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Earlier this month, I had the luxury of inspecting a new Omatek Smartbook at the Ministry of Education in Ghana. The Smartbook is a low-cost laptop aimed at the education market, and one look at it and you know its an XO laptop derivative:

Virtualization vendors use VDI internally in their networks don't they? Maybe no one bothered to ask before. Find out for yourself.

I've been running Debian in one form or another, on one box or another, ever since Etch went stable in April 2007. I last ran Etch extensively both on my VIA converted thin client and on the $15 Laptop (Compaq Armada 7770dmt), but since then the VIA has been used to compare Ubuntu and Wolvix, and the Compaq has been running OpenBSD and Puppy. So it had been a long time since I had worked with Etch (as opposed to the newer, soon-to-be-stable Lenny I've been battling on my Gateway laptop). Debian Etch really is like a comfortable pair of old shoes.

IBM declared in a new corporate policy that it was establishing new IT standards and redefining its ties with the International Standards Organization (ISO). If developing countries want to develop their own standards, IBM is willing to support them. Ramifications are clear regarding the turbulent debate around acceptance of Microsoft's Open Office XML (OOXML) data format.

Elgg is an open source application for rolling out a social network. It installs like any Web-based software, but instead of a blog or a wiki, it gives you all the components of a social networking site -- your own MySpace! It's popular with educational institutes and used by several universities across the world, in addition to powering social networks of companies such as Swatch. The new Elgg 1.0, released last month, is modular in design, making it easier for developers to build social networks around the platform.

I know, I know…you’re wondering why this is in the open source blog. The reason is simple: I have used open source operating systems for a long, long time now. I have championed against Microsoft for over ten years. But when Techrepublic liked the idea of me writing some Vista content for them, I couldn’t say no. Of course this meant me actually using Vista. So I thought it would be interesting for the open source crowd to get my initial reaction to my explorations with Windows Vista. You know, see how (or if) it stands up to Linux. It was a hard pill to swallow for me. It might be a equally as hard for you. Let’s find out. Shall we?

A commenter on one of my articles recently asked: "Why is it that true believers feel the need to replace every last proprietary app?" He continued: "VMware, Skype, and Google Earth are best-of-breed and free-as-in-beer." Over the last year or two, such sentiments -- often rudely expressed -- have become increasingly common in the free and open source software (FOSS) community. But, when you think for a while, they miss the point. If free software is to achieve its goal of guaranteeing that users can control their computing, then a completely free operating system is a basic necessity. An almost completely free operating system is both short-sighted and not enough to give users the control of their own computers that is supposed to be FOSS's ultimate goal.

Though the financial services market in the US is in bailout mode this week - the CME (Chicago Mercantile Exchange) is hedging its bets -- with Linux.

After months of speculation and anticipation, T-Mobile and Google on Tuesday unveiled the G1, a new smartphone manufactured by HTC and the first commercially available handheld to run Google's Android mobile operating system. In the U.S., T-Mobile subscribers can immediately order the G1. The handset will be available in black, white and brown at select T-Mobile retail stores and online on Oct. 22.

One day you're chugging merrily along, and then you're staring at your Linux machine that won't boot -- a machine that just happens to contain everything of importance to you. While some degree of disaster is inevitable, it's how you cope with it that counts.

What Greg Kroah-Hartman said, what Canonical answered, what do users think about it, what does Joe Brockmeier think about it and what is the Linux Foundation\'s point of view... Linux ProMagazine editor Rikki Kite tells the whole story in her ROSE Blog.

For those who prefer to edit C, Bash, PHP or other source files using Nano instead of an advanced IDE like Emacs or Vim, enabling syntax highlighting is probably a must-have. To enable highlighting in Nano for various programming languages, you will first need to edit (or create if it doesn't exist) the file ~/.nanorc, where ~ is your home directory and put in it lines like this:

Vendor Callout: Do you use the technology that you sell? Try not to be shocked when the answer is no.

This is James Turner with O'Reilly Media; I'm talking today with Theodore Tso, who is the Chief Platform Strategist at the Linux Foundation.

Despite Microsoft's efforts to keep Windows 7 information secret and safe within a close circle of partners and testers until its good and ready, another round of screenshots has found its way to the web. Over the weekend, the ThinkNext.net blog posted a variety of screenshots purportedly from the latest batch of beta code, Windows 7 M3 Build 6780. Unfortunately, the page is now deader than disco. Someone claiming to be a Microsoft suit emailed the author and dropped enough litigious worIt ds of advice to encourage a hasty retreat.

osol-0811-98, the pre-release version of OpenSolaris 2008.11, based on Nevada build 98 is now available. These are the bits of technology where many people would say we have competitive advantage over Linux, although some engineers will argue against that. The Linux community has a vast community and developer base, and that's what we're trying to create. That's where they're mature and we're young. Screenshots by The Coding Studio

Lighttpd is a secure, fast, standards-compliant web server designed for speed-critical environments. This tutorial shows how you can install Lighttpd on an OpenSUSE 11 server with PHP5 support (through FastCGI) and MySQL support.

Nokia is well prepared for Google's high-profile foray into the mobile phone business thanks to years of development experience and millions of phones on the market, a senior Nokia official told Reuters. Details of Google's plan to enter the mobile software market are expected on Tuesday when T-Mobile USA displays the first phone based on Google's Android platform in New York.

Earlier this month the ATI Radeon HD 4600 series from AMD was unveiled as the new mid-range graphics cards derived from their flagship RV770 graphics core. The Radeon HD 4650 and Radeon HD 4670 are the two RV730-based products now available. The ATI Radeon HD 4670 may not be able to compete with the Radeon HD 4800 series in all of the tests, but at a price of under $100 USD is it worth pursuing? For this article we have our hands on the brand new Sapphire Radeon HD 4670 512MB graphics card as we test it on Ubuntu Linux to see how well it can perform in our OpenGL tests and overclock with the recently added OverDrive support.

ATS (admin task scheduler) enables administrators to automate tasks by scheduling execution of stored procedures. Many Linux and Unix database administration tasks, such as online backup, can be performed by calling the built-in ADMIN_CMD procedure.ATS uses a straightforward SQL interface and operates without the DAS.