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Paul Ferrill takes a look at the new, more powerful Asus EeePC 1000 from ZaReason, customized with Ubuntu Hardy Heron. Do a beefier CPU, more RAM, and goodies like a Webcam, Bluetooth,and a larger solid-state hard disk play well with Ubuntu?

You know that traditional desktop computing is a dying technology but is VDI really the answer? Is it the long-term answer? The answer is no.

IT organizations that feel safe from open-source licensing violations might be wise to check their code anyway, because open-source components are rapidly seeping into applications by way of offshore and in-house developers taking shortcuts, as well as a growing population of open-source-savvy grads entering the workforce. "With all of these new aspects, open source is something companies are going to have to get their heads around," says Anthony Armenta, vice president of engineering at Wyse Technology Inc., a maker of thin clients.

Symbian has told the world that as open source operating systems go, Linux is unfit for mobile phones. "There’s been a lot of misleading information over the years...about the fitness of Linux for the mobile space," Jerry Panagrossi, vp of Symbian's North American operations, told industry insiders this morning at the GigaOM:Mobilize conference in San Francisco.

Introduced in Ubuntu 7.10 was a feature known as BulletProofX, which provides a fail-safe mode that is by default used when the X server fails to properly initialize. In this original implementation, it would default back to using the VESA display driver with 256 colors and then proceed to run the displayconfig-gtk utility. While this is nice for the end-user as it keeps them from touching a terminal to debug an X server problem, for experienced users it inhibits them from easily debugging the problem. This Canonical implementation also had frustrated other users. However, with the forthcoming Ubuntu 8.10 release, it has received some much-needed improvements while making BulletProofX more simple.

The next version of VMware's flagship virtualization management software, VirtualCenter Server, will work with Linux and the iPhone, the company's chief technology officer has announced. The VMware VirtualCenter Server update will run on Linux and will be supplied as a virtual appliance, which is a ready-to-run virtual machine that has been preconfigured with all the necessary software, Stephen Herrod said in a keynote speech at the VMworld conference in Las Vegas Wednesday.

The is a clear pattern to open source's continuing rise. The first free software that was deployed was at the bottom of the enterprise software stack: GNU/Linux, Apache, Sendmail, BIND. Later, databases and middleware layers were added in the form of popular programs like MySQL and Jboss. More recently, there have been an increasing number of applications serving the top of the software stack, addressing sectors like enterprise content management, customer relationship management, business intelligence and, most recently, data warehousing.

Have you ever wanted to ssh to your Linux box that sits behind NAT? Now you can with reverse SSH tunneling. This document will show you step by step how to set up reverse SSH tunneling. The reverse SSH tunneling should work fine with Unix like systems.

55,000 Sugar/GNU/Linux XO machines are being shipped every month to kids all over the world. This is a generation getting ready to break the bonds of digital dependencies and building a commons for themselves on free and open source software and open content and standards. In the meantime, Microsoft announced a pilot study to run Windows XP on these very machines.

Dirac is a video codec data compression technique first developed by the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) that is under Mozilla Public License Version 1.1.

You may not know this, but Albert Einstein wore an editor's hat at Encyclopedia Britannica, as did George Bernard Shaw and more than 80 Nobel laureates and Pulitzer Prize winners. But it's that other encyclopedia, the online one, where vandals and anonymous editors allegedly run rampant, that's been getting all the attention lately.

The Hanlin eReader V3 from Tianjin Jinke Electronics out of China claims to provide a month of use between battery charges. By then 10,000 pages of reading should have been possible – provided you have the requisite time and patience.

Thin clients reduce hardware costs, offer added security by stripping away storage options, and ease management tasks by storing all configurations on a centralized server. Citrix provides a good solution and is a dominant player in this arena with Citrix Presentation server, but that comes at a price -- about $1,000 for five concurrent connections and about $200 to $300 for each additional concurrent client connection. However, taking the thin client route does not have to be that expensive: openThinClient is an open source thin client server that is absolutely free.

Nokia has revealed that the next version of its Maemo Internet-tablet operating system will support 3G cellular connectivity. Maemo is the platform used in the Finnish manufacturer's Internet-tablet series, the latest iteration of which was the the N810. On Wednesday, Nokia's open source chief Dr Ari Jaaksi told the audience at an Open Source In Mobile (OSIM) event in Berlin that Maemo 5 would include support for high-speed packet access (HSPA), a standard sometimes described as 'super-3G'.

With 1.4 billion people connected, the Internet is the greatest collaborative network that mankind has experienced. One of the consequences of the growth of this network is a shift in the way knowledge is being created and distributed. As we move to an interconnected world, the balance of power is shifting from old, proprietary models of knowledge creation to the open source model that emphasizes collaboration and sharing. From management gurus to consulting firms to leading business schools, everyone is taking note of this new phenomenon that goes by various names like ‘Collaborative Innovation,’ ‘Open Innovation,’ or ‘Distributed Co-creation.’

Linux Firefox users can say a eulogy for EULA (End User License Agreement). After much pressure, Mozilla is removing the EULA from the Firefox welcome screen on Linux distributions, according to a recent Mozilla blog by Harvey Anderson, VP and general counsel of Mozilla.

OpenOffice.org is in an unenviable place. Office suites -- word processors, spreadsheets, presentations and the ilk -- are utilitarian, complex bundles of software. They are a necessity of modern life, used daily by individuals and businesses all over the world. It isn't that people take them for granted. People don't consider them much at all. It has been a long time since I've had any feelings whatsoever about an office suite. There have been developments in office software that have been innovative, such as online document creation. And though useful, I still can't honestly say that I've been enthusiastic about (or, since Clippy was retired, repulsed by) any office application.

Not that anything approaching brain-surgery-level thinking was in any way involved here, but I figured out why and how it's easy to get paragraphs to automatically indent when writing in the Geany text editor. First of all, it's not called automatic tabbing or paragraph inentation. The correct term for what I'm enjoying so much is "auto-indentation," and it can be turned on and off under the Document menu in Geany.

As a Linux evangelist, I find myself in an interesting quandary. There are many new netbooks being sold with Linux pre-installed, but often the way Linux is installed is not what I’m used to seeing. I’m not sure if that’s a good thing or a bad thing. I understand the reasoning for custom interfaces, but it has some disadvantages. Love it or hate it, as a Linux community we have to be able to handle these things gracefully, or we lose all the potential impact we gain with pre-installed Linux.

Here's a little something to finish the week off and tie up some loose ends. You may have noticed in our Perl script to maximize guaranteed matches in any give number pool that we did all of our work using permutations, which we then went through the trouble of sorting and removing duplicates. Probably a few people out there were thinking: "Why permutations if 1,2,3 and 3,1,2 are going to be considered equal? Isn't that just a bunch of extra work?" The answers to those questions are "why not" and "yes" ;)