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Boy, I wish I'd been at Gartner's Symposium ITxpo in Orlando, Fla. this year. That way I could heard with my own ears, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer tell an audience of high-level business people that if they want to wait for Windows 7 to switch from XP, instead of going to Vista, "They certainly can."

OpenSolaris 2008.05 had given a new face to Solaris through a vastly improved desktop experience. While OpenSolaris 2008.05 was not perfect, it was quite pleasant and a very nice first step. Sun Microsystems is now preparing for the release of OpenSolaris 2008.11 to incorporate their latest set of changes. In this article we are looking at some of the latest advancements in this pre-release.

At least I'm not the only person being paid beans to manage myself and the 5 departments I performs all essential functions in ;) This Saturday's post is from a pretty interesting site dealing with all things Linux. It goes by the name of reallylinux.com. This piece, that I found on there, interested me because, especially in dubious economic times like we find ourselves in these days, I'm often amazed at the sheer amount of diversity and depth of experience employers seek to acquire for less-than-bottom dollar.

By now you have probably heard about these newfangled netbooks, products like the ASUS EeePC and Dell Inspiron Mini 9. I've suggested that the biggest growth potential for these devices would come from emerging markets. But after a closer look, I've seen some trends that most likely will cause greater demand in the U.S. and Europe as well.

Almost a month ago, on September 24th, fellow zdnet blogger Mary Jo Foley filed a report under the title: Microsoft: Windows and Linux offer same TCO in emerging markets, which she introduced as: "While Linux may be cheaper up front, but over time, Windows and Linux offer roughly the same total-cost-of-ownership to customers deploying large numbers of PCs in schools in emerging markets."

Books, articles, and training courses mostly teach Photoshop as though it were photography itself. Me, I think giving so much as one devalued red cent to Adobe is equivalent to saying "Why yes, I am for corrupt corporate control of everything and vandalism of fundamental civil rights" because of what they did to Dmitry Sklyarov. To this day no one at Adobe has apologized or admitted error; they stubbornly cling to the "we must protect our precious IP" party line. Call me a moldy old hippie, but in my world due process, fairness, and civil rights trump Adobe's precious IP. Which wasn't so precious at all, but closer to laughable.

The procedure down here has been developed due to virt-install failure to handle OpenSuse 11 PV DomU install at Xen 3.3 (3.2),(3.1) CentOS 5.2 Dom0 either via NFS or HTTP shared directory. Perform initial connect to Apache Server running at Dom0 , deployment and configuration (until first DomU reboot) via profile openSUSE11PV.cfg When OpenSuse DomU first time goes down for reboot, shutdown Suse DomU via “xm” and switch to pygrub profile for loading scp'ed images created via vm-install at OpenSuse 11 Dom0.

Not long ago I watched a free software developer totally lose his cool with a user who (admittedly very frustratingly) posted a “bug report” in Spanish on an English-language project that amounted to “it doesn’t work”. He posted a very sarcastic reply in a couple of random languages (one of them through a machine translator). It was an understandable reaction, and in a way, kind of funny if you could understand all of the languages involved, but it wasn’t exactly good public relations. It was a sure sign of burnout. He had forgotten one important point: you are not obligated to help just because you wrote the thing. Read Terry Hancock's advice to hard-pressed software developers on how to cope at Freesoftware Magazine.

This is WFTL Bytes!, your occasiodaily FOSS and Linux news show for Oct 16, 2008, with your host, Marcel Gagné. Today's stories include EVIL androids, EVIL firewalls, EVIL cameras, EVIL content filters, a super fast graphical browser, and some Linux blogs some Linux blogger says you should follow.

Linux has all the power and flexibility you need to power your network, both for servers and networking devices. Carla Schroder shows you how to select hardware, software, and not spend money unnecessarily on pricey commercial software. Which is probably Linux or BSD-based anyway.

As the work on KDE 4.2 turns out to be on quite an advanced stage, I’ve decided to test the current development version. For the purpose of this test I used the Archlinux distribution, that features the KDE 4.2-SVN packages repository. It is just enough to add appropriate entries into pacman.conf at the top of the default repositories, and there we can go on installing kde-svn.

We loaded and ran the 2009 (10th Anniversary) edition of Mandriva Linux One, which we reviewed earlier this week. It's pretty, it's smooth, and it had a few problems with the GUI software install/remove utility that would leave a new user scratching his head, but overall, it's a nice update to a distro that started out with the idea that ordinary, non-technical computer users should be able to install and run GNU/Linux without expert help -- and that still adheres to this principle.

Who's afraid of open source? "When splashy headlines come up about Verizon, the uninformed can think very negative things about open source and have this fear," Philip Robb, general manager of FOSSBazaar.org said. "But you just have to recognize how it's different. Avoiding open source is probably going to be a competitive detriment to your organization so you should just try and stay informed."

This week, the Linux kernel and Intel developer teams announced they had discovered the probable cause of the e1000e driver bug. This bug was particularly destructive, as it would corrupt the EEPROM/NVM of certain Intel ethernet adapter chipsets, completely disabling them.

The Linux Foundation got positive results from its first ever End User Summit in New York October 14 and 15. Its concept of "end user" ended up including not only private users but many enterprises and organizations.

I don’t like KDE4. I don’t like the Dolphin file manager either. There, I said it. I’m not trying to start a flame war. Really. But those dislikes are proportional to my concern about the future of Konqueror. For my money, it is just about one of the best things before and since sliced bread. I loved it enough to write about here at length and in depth. As a file manager it is packed to the gunnels with power features and as a browser it’s not half bad either. The integration of both in this universal document viewer is the killer feature but it is getting rather left behind behind in the Web 2.0 goldrush. I worry that it might wither on the vine. Then, I discovered Krusader. It’s a massively powerful and feature-packed twin panel file manager and if Dolphin isn’t cutting the mustard Krusader might just be what you’ve been looking for. Gary Richmond tours the killer features of Krusasder and you can read the full article at Freesoftware Magazine.

People often wonder how to get new capabilities—new packages, new features in existing packages, or even bug fixes—included in Red Hat Enterprise Linux. The process for doing so is straightforward, but may be foreign to those with a background in traditional software products.

The ps command has a large number of options that many Linux admins have not explored. Juliet Kemp shows how to use ps to show the command environment, who is doing what on a remote machine, and more.

KDE users have a new online spot to get together and talk about their favorite desktop environment. The KDE Forum re-launched this week and is already over 17,000 members strong.

eBay came through with a profitable third quarter, but don't expect such good news in the coming months. Its earnings were almost 1 and a half billion dollars better than Q3 of last year, but the total sum of all transactions on the auction site actually went down one percent. That's a first.