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I started this blog post when I was on paternity leave with my first child, thinking I'd get it finished over a few days in my spare time. Fool. As any of you with children know, there is no spare time with a newborn. So, here I am now, having lived with - and used when I can - an Ubuntu Linux laptop for the last couple of months. I've been trying it out alongside my usual laptop (Sony Vaio running Windows XP), my new MacBook Pro, and a Vista notebook that we also have in the house.

CodeWeavers, developer of software products that allow Mac and Linux users to run popular Windows software, has released CrossOver Mac 7.0 and CrossOver Linux 7.0. Both version of CrossOver 7.0 include support for Microsoft Office 2007, including Outlook 2007, newer versions of Quicken, and the Adobe CS and CS2 line of products, in particular Photoshop.

An amazing self-replicating 3D printer that is being made available under a GNU General Public Licence. If you have a RepRap machine, you can make another and give it to a friend... How cool is that?

I've heard through the grapevine that Oracle and Red Hat are in the midst of...something. Some suggest acquisition. Others insist partnership. Still others speculate that absolutely nothing is going on at all.

ASUS boards P5K Premium/WIFI, P5K3 Deluxe, P5E3 Deluxe have as second NIC integrated on the board RTL8110SC. RTL8110SC (vs Marvell Yukon) is GLDv3 NIC and may be used for Solaris xVM PV and HVM DomUs creation at Solaris (Nevada) Dom0. However, straight forward attempt to install SNV DomU in DHCP mode will time out at DHCP request phase due to failure checksum offloading on Realtek 8110SC.

Strange but true: an Australian Linux powered robot has beaten off stiff competition from a Dutch guitar playing robot and a Finnish robotic pianist to win a major science competition...

ColdFusion 8 is arguably one of the most significant releases of the product since ColdFusion MX (6.0) first graced our servers in 2002. The release brings with it long awaited image manipulation tags and functions. Built-in AJAX integration makes it easier to create "Web 2.0" applications. Compared to previous releases, it's also wicked fast. Given the significance of these new features, it may be easy to overlook some of the enhancements that have found their way into ColdFusion 8. In this article by Charlie Griefer, we will look into the some of the enhancements to existing features and functionality that you may have missed.

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The OpenSUSE Project has achieved a new release of its free desktop and server distribution. OpenSUSE 11.0 features a redesigned installer, KDE 4.0, GNOME 2.2.2, and the flashy Compiz Fusion 3D window manager, and over 200 new features.

Matthew Dillon continues to make significant progress on his HAMMER clustering filesystem for DragonFly BSD. He labeled the latest release 56c, noting that it, "represents an additional significant improvement in performance, [also including] bug fixes and most of the final media changes." A significant improvement in write performance was obtained by making the filesystem block size automatically increase from 16K to 64K when a file grows to larger than 1 MB. One remaining media change is required to optimize mtime and atime storage, at which point HAMMER will go into testing and bug fixing mode.

What started as an effort to package software not included in Red Hat Enterprise Linux has grown to be the most interesting part of Fedora for some ISVs. Extra Packages for Enterprise Linux, or EPEL, is not a mass rebuild of all Fedora software for Enterprise Linux. It is a disciplined set of packages with a maintenance philosophy that aligns with Enterprise Linux.

openSUSE 11.0 was one of the most anticipated Linux distro releases of 2008. Despite a few bugs in the final code, which was released yesterday, it was worth the wait. The openSUSE version of KDE 4 alone is worth the download, and the improvements to the software manager make customizing a pleasure. I used the 4.3GB DVD version, but live CD versions are also available. In either, the first thing you might notice is the beautiful new installer. The layout is similar to that of previous versions, with a large interactive window and a progress list to the right, but with an elegant new color scheme and stylish graphics. And the beauty is not only skin deep -- there are a lot of changes under the hood in this release.

Microsoft recently survived a bruising battle with the open source community over the ratification of Office Open XML (OOXML) document format as an ISO standard, a process that is now facing a number of appeals. The company also recently announced support for the competing Open Document Format in its forthcoming products. Here Paulo Ferreira, Microsoft South Africa's Platform Strategy Manager, talks to Tectonic about the future of XML, Microsoft's relationship with the open source community and why standards are important.

I was offered the chance to have an initial look at Novell's latest Linux offering openSUSE 11. It's a distribution I've tried in previous versions but often had trouble settling on. It seems very popular on enterprise desktops along with Red Hat. I got a copy of the KDE4 LiveCD and gave it a spin.

Red Hat has a desktop Linux plan. It’s just not the same desktop Linux plans that everyone else has. As Jim Whitehurst told me in an informal gathering of Red Hat executives and press, “There are companies that sell hundreds of products for millions of dollars and there are companies that sell millions of products for hundreds of dollars. Guess which kind of company Red Hat is?”

If you're used to a "standard" *NIX shell you may not be familiar with bash's array feature. Although not as powerful as similar constructs in the P languages (Perl, Python, and PHP) and others, they are often quite useful. Bash arrays have numbered indexes only, but they are sparse, ie you don't have to define all the indexes.

One of the things I both love and hate about my job is getting assigned new projects. They can be about anything and everything. A few months back I was given an assignment to create some chroot jails for a group of customers so that they could securely upload files with sftp. The requirement was that the customers needed to be able to upload file, but in a secure and private way. Customer One should not be able to see Customer Two's files, for example. And neither customer should be able to browse the filesystem of the server. I was also asked to define a process whereby our support staff could add new jails as needed.

Learn, step-by-step, how to configure and encrypt the built-in Wi-Fi network that comes with the Cell Broadband Engine-based Sony PlayStation 3. And, as a little bonus, discover 16 quick steps that explain how to switch from a wireless network back to a wired network on the PS3.

Speaking on the first day of the Linux specialist's annual user conference in Boston, Whitehurst said his company need to work on its approach to "mundane" issues such as its own internal systems and managing customer records. "There is still a lot we need to do around execution. One thing I have heard from customers and partners over the last few months is that we are basically kind of tough to do business with — great technology but not necessarily the easiest company to do business with," he said.

AMD has now evolved their Linux support by taking it a large step further. AMD is in the process of pushing new high-end features into their Linux driver -- such as Multi-GPU CrossFire support -- and with the ATI Radeon HD 4850 they have even begun showing off Tux, the Linux mascot, on their product packaging and providing Linux drivers on their product CDs!

Novell announced the official release of OpenSUSE 11 yesterday. It's the latest version of the community-driven Linux distribution and includes significant new features like the KDE 4 desktop environment and the PulseAudio sound server. We tested both the GNOME and KDE flavors of OpenSUSE 11 by installing from the Live CD images. These work reasonably well and provide an installation experience comparable to that of Ubuntu and Fedora.