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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.

When Levolor, a maker of window coverings, was looking for a better way to manage floods of data more quickly and efficiently, it ended up swapping its homegrown application for an open source tool. John Shafer, e-business application developer for Levolor, says that his company -- a division of Rubbermaid based in Atlanta -- needed to replace its in-house solution with something that would allow Levolor to better integrate incoming consumer orders with outgoing shipment status reports. It decided to go with a scalable, open source data integration suite from Talend.

Unison Technologies, which develops unified communications software for Linux servers, is gearing up to launch a partner program for solutions providers and managed service providers. Here’s the scoop.

More than 1000 sysadmins from all over the world attend the USENIX LISA conference in San Diego -- for the keynote you can join our live stream for free and watch an extraordinary speaker: Sean Dennehy, Chief of Intellipedia Development, Directorate of Intelligence, U.S. Central Intelligence Agency will be talking about the "Need to know Culture".

Microsoft's CodePlex site could be revised before the year's out to signpost genuinely open-source projects, after the company got itself in hot water. Sam Ramji, senior director of platform strategy, told The Register that Microsoft hoped to wrap up internal discussions over what to do about CodePlex and resolve the issue before the New Year.

Time is up, and we are home again. KDAB has once again proved to be a great host, and so has the city Berlin. We have had a great and productive weekend. Read on to learn more details about the KOffice 2008 meeting in Berlin.

Looking for a big boost out of its current financial doldrums, Sun Microsystems unveiled a line of data storage systems this week that it hopes will establish the Santa Clara, Calif., company as a new force in a growing market. Sun is unveiling three newstorage appliances -- industrial-strength computers designed for corporations and other organizations.

Virtual appliances deliver focused services in a lightweight package. With all of the talk around virtualization being large system optimization, why single-purpose machines getting so much attention?

Cynthia Harvey takes us on a tour of fifty popular and powerful FOSS and FOSS-based security utilities: firewall, IDS, anti-malware, encryption, secure delete, forensics, and more. Some cost money, many are free, and all are excellent.

Many academics and students share a dirty secret: They hate the drudgery of assembling bibliographies. The cb2bib utility attempts to remove some of the drudgery, at least so far as online references go. Designed primarily for use with BibTeX, cb2bib can also be used with other formats once you export the results. However, whether the application actually makes bibliographical tasks easier seems questionable.