), the Yakuake is the renowned and appreciated one. It supports many features - like tabs - which serve not only as eye candy.

Periodically, Linux media outlets go on list frenzies -- Ten Linux Distros for New Users, Five Great Distributions You've Never Heard Of. These are interesting lists but always seem to feature the same distributions. Some distributions are consistently left off these lists, seemingly regardless of whether they are a better fit than the usual candidates. I always read these lists, and wonder why Zenwalk is rarely mentioned. Perhaps it isn't for brand new users, but it's a great distribution that is overlooked far too often.

The eight-year-old Dillo project has released version 2.0 of its Linux-compatible, ultra-lightweight HTML browser for embedded systems, antiquated PCs, and other low-powered devices. Dillo 2 adds support for anti-aliased text, multiple languages, and tabbed browsing, while improving table rendering and lowering memory usage, says the project.

So the government decided to use free software; in the beginning due to its low cost, but soon they realized that free software is a powerful tool to provide “technological independence” and avoid reliance on global conglomerates and monopolies.

While virtualization market growth remains strong, latest research of license shipments shows that the sector is showing early signs of maturing, according to a new report. As far as vendor market share is concerned, the status quo was pretty much retained for the quarter.

"Merb started as a way to do things that Rails couldn't do efficiently, but over time, it became more like a Rails replacement," Yehuda Katz, Merb's project maintainer and developer, told InternetNews.com. "For Merb 1.0, it pretty much does everything that Rails knows how to do. The main difference is that Merb focuses on efficiency and speed as well as modularity and hackability."

This is WFTL Bytes!, your occasiodaily FOSS and Linux news show for Oct 16, 2008, with your host, Marcel Gagné. Today's stories include much ado about Flash, American schools having the life choked out of them, making money from open source, and strange names for babies.

The global economic crisis would provide a boost for open source software, Red Hat chief executive Jim Whitehurst claimed during a visit to Sydney this week. Whitehurst, who stopped over down under as part of a tour of the Asia-Pacific region, said in an interview with ZDNet Asia's sister site ZDNet Australia that the crisis would cause companies to consolidate their technology infrastructure and reduce spending. "So the bad news is when things get tight, people stop investing as much in the future," he said. "I would expect to see a slow down in spending for new functionality." However, the CEO said that this would cause more companies to consider open source software as an option.

If you write software for the Mac, you must obey Apple's rules. Period. End of statement. If you write software for Windows, you have more leeway, but Microsoft pretty much calls the shots. If you write software for Linux though you can pretty much do whatever you want, except, of course, you shouldn't. Because if you do re-invent the wheel every time you write for Linux, we end up with software that doesn't work or play well with other Linux software. That's where the LSB (Linux Standard Base) comes in.

Although many Linux distributions can run on either a desktop or server platform, few provide by default a raft of applications aimed specifically at server usage. Server Optimized Linux is an exception -- a distribution aimed squarely at servers. That's an appealing prospect, but the reality is more underwhelming. SoL 25.00 installs a variety of server applications, including Nagios, Xen, Apache, Exim, SpamAssassin, ClamAV, cdrkit, OpenIPMI, MySQL, PostgreSQL, Firebird, and SQLite; a complete list is available on the distribution's software page. SoL is also optimized for virtualization as a virtual machine guest or host, and you may even deploy it in a cluster.

Microsoft is contemplating thinking about possibly implementing an 8 second boot feature in Windows 7. Maybe one of the developers has got a Linux netbook?

A number of leading authorities have been urging caution on the adoption of Web-based services as a new wave of vendors unveil cloud initiatives. Cloud computing involves computing resources hosted in an off-premise"cloud" rather than an in-house computer room.