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Hi All, Here's my forth tip in the "OpenLDAP Quick Tips" series: "You want to test your configuration for your directory server": The OpenLDAP Software Suite comes with many great command line tools which we will cover in the OpenLDAP Quick Tips series.

After a rocky beginning, the nonprofit group One Laptop Per Child thinks an advertising campaign will give a lift to the organization’s effort to place low-cost laptops in the hands of children in developing nations. About 500,000 of the group’s light and rugged machines are being used in 31 countries, including Afghanistan, Cambodia, Ethiopia, Iraq, Lebanon, Peru, Rwanda and Uruguay. But the cost of the laptops, at less than $200 each, has been prohibitively high for many countries,and the number of laptops distributed has fallen short of early projections.

The GNOME Foundation executive director, Stormy Peters, recently wrote a bit about why the focus on "the KDE versus GNOME" debate is not the real issue. Many commenters on her post agree (while others actively demonstrate) that it is counterproductive.

Close on the heels of OpenOffice.org 3.0, Sun today announced the release of StarOffice 9, it's own version of the office suite, with added support.

Mirror, mirror, on the wall, who are the greatest geeks of us all? That question -- posed in an Australian iTnews article,The Top 10 Greatest Geeks of All Time on Monday -- sparked quite a discussion in the blogosphere last week, garnering more than 1,300 Diggs and 280 comments by Friday.

DistroWatch Weekly was first published in June 2003 as a publication summarising the happenings in the distribution world on a weekly basis. Now, 5½ years and 278 issues later, an era is about to end. The publication that has been growing in stature and influence, needs a new editor, a person (or two) with fresh ideas, eager for new challenges, ready to report about the latest technologies in an unbiased manner. If you think you can fulfil the criteria, please read below for the official "position vacant" notice. In the meantime, please accept our apologies for missing an issue last week. We hope to bring you more quality articles, authoritative news summaries, and all the usual goodies you've come to expect from your DistroWatch Weekly in the future. Happy reading and thank you all for your continued support!

In response to growing demand from open source users, Adobe will today release a 64-bit version of its Flash 10 player for Linux. The 64-bit version will be an alpha release and will be followed by versions for other platforms at a later date.

[Yes, you read that right. 64-bit Flash for Linux first. 64-bit Windows will follow "someday" :-) - Sander]

For years, there has been one uploader option listed on Flickr that is Linux compatible. jUploadr continues to be a great tool (and though updates aren't frequent, it handles basic Flickr uploading tasks well). Don't let the fact that it's the only Linux uploader listed on Flickr's site make you believe it's the only option, or that Linux targeted uploaders are one trick ponies.

Kraft helps you keep track of business offers and invoices and can generate PDF files to help you easily issue these routine documents to third parties. Since Kraft is a KDE application, it can draw contact information directly from your KDE address book, so you don't have to duplicate or sync your contacts in order to generate an invoice.

In newspaper ads across the United States, Dell is promoting a low-cost notebook computer called the Inspiron Mini 9 running Ubuntu Linux. It's Microsoft's worst holiday nightmare.

Open source operating systems, applications and middleware continue to disrupt and infiltrate the IT channel. But which open source companies are truly committed to VARs, solutions providers and managed service providers? This survey from The VAR Guy will reveal the answers soon. All open source companies are welcome to participate.

A few more improvements, and a possible move to "project" status - your opinion will decide! I'm beginning to think that this script should be put on my SourceForge page and maintained there. It's not that I mind doing these weekly updates, but I feel like I'm writing the same thing over and over again, where I could be offering you, the reader, more value by producing different scripts in its place.

LXer Feature: 16-Nov-2008

We have a slew of big stories from the previous week that include OpenOffice 3.0 downloads hit over 10 Million, Mark Shuttleworth talks about Dell, one of our readers tries to get Linux support from a Domain Hosting company, a list of 50 Open Source security tools, getting Linux to boot in 2.97 seconds, Novell decides to go after Red Hat's customers instead of getting their own and one writer's take on why we'll all be buying netbooks on Black Friday.

When the Space Shuttle Endeavour launched last week, the astronauts onboard and the technicians on the ground at mission control will have at their disposal new software that could streamline the process of problem reporting and analysis. The software, called the Problem Reporting Analysis and Corrective Action (PRACA) system, was created by the Human-Computer Interaction Group at NASA's Ames Research Center, and is designed to give a wide cross-section of people in the Space Shuttle ecosystem access to a single database package for tracking problems with the Shuttle and its associated infrastructure.

So...let's keep on handing out cd's, holding our Lindependence events, flooding You Tube with Cube videos ad nauseum and anything else we can think of that reaches hundreds of people in a months time. Microsoft is reaching millions a day. And their doing it with your penguin.

Hosted, and generally free, office applications are being touted as a big threat to Microsoft's dominance of the desktop, but a survey of US Internet consumers found that free desktop based office apps like OpenOffice are what Microsoft should fear most. For now at least.

With a default install of Ubuntu Desktop 8.10, there are quite a few mono packages installed as standard. In fact there seem to be quite lot really (I counted 28!), especially considering they are only there to support two fairly minor applications: Tomboy and F-Spot. Although the good news is that Intrepid Ibex comes with one less Mono application than did Hardy; which also included Banshee.

There's a blurb on the back cover of this book; a quote of Greg Kroah-Hartman, who is a well respected contributor to the Linux kernel and the current Linux kernel maintainer for the USB, driver core, debugfs, kref, kobject, and the sysfs kernel subsystems. As you can imagine, his word carries a certain amount of weight in the Linux development community. Regarding this book, he says, "The first edition of this book has always been kept within arm's reach of my desk due to the wonderful explanations of all areas of the Linux userspace API. This second edition greatly overshadows the first one and will replace it." That certainly speaks volumes.

This article focuses on software which emulates home computers, a class of personal computer which reached the market in the late 1970s, and became immensely popular in the following decade, selling many millions of units. Leading home computer companies included Commodore, Sinclair, Atari, Apple, Acorn, Tandy Radio Shack, and Amstrad. Many of the earlier machines (in particular the ZX Spectrum and Commodore 64) often ended up being very game oriented. However, the later home computers had more sophisticated hardware which widened their use in other areas. For example, the Atari ST was used professionally in music studios, in desktop publishing, and had a wide selection of office software available. However to many users it was still regarded as a games machine.

It would be a strange thing indeed if Xubuntu ended up running better on my Gateway Solo 1450 than the flagship Ubuntu distro. While I've had luck with Xubuntu in the past (I think my favorite version was 7.04), regular Ubuntu always seemed to be more polished and stable than Xubuntu or Kubuntu. Until now.