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The most recent official count of Linux distros put the number at 'one hell of a lot'.This is good because it gives us plenty of choice, and choice provides freedom and freedom is good, right? Maybe it can feel as if there's a little too much choice at times, but there's no doubt that the huge variety of distributions makes Linux more interesting. However, trying different distros isn't as easy as experimenting with a new web browser, word processor or even desktop environment.

In this article I’m going to go through some details about what is going on under the hood when you run a Python program, as well how those details have changed over the years in different python’s implementations ranging from original CPython (Python implementation in C) all the way to the newest implementations like PyPy.

Stupid humor about stupidity. Stupid, but, perhaps, funny... Hope your Saturday's going well and you've managed to make it through another work week without hurting yourself or someone else ;) I'm still working (during my off time) on the many many suggestions for our bash cable TV listings script so that we have a decent update by Monday. Of course, while I do all that sort of puttering around (trying to figure out where they're hiding what information, and so forth) I like to take a break, now and again, to see if I can't find something to lighten the mood.

Dave Girouard, president of Google enterprise division, stated that his company's long-term goal is to open up the Google development stack to outside developers. If this is true, then it could have some serious long-term implications for developers who could use Google services in new and interesting ways.

Behind Yahoo's push to open up Web search and advertising is software powerful enough to sort through the entire Library of Congress in less than half a minute. The software, calledHadoop, is part of Yahoo's massive computing grid and is transforming the way that Yahoo and corporate giants like IBM extract meaning from enormous streams of data.

On this episode I interview Oren Tiech from Sun Microsystems about xVM Ops Center. Also, you get to see me in my undies. Woo Hoo!

This tutorial provides step-by-step instructions on how to install Xen on a CentOS 5.2 system. Xen lets you create guest operating systems (*nix operating systems like Linux and FreeBSD), so called virtual machines or domUs, under a host operating system (dom0). Using Xen you can separate your applications into different virtual machines that are totally independent from each other (e.g. a virtual machine for a mail server, a virtual machine for a high-traffic web site, another virtual machine that serves your customers' web sites, a virtual machine for DNS, etc.), but still use the same hardware. This saves money, and what is even more important, it's more secure. If the virtual machine of your DNS server gets hacked, it has no effect on your other virtual machines. Plus, you can move virtual machines from one Xen server to the next one.

Ryan Gordon (a.k.a. Icculus) has announced the release of a Crysis Wars (the multi-player version of EA's Crysis Warhead) server for Linux. Crysis Warhead is an expansion to the original Crysis game and was released for Microsoft Windows in September.

The chart says it all

This wasn't the first time I tried Fedora — or Fedora 9 for that matter — via live CD. I must have burned my first CD of the distro soon after it was released. Now that I was resolved to replace Debian Lenny on The $0 Laptop (Gateway Solo 1450) with ... something that didn't have Lenny's seemingly unsolvable screen-refresh issues, I decided to give Fedora 9 a try. I knew that it was a little less than three weeks until the release of Fedora 10, but since I was ready now, Fedora 9 it was.

It looks like presiding over the death of the Yahoo-Google ad deal will be one of the final acts of Thomas Barnett, the Assistant Attorney General who headed the Justice Department's Antitrust Division since June 2005. Barnett announced his resignation today, effective Nov. 19.

We've checked out ATI's Radeon HD 4550 low-end graphics card already and found it to be a nice solution for Linux users on a budget, but how does NVIDIA's competitor contend? In this review we are looking at the NVIDIA GeForce 9500GT from Sparkle. This graphics card has 1GB of DDR2 memory along with DVI, HDMI, and DisplayPort connectors.

A seemingly innocuous change to the networking code that went into the 2.6.27 kernel is now causing trouble for various distributions. Ubuntu, Fedora, and openSUSE are all buttoning up their packages for a release in the near future—with Ubuntu's due this week—so kernel changes are not particularly welcome. Unfortunately, if the problem is not addressed, some users may never be able to download a fix because their TCP/IP won't interoperate with some broken equipment on the internet.

Online learning is evolving into much more than discussions via Blackboard. Today's online learners are spending time engaged in discussions, meeting in virtual classrooms, and combining online and on-the-ground learning, even if they live time zones away from campus.

Over at Internetnews.com, Sean Michael Kerner points out an intriguing bit of information spotted at Groklaw indicating that SCO appears to be taking some steps toward reincorporating the Caldera International name. Insert copious amounts of wild speculation here.

Tips4Linux.com is a new Linux Tips site that brings a new interesting small how-to every day. Learn how to add extra SWAP space on the fly or convert videos for PocketPC devices. Unmount stubborn devices or block IP's with IPTABLES by adding them to a simple text file.

Service providers are all excited about "the cloud" and want us to buy into this vague, mysterious "new" service. But real geeks want details, not hand-waving. In this installment of the excellent classic Networking 101 series, Charlie Schluting tells us how competing service providers all have to cooperate for the Internet to work at all.

This is WFTL Bytes!, your occasiodaily FOSS and Linux news show for Friday, November 7, 2008, with your host, Marcel Gagné. Today's stories include Obama, the open source president, what follows the death of Windows, an Android cracked, what keeps Microsoft up at night, and HP rolls its own . . . Linux, that is.

Undoubtedly you've heard the old cliché that Windows is easier to maintain because it has GUI tools for everything while Linux requires commands lines and a terminal. Any experienced Windows administrator knows the point-and-click GUI tools don't cover everything.

These are good times for Linux users. Ubuntu's 8.10 release recently went live, Fedora's 10 release is coming up in mere weeks, and openSUSE will finalize its 11.1 offering in December. Even if none of these distributions are your first choice for daily use, they are popular and are frequently worth checking out on liveCD, even if you plan to continue using your current distribution.