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As a director of the Linux Foundation and a Linux SCSI developer, James Bottomley opened the Linux-Kongress in Hamburg, Germany this week with a keynote investigating the commonalities and differences among the various Open Source operating systems. He describes Linux as the liveliest variant among them.

A surge in demand for netbooks is helping drive business for Linux, as the devices are designed to be low cost with smaller storage, according to Novell Inc.'s chief technology and strategy officer for Linux. "People typically don't care what operating system is on the netbooks, because they don't buy them to run a suite of applications like Microsoft Office but to be on the Web using a Web browser," Novell's Nat Friedman said in an interview. Novell's SUSE Linux is already being preloaded with laptops from vendors including Hewlett-Packard Co. and Lenovo Group Ltd. The company is now in negotiations with Lenovo and HP to start offering its Linux distribution on their netbooks as well, he added.

If you have read my Linux posts, you know Simply Mepis happens to be my preference out of the hundreds available. I have been happily using Mepis for many years, and have no plans to go elsewhere. It’s easy to install, maintain and customize. That’s a great combination.

In addition to building Web and console applications with Ruby, you can write complex GUI desktop applications that run unmodified on multiple platforms. This article introduces Monkeybars, a library that uses JRuby and Swing for building applications, and takes you through an example application.

The Debian 5.0 release missed its intended deadline of September and the project has been silent as yet about any news of an update. The latest guess from developers' circles is that "Lenny" will not be ready until June of 2009.

KOffice has been trailing the office application leaders for a long time. Despite years of development, it has yet to match OpenOffice.org feature for feature, although its features are complete enough that they have attracted a loyal community. Judging from the first beta, KOffice 2.0 will still not rival OpenOffice.org or other free software rivals, but it should be a major step in that direction.

Akkana Peck shows how you can speed up your Web searches with custom bookmarklets-- you don't need to be an ace coder to create your own; it's easy, fast, and powerful.

Since the free, online Wikipedia user-created encyclopedia began in 2001, the Linux-based IT infrastructure behind it has been expanded and lassoed together to keep up with the demands of the popular Web site. That meant that often it was haphazardly expanded by tossing in a new server with a different operating system each time. Over five years, the servers were running a variety of versions of Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Red Hat Fedora, making it more complicated to install applications and maintain the servers. Soon, that problem will be gone.

The year of the GNU/Linux desktop has been always right around the corner for many years now. Many have been looking for the 'killer application' that can only be had on GNU/Linux and that will spur widespread adoption of Linux on the desktop. While fast-booting Splashtop desktops look promising, one killer application boldly going where Windows cannot go is languishing. That killer application is...

Which hypervisor performs better, Xen or VMware's ESX? That apparently depends on which organization you ask. But for a team that's tasked with choosing a virtualization platform, some impartial data would sure be helpful. "That's where we come in," said Michael Salsburg, director of the Computer Measurement Group, a non-profit that acts as a repository for the performance data gathered by hundreds of member companies around the world. We spoke recently on the phone after a colleague told me about CMG.

Introduced in the Catalyst 8.8 Linux driver and further stabilized within Catalyst 8.9 was AMD's MultiView technology. MultiView makes it possible to use multiple GPUs on the same system not for Linux CrossFire but for driving multiple display heads. Using MultiView on Linux you can easily drive four, six, or even eight screens. In fact, up to 32 displays are theoretically supported on a single system (permitting you have enough graphics cards and PCI Express slots). MultiView also allows for OpenGL acceleration across all displays and does not rely upon Xinerama. In this article we are taking a brief look at this multi-GPU multi-monitor feature catered towards AMD's workstation customers.

"Claiming itself to be a next-generation publisher, WEbook has successfully roped in venture capitalists to invest in their business," Deepak Thakur, senior research analyst in ICT Practice at Frost& Sullivan told the E-Commerce Times. If the dot-com burst and the more recent Wall Street fiasco have taught us anything, it is that investor confidence is not necessarily a harbinger of success.

LinuxCertified,Inc. a leading provider of Linux training, will offer weekend Linux system administration bootcamp on October 25th - 26th, 2008 in South Bay (CA). This workshop is designed for busy information technology professionals and is designed to cover the most important Linux administration areas.

As important as security is, remaining current with every development is hard, and evaluating possible vulnerabilities across a network can be quite a chore. You need a way to both automate tests and make sure you're running the most appropriate and up-to-date tests. Open Vulnerability Assessment System (OpenVAS) is a network security scanner that includes a central server and a graphical front end. The server allows you to run several different network vulnerability tests (NVT) written in Nessus Attack Scripting Language (NASL), which OpenVAS updates frequently.

Chromium is an open-source browser project that is the basis for Google's Chrome browser. Right now, Chromium doesn't support Linux natively, but Codeweavers has created a Linux port called CrossOver Chromium that can be installed free of charge. This guide shows how to install CrossOver Chromium on Ubuntu 8.04.

Kicking off what promises to be a month packed full of good Linux releases, Mandriva Linux will today release Mandriva 2009, the latest incarnation of its popular Linux desktop. This is what you can expect.

Regardless of all its hype, security in cloud computing is not a revolution; rather it's an evolution of the age-old business model of outsourcing. The concept of cloud computing has evolved from the concepts of grid, utility, and SaaS, and these models evolved from the application service provider in the mid-early '90s.

eBay is not going through the happiest of times. Not only has it found it necessary to make 1000 people– 10% of its workforce –redundant, it has had toown up to a serious breach of trust with its Internet telephony program, Skype.

Opera Software has launched launched Opera 9.6, the newest version of its Web browser. Opera 9.6 includes improvements in the built-in email client as well as better browser synchronisation

A handy chart to keep track of what init script run when you type your favorite command to change Solaris run levels. Today's post harkens back to an earlier post we did on clearing up some common misconceptions about Solaris run levels. That post took care of going through the in's and out's of what the differences between boot, reboot, init, shutdown, etc, all mean and has a lot of good practical examples to demonstrate each point.