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Asustek is not a name most people know. The Taiwan-based hardware maker traditionally operates in the PC-board sector. But a few years ago the company began to make its own notebook PCs. Branded Asus, the initial slew of notebooks escaped most people’s attention, except geeks who already knew of Asustek’s good reputation in the PC-board market.

Phoronix Test Suite 1.4 "Orkdal" will be released tomorrow, and while this release is coming just two months after the release of Phoronix Test Suite 1.2, there are in fact quite a few changes for this Q4'08 release. In two months time we have pushed out five development releases of Orkdal, there are over 220 official changes, and the diff output between the Malvik and Orkdal releases amount to over 20,000 lines of code. The most prominent features in Orkdal are compatibility the Mac OS X operating system, support for Cascading Test Profiles, support for Self-Contained Test Profiles, new modules being added, updates to all in-tree test profiles, WINE test coverage, and improved hardware/software detection.

Sun Microsystems has released the updated 5.1 version of the MySQL open source database software it recent acquired, promising improved performance and management of larger database applications. "If our users initially choose MySQL because of its low cost, they continue to use MySQL for its high performance, scalability and broad platform support," said Marten Mickos, Sun's SVP of its database group. "MySQL 5.1 continues this tradition by performing up to 15 percent faster than previous versions in our own internal tests--making it a compelling solution for demanding Web-based enterprise applications."

A major technology distributor is evaluating ways to work more closely with Sun Microsystems' portfolio of open source software. Here’s the scoop, only from The VAR Guy.

This article documents the steps, with a working example, for how to use gettext as a translation management system for a static website. For the impatient, it's boiled down to 11 steps at the end.

Hi All, I might as well start easing back into the OpenLDAP Weekly Newsletter by doing some "OpenLDAP Quick Tips". Here's the first one.

With the festive season approaching, you might want to make decorative labels for presents or christmas cards. It is easy to make labels in OpenOffice and, if you have the Open Clipart collection installed, you can choose from a wide range of graphics to decorate them.

It's been coming along for some time, but today RPM Fusion has officially launched as the premiere third-party RPM repository for Fedora and Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) users. The Dribble, FreshRPMs, and Livna repositories had merged to form RPM Fusion...

Support for RESTful Web services, JBoss Seam and Java refactorings and code inspections are among the new features in IntelliJ IDEA 8, JetBrains' Java IDE for Linux, Mac OS X and Windows that began shipping today. If you're not familiar, JetBrains' raison d'être is to make an integrated development environment that keeps developers productive and integrates tightly with other open source development tools such as Ant, JUnit and Subversion.

A. Lizard's in-depth howto on setting up secure remote graphical desktops wraps up today with the final server and client setup, and how to get through firewalls.

Kid3 is a free opensource tool to easily tag multiple MP3 files (e.g. full albums) without typing the same information again and again and allow you to control and edit ID3v1 and ID3v2 tags. It’s one of those things I started doing so enthusiatically and then give up after a few tracks and finally this should help me get around this.

Forget the OS wars, Apple and Microsoft do not need to wield any weapons today. Linux seems to be doing a good enough job of shooting itself in the foot when it comes to appealing to your average PC user.

Firefox has a lot of special features that are written specifically for Linux users. Akkana Peck shares some of her favorites.

As the primary gateway to voice calls, Internet browsing, audio and video applications, and imaging display, demand for consumer electronics are naturally increasing. Specifically, there is a need for more choices in hardware features, software applications and innovative user interfaces (UI) packaged together in portable devices that are customized in various shapes and colors. To meet this growing demand, consumer electronics manufacturers look to open source software and hardware platforms that allow unbarred innovation. In this article, we'll examine why and how manufacturers engage with the open source community, where open source Linux is and isn't succeeding, and how Texas Instruments Incorporated (TI) is participating in various open source projects and organizations, including Google's Open Handset Alliance (OHA).

The writing is on the wall. Despite a major push to sell the much-maligned Windows Vista, customers aren't buying. Nearly two years after Vista's release, Windows XP remains the standard desktop OS in business, and Microsoft has extended its availability three times (currently to August 2009) due to customer demand. Microsoft itself forecasts just 2 percent growth in Vista sales in early 2009, after lackluster sales in 2008. And that's after forcing customers to buy Vista to get XP "downgrades."

It seems as though the wide-open door for the Google Android-based T-Mobile G1 wasn't nearly wide enough. Intrepid hackers have blown the door right off the hinges and shined a big spotlight inside the smartphone software. What did they find? Full root privileges to the G1 file system.

Sun is offering on Thursday its open-source Sun GlassFish Enterprise Server version 3 Prelude, a Web application server based on a modular OSGi architecture with capabilities from the planned Java Platform EE (Enterprise Edition) 6 release. The application server, which will be supported by Sun, is geared to Web-tier production environments. It will be the basis for the planned GlassFish Enterprise Server v3, also based on OSGi and Java EE 6 and due next year. "Glassfish v3 Prelude is our OSGI microkernel application server," said Paul Hinz, director of product management for Java enterprise systems at Sun.

The Sound Blaster X-Fi sound card driver for Linux from Creative Labs was awful. That's simply the nicest way to put it. The driver was home to many bugs, initially only supported 64-bit Linux, and it was arriving extremely late. The open-source drivers supporting the Creative X-Fi drivers have also been at a stand still. However, Creative Labs today has finally turned this situation around and they have open-sourced the code to this notorious driver. The source-code for the Creative X-Fi driver is now licensed under the GNU GPLv2.

Maps are cool; there's no end of applications which can make good use of mapping data. There is plenty of map data around, but it's almost exclusively proprietary in nature. That makes this data hard to use with free applications; it's also inherently annoying. We, as taxpayers, own those streets; why should we have to pay somebody else to know where the streets are?

The European Commission has published guidelines for the procurement of open source for public administrations in Europe following public tender processes.