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Reading WorldChanging's "editorial retrospective" by Ethan Zuckerman on the article on the OLPC XO he posted in June, 2006 really made me wish that the project had, well, worked out better. Articles like Ethan's remind me of the good work and ideals that have gone into the OLPC XO, which both refreshes me and frustrates me further. This post begins a four-part series on the One Laptop Per Child project, some of the key problems it has faced, and the amazing promise that it still holds for international development and global education.

The Servico Federal de Processamento de Dados (SERPRO), (a US$ 1 billion annual revenue Brazilian government owned IT enterprise), announced during the Debian Day Brasil 2008 Porto Alegre that it has selected Debian GNU/Linux as the preferred distribution for its hundreds of GNU/Linux development and production servers. Future SERPRO tenders and public hearings will include clauses requiring Debian GNU/Linux compatibility. Recent SERPRO tenders have already encouraged participation by small FLOSS regional companies, as well as Debian support services.

Jeff Elkner teaches high school students in Arlington, Va., about Linux and other Free Software. He's serious about helping budding computer scientists understand what FOSS is and what it can do for them, and he's one of those guys who always seems to be sharing his knowledge with others. One of Elkner's latest efforts, the Open Book Project, is a good illustration of his philosophy about sharing ideas and knowledge, which he says is similar to that of one of his heroes, Free Software advocate Richard Stallman.

Browser developer Opera Software has signed up with the Symbian Foundation, a Nokia-led consortium that was set up in June to turn the Symbian mobile operating system into an open source platform.

How to backup MySQL and recovery Using Zmanda Recovery Manager

The SQI/Vector partnership provides a professional looking presentation of low cost support services for small businesses in a highly reliable infrastructure. It provides the necessary tools to make Vector Linux a presentable option to be offered by consultants serving small business or for knowledgeable small business owners to tap into directly.

Citadel is 100% GPL, and doesn't play games with making either binary or source downloads easily available. If I had to describe Citadel in a word, it would be "simplicity". It is a complex application with a lot of power and flexibility, but it's easy to install and administer.

Live CDs let you boot an operating system without installing any software on a hard drive. There are plenty of Linux live CDs and lots of tools to customize them. The Ubuntu Customization Kit, tastefully called UCK, lets you add your favorite applications into the distro. If you're not happy with the factory-installed Ubuntu apps, here's your chance to spin up your very own Ubuntu live CD without too much effort. Installing UCK is a no-brainer -- grab the latest .deb package and use GDebi to install it. UCK requires tools such as fakeroot and mkisofs, which you can install using Synaptic. In addition to UCK, you need about 5GB of free disk space under your home directory, as well as the ISO of the Ubuntu version you want to customize.

Linux Installfest HOWTO provides information that could help you with the organization of a successful installfest. What is the definition of a successful installfest? Basically when the people are happy after such an event then that means the installfest went O.K. and it is successful. This howto is one of the documents need update and for that reason it is in the wiki. So, you all could help that document to become better.

This month marks the 25th anniversary of the founding of the GNU Project by Richard M. Stallman. GNU is one of the oldest and best-known organizations in the free and open-source world, providing not only high-quality software, but also a well-known license (the GNU General Public License), and a philosophy that continues to influence many activists and programmers. The exact anniversary of Stallman's announcement is September 27th, 1983, when he called upon programmers to join him in creating "free Unix."

This week's feature story is a review of Debian GNU/Linux 5.0 "Lenny" on the ASUS Eee PC. With Debian being the first Linux distribution to have an open communication channel with the Taiwan-based hardware manufacturer, our expectations were high, but is Lenny really a good choice for the popular ultra-portable? Read on to find out. In the news section, Google restarts the browser war with Chrome, Dell unveils the long-awaited Inspiron Mini 9, Mandriva Linux 2009 enters the release candidate stage, and Fedora calls on beta testers to help with testing the promising ext4 file system...

Challenged by my iTWire colleague and Linux lover Sam Varghese to come up with 40 reasons to lose Linux and vote Vista, I’ve done just that. It all started quietly enough with iTWire colleague David M Williams writing an article entitled “5 reasons to upgrade from Windows Vista to Linux”, with David being a strong and well respected proponent of Linux.

The Fedora Project holds a “Fedora Users and Developers Conference” (FUDCon) several times each year, in various locations around the world. The latest installment was September 5-7, in Brno, Czech Republic. Max Spevack, Red Hat’s manager of Community Architecture, shared his trip report with us.

The Linux kernel is flexible, and you can even modify the way it works on the fly by dynamically changing some of its parameters, thanks to the sysctl command. Sysctl provides an interface that allows you to examine and change several hundred kernel parameters in Linux or BSD. Changes take effect immediately, and there's even a way to make them persist after a reboot. By using sysctl judiciously, you can optimize your box without having to recompile your kernel, and get the results immediately.

The acquisition of Qumranet puts Red Hat in the Virtual spotlight and opens the door to change desktop computing forever.

So what really happened? I doubt we'll ever get a detailed, nitty-gritty explanation, but I have friends in London and... Well, let me just make the following points about TradElec. First, TradElec runs on more than a 100 HP ProLiant servers in several locations in London. These servers are running Windows Server 2003. On top of this runs the TradElec software itself. This is a custom set of C# and .NET programs, which was created by Microsoft and Accenture, the global consulting firm. Its back-end databases, believe it or not, run on Microsoft SQL Server 2000. The goal was to maintain sub-ten millisecond response times. In short, it's meant to be a real-time system.

While the current beta edition of Chrome currently runs on Windows only, open source developers -- including some from Mozilla -- are now working on getting Google's new browser to operate on Linux and Mac, too. The developers' site for Chromium, an open source project rolled out by Google at the time of its launch of the Chrome browser, also contains build instructions for Windows, Linux, and Mac. There, in addition to making the source code for Chrome available under a BSD license, Google explains how to submit patches and submit bug reports. The source code for Chrome's high-performance V8 JavaScript engine is also downloadable.

Reports are swirling that Lenovo is moving away from Novell SUSE Linux on ThinkPads. But Novell and Lenovo have their own views to share.

In the first week of September 2006, the European Commission signed an agreement to fund a 30 month research project which aims to develop an open-source software system, seamlessly integrated in a software development environment for enabling decentralised, personalised and context-aware knowledge sharing. The Consortium that will carry out the research and development work, consists of Planet AE, Forschungszentrum Informatik an der Universität Karlsruhe, Institute of Communication and Computer Systems, National Technical University of Athens, Technische Universität München, Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, CIM College d.o.o, Intrasoft International S.A., Linux Industrial Association (LIPSZ Hungary), THALES Research and Technology France, TXT e-solutions S.p.A.

The open source arena never fails to surprise when it comes to offbeat implementations of community-produced technologies. Put together enough eyeballs and collaboration, and unusual inventions will ensue. We've covered several examples of this phenomenon on OStatic, including open source efforts completely outside the software arena. In this post, you'll find six unusual open source efforts worthy of Rube Goldberg.