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Linux-based PCs have reportedly been getting a bad rap for consumer resistance, but manufacturers say demand for them varies between the different Asian markets. This follows recent remarks made by a Philippines-based Asus marketing manager, that the vendor was dropping Linux on all of its upcoming Eee PC models in the country because Filipinos are not taking to the Linux OS well.

Novell Tuesday took aim at rival and Linux market leader Red Hat with a migration service designed to help move Linux users onto Novell's Suse enterprise servers. The SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES) Subscription with Expanded Support program is a three-year contract that covers support for Red Hat or CentOS, a Red Hat clone, during the first two years of the deal. During that time, Novell will provide Red Hat and CentOS server users with binaries released by Red Hat for its platform and technical support. The subscriptions, which include two years of transition support and three years SLES support, are similar to the three-year priority contracts Novell offers on its own servers. The price of the migration subscription is $3,748 per server.

Even as Red Hat, Canonical, Novell, and other Linux vendors seek to differentiate their respective offerings, Novell wants to make it easy to overcome differences between Linux distributions...provided that customers want to migrate to Novell's SUSE? Linux Enterprise Server (SLES).

If you want to turn your netbook or conventional laptop into a nifty open source navigation system, you need two things: a USB receiver and a GPS-enabled navigation application. You can buy a GPS receiver cheaply at virtually any gadget store or on eBay. And there are actually several GPS-enabled navigation applications out there, including Navit, GPSdrive, and Roadnav. These are fine applications, but if you are looking for GPS software that offers the right amount of features wrapped in a sleek and user-friendly interface, try tangoGPS. This lightweight GPS-enabled navigation application can pull maps from different sources and has a few clever features up its sleeve.

United National Breweries switches over to Red Hat Linux to run financial systems, improves performance significantly. Like many companies United National Breweries (UNB) took a decision some time ago to lease its IT equipment instead of buying it outright. In line with that decision UNB’s national IT manager Kevern Upton says that its primary IT suppliers for its financial systems were Unisys, who took responsibility for the server hardware and operating system, and Proteus, who took care of the financial system and the database that supports it.

Linux target framework (tgt) aims to simplify various SCSI target driver (iSCSI, Fibre Channel, SRP, etc) creation and maintenance. The key goals are the clean integration into the scsi-mid layer and implementing a great portion of tgt in user space.

The developer of IET is also helping to develop Linux SCSI target framework (stgt) which looks like it might lead to an iSCSI target implementation with an upstream kernel component. iSCSI Target can be useful:

a] To setup stateless server / client (used in diskless setups).
b] Share disks and tape drives with remote client over LAN, Wan or the Internet.
c] Setup SAN - Storage array.
d] To setup loadbalanced webcluser using cluster aware Linux file system etc.

In this tutorial you will learn how to have a fully functional Linux iSCSI SAN using Linux tgt framework.

Create a LAN for Virtual Servers with KVM and VDE. You have one host [ hoster ] running KVM on UBUNTU with 1 network interface accessing to internet.You want to have 2 debian etch virtual servers [ guest ] ( debian01 and debian02 ) running on your hoster with network access between them and hoster in a local LAN. In this case virtual servers will not be able to access to internet, but later I will explain how to do it.

Two members of ShangHai Linux User Group and Herbert Xu, a famous China native Linux kernel hacker, enjoyed a 2-day trip for Linux Conference of USTC (University of Science and Technology of China) in HeFei of China.

Today Fixstars Corporation announced it has acquired Terra Soft Solutions, the company behind Yellow Dog Linux. Fixstars has created a new subsidiary to manage the Terra Soft employees, products, and offices. Fixstars provides application development and optimization tools for Cell Broadband Engine multi-core processors. This makes the acquisition of Terra Soft fitting from the historical standpoint, and promising for Yellow Dog's future.

Novell is reaching out to Red Hat customers and Microsoft partners with a new offer. The strategy: Train Microsoft partners to replace Red Hat Enterprise Linux with Novell SUSE Linux. Here’s the scoop on the strategy.

In case you were wondering, yes it does occur to me that all the time I'm spending trying to figure out why Ubuntu is crashing (or why my Debian Lenny screen slowly degrades during each computing session) is time better spent finding a system that does work and presents none of these problems. That's why I'm running the currently trouble-free CentOS 5.2 as my secondary distro on the Gateway Solo 1450 laptop.

When writing bash scripts you sometimes need to run commands in the background. This is easily accomplished by appending the command line to be run in the background with an ampersand "&". But what do you do if you need to run multiple commands in the background? You could put them all into a separate script file and then execute that script followed by an ampersand, or you can keep the commands in your main script and run them as a sub-shell.

GLib is a utility library for C, which augments the standard C library in several purposeful ways to make your life that much easier while programming. GLib has many things to offer you.

Baobab is a C/gtk+ application to analyse disk usage in any Gnome environment. Baobab can easily scan either the whole filesystem tree, or a specific user-requested directory branch either on the local system or on a remote system.

How to Integrate windows Active Directory and Samba in Ubuntu. Samba is an Open Source/Free Software suite that provides seamless file and print services to SMB/CIFS clients.” Samba is freely available, unlike other SMB/CIFS implementations, and allows for interoperability between Linux/Unix servers and Windows-based clients.

ITTIA boosts its database features by introducing an Open Database Connectivity, or ODBC, driver for ITTIA DB. The ODBC API support makes another impact for ITTIA DB developers to share data with embedded systems and devices while also offering reporting capabilities to their end-users.

This is WFTL Bytes!, your occasiodaily FOSS and Linux news show for Tuesday, November 11, 2008, with your host, Marcel Gagné. Today's stories include a netbook slug-fest, lies and damned lies, misinformation, the Microsoft Linux-killer, smartphone sales figures, a smaller OpenOffice.org, and a digital dark age.

One Laptop Per Child confirmed that it will start selling its XO laptop on Amazon.com Inc.'s Web site on Monday. The XO laptop will be sold on Amazon through the same arrangement as the G1G1 program, in which a consumer donates $400 for two laptops, one of which is delivered to a child in a developing nation. Only Linux-based XO laptops will be available through Amazon, said Jim Gettys, vice president of software engineering at OLPC. A Windows version will not be sold.

But my affections are wearing thin; after all these years CUPS still does not provide a user- or admin-friendly interface or useful notifications, and setting up automatic driver downloads for Windows clients is still a black art. The printer interfaces in Gnome and KDE are useless duplications of effort that don't offer much that is really helpful, and the KDE printer manager has long been notoriously buggy, though it has improved a lot over time. We miss out on a lot of CUPS' useful functionality, such as printing over the Internet and connecting Windows clients without Samba, because the interface and documentation skip over the gnarly bits of how to actually set these up.

From the "why pay when you can get it for free" files: InternetNews.com has learned that Sun is set to release StarOffice 9 on November 17th. StarOffice is Sun's office suite offering currently based on the OpenOffice.org code base. Considering that the two products are nearly identical though, it makes you wonder why Sun even bothers anymore.