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STUX 2.0, released last month, is a remarkable improvement from the 0.9.2 release I reviewed a couple years ago. While the look and feel of the Slackware-based distribution have stayed pretty much the same, STUX lacks the glaring technical problems that made it unusable on the previous occasion.

Today I was not in the mood for testing applications and making some review, and although the new Flock 2.0 would deserve my attention, I think I'll cover it tomorrow. So instead of a review or a tutorial, I decided to write something more like a lecture, so you won't need any technical knowledge to read it. Surfing on the web got me an idea: how about an article to pick up a Linux distribution? And, to be more precise, what about an article to explain why Ubuntu or Debian? Since these are also the only two distributions I'm familiar with, here I am, writing this.

IBM is targeting midsize business customers that use Linux with a new "baby" mainframe that costs just a fraction of the amount charged for the high-end mainframe IBM released in February. The System z10 Business Class (z10 BC), announced Tuesday and generally available now, follows in the tradition of IBM refreshing its primary mainframe product and then following up several months later with a stripped-down, cheaper version, says Forrester analyst Brad Day. But the so-called “baby mainframe” is a pretty strong machine on its own, and lets IBM compete more aggressively against various RISC and Itanium-based servers as well as high-end x86 and x64 machines, Day says.

Hadoop is a distributed computing platform that provides a framework for storing and processing petabytes of data. Because it is Java-based, Hadoop runs on Linux, Windows, Solaris, BSD, and Mac OS X. Hadoop is widely used in organizations that demand a scalable, economical (read commodity hardware), efficent, and reliable platform for processing vast amounts of data.

So it appears there will be no way to escape from being blocked from seeing sites that are false positives due to buggy & broken filters or incorrectly classified, etc..

A computer simulation mostly used for social networking can be a useful tool for educators. Second Life, the virtual world in which participants create alter egos that explore and interact with one another, can be a useful venue for discussions, classes, conferences and projects, said Betsy Hughes, electronic resources librarian for the Kentucky Virtual Library.

Netspeed is a GNOME applet that shows the current down- and upload bandwidth of a network device. You can use it to keep an eye on your Internet speed, for example. This guide shows how to install it on an Ubuntu 8.04 desktop.

The Linux Foundation has included an application-checker tool in the public beta version of the Linux Standard Base 4.0. The software is designed to reduce development costs by ensuring applications can run on any Linux Standard Base (LSB) certified distribution, according to the foundation. "This LSB 4.0 release is aimed at the practical needs of developers, both those looking for a standard platform and those who just want some practical advice on portability," said Jeff Licquia, senior engineer and technical lead for LSB 4.0 at the Linux Foundation, in a statement.

How to modify an existing local zone's file systems on Solaris 10. Today's post is a follow-up to yesterday's post on creating new file systems in a local zone on Solaris 10. Today, we're moving on to a simple how-to on modifying existing local zones. As some of you may have noticed, with yesterday's post, I managed to blithely bypass the creation of the local zone we were working on.

In my last article, I discussed, in quite some detail, the process that GCC uses to convert a C source file into an executable program file. These steps included preprocessing the source to remove comments, include other files as required, and string substitution. The resulting file was then compiled into assembly language. The assembly language output was then used to create an object file containing machine language, which was then linked with other standardized libraries to create an executable.

The next time you get the urge to enter angry messages to phishers on fake (malicious) Web sites, stop and consider this discovery by researcher Joe Stewart. The identity thieves behind the Asprox botnet have built extra logic into phishing sites to detect taunts and subject those computer users to drive-by malware exploits.

Have you ever heard of Arduino? It's billed as an open source electronics prototyping platform, and proponents claim that it could lead to devices capable of interaction not seen on today's computers. I'd say it's not entirely open source for several reasons, but it does leverage open source software components and an inexpensive starter hardware platform following many of the principles that open source projects follow. O'Reilly has just announced a $12.99 new book called Getting Started with Arduino, intended to kick-start new Arduino projects.

GNOME Do (Do) is an intelligent launcher tool that makes performing common tasks on your computer simple and efficient. “GNOME Do” not only allows you to search for items in your desktop environment (e.g. applications, contacts, bookmarks, files, music), it also allows you to specify actions to perform on search results (e.g. run, open, email, chat, play).

Hip hop artists might not be the most obvious target for Linux evangelists, but a little-known distribution called Transmission is making waves. It's what powers Indamixx, a pro audio production system that runs on a customised Samsung handheld computer created by Trinity Audio Group. Developed by 64 Studio Ltd. on a mixed Debian/Ubuntu base, Transmission and its bundled applications are a quintessential open source story.

I'm running what I call The Self-Reliant Thin Client on Debian Etch, a GNU/Linux distribution I haven't run intensively in quite some time. I also recently installed the PowerPC build of Etch on my Power Macintosh G4/466, but I've been using the converted thin client almost exclusively since I built it last week using an 8 GB Compact Flash module as the system's sole hard drive.

Plat'Home, a Japanese Linux company, is announcing today the winners of its "Will Linux Work?" contest. Launched a month ago, the contest challenged users to come up with interesting, challenging technology solutions leveraging Linux. Full results of the contest including quotes from the winning contestants are found here. Here, below the fold, are some of the more imaginative winning solutions.

Attempt to reproduce for OpenSuse 11 procedure worked so smoothly for RH’s PV DomUs , described in previous post, appeared to be a bit more complicated. Pygrub installation profile reading data from HTTP source at Dom0 still worked fine, but Xen 3.2 Ubuntu’s 8.04.1 pygrub failed to read image had been created for OpenSuse 11 PV DomU (/dev/sda11) . Just an ordinary “xm” profile was required to finish configuration and load PV DomU when image was already created on block device, say /dev/sda11. Xenified kernel and ramdisk had to be copied of image device to Dom0 file system. There may be several ways of achieving this goal.

Ken is a well-spoken polite man, but that doesn't prevent him from asking the hard questions that nobody else wants to ask at these industry lovefests, which increasingly appear to be more about newer and more innovative ways to exploit Linux and FOSS. Ken stepped up to the mike at the panel discussion and asked a simple question that visibly discomfited the panel: "My customers can turn on their cable television and in 30 minutes watch five Microsoft Windows commercials. When are IBM and HP going to put the same things on? When are my customers going to be able to see about Linux? Television and radio legitimize the product."

The responses, in my occasionally-humble opinion, were worthy of Redmond itself.

With the Symbian Foundation throwing its weight behind the Eclipse Public License (EPL), the cache of that license has grown a great deal. But what prompted the foundation to go with the EPL. Was it just a total aversion to the GNU General Public License (GPL)? Well, David Rivas, vice president, S60 Software, Product and Technology Management, Devices at Nokia, which is the charter member of the Symbian Foundation, will not say that, exactly.

All of these developments are merely things to keep an eye on because Microsoft is gradually falling, and being the vicious company which it is,