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If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, then the Linux community must be doing something right. Rumors abounded throughout the blogosphere last week that HP may be working on its own version of our favorite operating system. Specifically, employees within HP's PC division are reportedly working on a mass-market operating system that is based on Linux but easier to use.

Amarok sure inspires a lot of KDE-envy for Gnome users. Unfortunately, it doesn’t fit in well in Gnome: it’s written for a different desktop environment, uses a whole different toolkit, and requires a lot of extra libraries to run. Luckily, there’s a great Gnome-based alternative: Rhythmbox. Andrew Min at Freesoftware Magazine explores the Gnome alternative to amarok. You can read the full article at FSM.

Mail merge, the production of multiple documents that differ only in minor details, remains a difficult task in OpenOffice.org Writer. Few use the function regularly, and when they do, the mail merge wizard seems to cause as much confusion as it resolves. Writer's original mail merge feature, retrievable from Tools -> Customize -> Add -> Documents -> Mail Merge is somewhat more straightforward, but, even with it, users are likely to confuse the original document and the information source. In comparison to those other alternatives, FastMailMerge is not only simplicity itself, but a welcome relief that easily lives up to its name.

13 terminal emulators for Linux: Konsole, GNOME-Terminal, Yakuake, Tilda, ROXTerm, xterm, Eterm, xvt, rxvt, mrxvt, rxvt-unicode, aterm, wterm.

Traditional methods of spam protection involve using Bayesian detection rules (usually via SpamAssassin) on messages after they have been accepted by your server. Most mail sysadmins may have encountered the constant cries from their users asking “can’t you stop them sending it?”. Of course you can’t stop somebody sending a message but you can stop accepting them in the first place. Enter greylisting. These two articles are kind of follow-ons to my previous article on spam prevention in exim mail servers. Think of it as an appendix. If you are starting from scratch you might find is useful to go and read that first. Read Ryan Cartwright's article in full at Freesoftware Magazine.

This howto explains installing Zivios Master Service version 0.5.0. Zivios is an n-tiered PHP-5 application, providing identity management, single sign-on, user, group and computer provisioning, as well as remote management of services. It uses MySQL and OpenLDAP as its data store, with OpenLdap being the primary back end for identity management and application integration and MySQL being used for panel specific data.

Microsoft's new "I'm a PC" ad campaign celebrates the fact that millions of people prefer PCs over Macs. But it overlooks the fact that many of those PC users are leaping from Windows to Linux. For me, "I'm a PC" means I've discovered the freedom of open source.

Toshiba has announced that it too is joining the “Netbook” race, but given that the Intel Atom is a chip designed for exactly this type of low-spec computer, what’s more of a surprise is that it has taken Toshiba this long to join in the fun!

Postfix Mail Server will allow you to set a base domain and add any number of virtual domains. Virtual domains can either be virtual alias domains which are the domains that your server is the final destination for and also virtual mailbox domains which do not have local accounts and only pick up mail through IMAP or POP3.

A quick script to pull up famous quotations based on keywords or phrased you provide on the Unix or Linux CLI. Today's Linux/Unix bash shell script is yet another follow up to a whole cavalcade of scripts we've written to mine the knowledge on tap at reference.com, although this one is grabbing its material from QuotationsPage.com. If you missed any of the others, you can still find them in our older bash script posts to do encylopedia lookups, access the online Thesaurus, translate between different languages and, of course, the use the online dictionary.

Javier Colado, Novell's new channel chief, tells The VAR Guy that he has some new ideas to help strengthen Novell SUSE partner relationships. Here's a look at the first interview published with Colado.

Sometimes sharing files and folder between Windows and GNU/Linux can be annoying and problematic especially for beginners. In this article we're going to see how to setup Samba and how to get both Windows and GNU/Linux sharing and browsing public share the right way.

This review has been a long time coming...mainly because I've been having such a good time with this book. That said, the title is a bit misleading. It's not really "The book that should have been in the box" (even if JavaScript came in a box) since a "box of generic JavaScript" wouldn't have come with half of what this book contains. In fact, I'm not really sure the reader will come away with a solid foundation in JavaScript after reading McFarland's book. Let me explain.

Until Chrome came along, Google's Master Mobile Plan didn't quite add up. Now it does. Chrome -- Google's new superbrowser -- is cream on the top of a new mobile software stack. Let's call it GACL, for Gears, Android and Chrome on Linux. Gears is a way to run Web apps on desktops and store data locally as well as in the cloud. Android is a development framework for Linux-based mobile devices. Chrome is a browser, but not just for pages. Chrome also runs apps. In that respect, it's more than the UI-inside-a-window that all browsers have become. It's essentially an operating system.

LXer Feature: 21-Sept-2008

In this weeks Roundup we have, The Large Hadron Collider survives its first attacks from hackers, 5 Useful Tips to Customize Firefox 3, Android gets closer to being released, Carls Schroder opines on what it means to be a "geek" and University of Santa Barbara researchers show incredibly easy it is to compromise the security on a Sequoia Systems voting machine. Also, 10 things Linux does better than Windows, a Richard Stallman interview, VLC gets a new look and Google Chrome for Linux?

Google controls about 70 percent of the search advertising market. Doesn’t that give it a monopolist’s ability to set prices as high as it wishes? Brad Smith of Microsoft said Yahoo’s gains would be at the cost of American businesses. It does not. Google does not set the prices. Its advertisers do, bidding against one another for the amount they will pay when a user clicks on one of their ads. They do the same for ads on Yahoo and Microsoft search sites, too. Auction pricing is so deeply embedded in this business that you can see why Google and Yahoo innocently thought that their advertising pact, which was announced in July and is to be put into effect next month, would sail through a regulatory review to which they voluntarily submitted. The review continues.

Following the release on Tuesday of details about debates and decisions at this year's Kernel Summit, LWN.net has now reported on the second and final day of the conference. Linus Torvalds, Andrew Morton, and some 80 other important and nearly all male kernel developers discussed their approaches to the further development of Linux and exchanged experiences. Like the LWN.net articles covering the first day, Jonathan Corbet's reports on the second day of the kernel Summit are available exclusively to LWN.net subscribers until the 25th of September. As has been the case in previous years, other sources of information on the summit are scarce – it often takes weeks or months for additional information on decisions reached at the conference to trickle out on blogs or posts on the Linux Kernel Mailing List (LKML).

A few days ago I wrote a tutorial showing how to compile Wine 1.1.4 from source in Ubuntu 8.04 and how to install it. In the meantime, version 1.1.5 was released on September 19, and since the compile from source and install procedure has not changed, I will explain here how to install the last Wine release using the official WineHQ APT repository. What follows are a few easy to do steps for getting the last Wine release up and running on your Ubuntu Hardy system:

This benchmark shows how Apache2 (version 2.2.3) and lighttpd (version 1.4.13) perform compared to each other when delivering a static HTML file (about 50KB in size). This benchmark was created with the help of ab (Apache benchmark) on a VMware vm (Debian Etch); if you try this yourself, your numbers might differ (depending on your hardware), but the tendency should be the same.

Greg KH, Linux kernel developer delivered a keynote in the Linux plumbing conference about the health of the ecosystem. His message was essentially that distributions that don't contribute to the ecosystem have to rely on the whims of others which is unhealthy for them. Here is an introduction the development model and some interesting statistics about the Linux kernel code