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Dell this morning gave its Vostro line a refresh made for regions where cost is a concern but still offering features that are rare almost anywhere. Dell vows a more aggressive update still for its Vostro desktops. The A100 is the PC creator's first Atom-based desktop and is targeted at the ASUS Eee Box and other systems for developing areas where cost is the most important factor. In addition to the low-cost, low-power processor, the mini-tower also comes with Ubuntu Linux as its only operating system choice; the system is Dell's first ultra-budget desktop to ship with the open-source as its exclusive platform.

[Probably won't come to the USA, but still good news that it's a Linux-only machine. Windows not available! -- Sander]

Dynamically linked shared libraries are an important aspect of GNU/Linux®. They allow executables to dynamically access external functionality at run time and thereby reduce their overall memory footprint (by bringing functionality in when it's needed). This article investigates the process of creating and using dynamic libraries, provides details on the various tools for exploring them, and explores how these libraries work under the hood.

There's little question that plenty of people are annoyed at how difficult it is to rip movies from legally purchased DVDs into formats readable by handheld devices or media players. The lack of consistency in document formats is an ongoing headache for anyone who receives files that are only readable with certain software. Information rights management has become enough of a frustration that a group has formed specifically to deal with the problem head on. GeekPAC is a political action committee made up of volunteers who are taking their complaints straight to Capitol Hill.

Speakers of Hindi and Tagalog will soon benefit from the work of a project called Decathlon which is translating multimedia software into these languages. Other languages from the Indian and Far Eastern subcontinent, such as Bengali, Nepali, Pashto, Burmese and Tetum, may also benefit from this venture. Organised by African localisation organisation Translate.org.za and funded by a grant from the Open Society Institute (OSI), the Decathlon project is focusing its translation energies on the VLC multimedia program.

Brain mapping is a graphic way to identify different parts of an issue or to plan steps or consequences of an action. Experts say mind mapping makes information easier to remember and makes studying more enjoyable. If you are a fan of mind mapping, you could use specific software to create mind maps. Here are 5 ways to create a mind map in Linux:

In a new twist to the Psystar saga, the Mac cloning company is to countersue Apple claiming anticompetitive business practises because the Mac Operating System is tied to Apple only hardware. Rudy Pedraza has become something of a love him or loathe him figure in the Applesphere. His company, Psystar, started selling Mac clones this year under the guise of the OpenMac which quickly became the OpenComputer and then added the OpenPro to its range.

For the first time I tried fedora I was really frustrated from the operating system. I would admit it was (and still is) a great one but the thought about migration is difficult enough. At that time I was migrating from SuSE 9.3, it was so nice and comfortable distro but I left it for Fedora.

In this article I will show how to install and configure fail2ban on a Fedora 9 system. Fail2ban is a tool that observes login attempts to various services, e.g. SSH, FTP, SMTP, Apache, etc., and if it finds failed login attempts again and again from the same IP address or host, fail2ban stops further login attempts from that IP address/host by blocking it with an iptables firewall rule.

For enterprise system administrators looking for interoperability with Microsoft Exchange, but not the high costs associated with it, PostPath email and collaboration server could be a smart business investment. Boasting interoperability with Exchange environments for a third of the cost, thanks to its use of the Postfix mail server and many other open source components, PostPath provides drop-in capability and compatibility with Exchange environments without the need for making changes to Outlook on the client side.

BIOSLEVEL.com looks at one of the first factory-overclocked Radeon HD4850 videocards. Featuring an improved cooler from Zalman and paired with the new Catalyst 8.8 driver, will this behemoth be enough to challenge's nVidia performance crown in Linux?

If today's title throws you off a little, that's good. I was going for an allegorical representation of the output of today's Perl script in the title of this post. The beauty of it is, even if I don't succeed, I have done my job, since (although this script is supposed to produce upside down and backwards HTML pages) the outcome of any input handed off to today's script may, or may not, have every single line reversed and in top to bottom order. In fact, when it comes to the more complicated issue of handling tags that dictate image, span, table, style and other such extravagant beautification, it may turn out a web page so horribly disfigured that you'll hardly recognize it. ...although, maybe that was the point. I allow my friends to talk me into wasting my time on folly like this far too often. ...probably because I enjoy it ;)

My name is Adrienne, and I’m a graphic designer at Red Hat—I create meaning using type and image. The other day I stumbled upon a story involving music, sustainability, and open source. Needless to say, I was intrigued. Brian Crabtree and Kelli Cain are the artists and creators behind Monome. At first glance, this cool device is simply a white square with a grid of buttons. It produces music and the buttons light up. It seems random, but the lights and music are synchronized.

A CIM event is the occurrence of a phenomenon of interest, which can be classified as either lifecycle or alert. This article shows you how to register CIM event handlers with a a single specific connection port to avoid added complexity.

Mozilla has announced the launch of a new feature for its Firefox Web browser designed to make it perform faster. Called"TraceMonkey," the feature is an evolution of Firefox's SpiderMonkey JavaScript engine and will be built into Firefox 3.1, according to the company. To increase JavaScript speeds by an order of magnitude or more, Mozilla designed TraceMonkey with a new type of just-in-time compiler.

Mailboxes are going the way of phone booths. More of us are paying our bills online and using the Internet to send our correspondence, so the U.S. Postal Service has decided it needs fewer mailboxes. (WTOP) The first question that jumped to my mind is how does the USPS expect me to mail a letter when I cannot find a mail box? The second question is, will there be any letters twenty years from now? Or less? This is not as trivial a concern as you might expect.

I've long been a sucker for small-footprint Linux distributions. So naturally, I thought it would be interesting to explore the latest version of "Ubuntulite." From what I've seen so far, I'm impressed!

As editor for LinuxInsider for more than a year now, I figured the time was right to start walking the walk with my personal machine. So I took my Dell Inspiron 1150 to this year's LinuxWorld Conference& Expo with the intention of switching my operating system to one of the many Linux distros.

[Hilarious, Editor for over a year and he is just now 'switching' Linux. - Scott]

ReadyTechs provides network support services for companies that don't want the expense of hiring and caring for their own employees. Now CEO Gerry Libertelli says the company is using Linux virtualization to open a new income stream based on cloud computing. Libertelli say he catches his existing customers at the end-of-life stage in hardware maintenance to offer them more than just virtual server administration. "We intervene in the hardware stream and say, 'How about a virtual network?' And that is starting to ramp up."

KMess is a MSN Messenger client for KDE Users in Linux. It enables Linux users to chat with friends online who are using MSN Messenger in Windows or Mac OS or Linux. The strength of KMess is it’s integration with the KDE desktop environment, focus on MSN Messenger specific features and an easy-to-use interface.

Firebug is popular because it solves the long-standing problem of debugging Web pages. Before Firebug, the two main methods for debugging Web applications were the server's error log (to which all error-related data was sent) and the HTML source code (making the debugging output visible to all users via the "view source" function). But with JavaScript becoming an increasingly important player in the creation of dynamic Web sites, and with CSS (cascading stylesheets) determining the formatting, the combination of error logs and "view source" was getting painfully difficult.