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The Ubuntu Live conference is still a few months away, but The VAR Guy has already booked his trip to the event -- and he expects to track these five trends at the conference.

Linux does many things to bring many people together. Often, the effects of such convergences are powerful. Larry Cafiero, an Editor for the Santa Cruz Sentinel, tells the story of how 2 people with absolutely nothing in common can find common ground for the greater good. A great read and indeed food for thought.

It sounds crazy to say this, but the XP-based version of the Eee PC 900 (the new version with the 8.9" screen) will actually be considerably -cheaper- than the Linux based version. At the official launch today, the company told journalists that "Microsoft has been a longstanding supporter of Asus" to explain the price discrepancy. And -- get this -- only the XP-based machine will be sold at mass-market retailers, while the Linux-based model will be consigned to computer stores.

Today was the first official day of JavaOne. I visited a couple of non-JBoss sessions that sounded really interesting, and they were–so now I share them with you. The first is about an improved web recommendation system, and the second is for improving collaboration with your off-site coworkers.

OpenSolaris, Sun’s open-source take on its Solaris operating system, has finally arrived. Some people, like Jason Perlow at ZDNet think that this is great news and that Sun’s latest operating system will give Linux a real challenge. Maybe it will, maybe it won’t. I’m inclined to doubt it simply because OpenSolaris has failed to develop a strong developer community. For more on that see Ted Ts’o, noted Linux developer and CTO of the Linux Foundation, blog posting, What Sun was trying to do with Open Solaris. T’so wasn’t playing OS religious wars, he was pointing out that while “OpenSolaris has been released under an Open Source license,” it doesn’t have “an Open Source development community.”

Experts have defended the Open Document Format standard against suggestions that its schema is broken, but the critic who highlighted the alleged flaws has defended his position. Alex Brown, a major contributor to the progress of the ODF's Microsoft-backed rival, OOXML, within the international standards process, carried out a "smoke test" last week, which he said showed the OpenOffice open-source application suite does not produce documents that conform to the ODF format--and also showed the schema defined in the OpenOffice standard is broken.

VMware Inc. today released a public beta for Fusion 2.0, virtualization software that lets Intel-based Macs run Windows, Linux and other operating systems. Fusion 2.0 also adds support for multiple monitors and makes it easier to switch from rivals' virtual machine programs, said the company. Multimonitor support is a first for Mac virtualization software, VMware claimed in a post to its company blog dedicated to Fusion. Its main competitor, Parallels Inc.'s flagship Parallels Desktop for Mac, lacks the feature.

Have a look at Linux kernel source from a bird's eye view. The Linux kernel is one of the most mysterious open source projects. There is a lot of documentation, however it is still a difficult subject to comprehend. The Interactive Linux kernel map is intended to help people gain an overview of the structure and interactions of the Linux Kernel. This approach is similar to classic operating system diagrams in which application and user space interfaces are at the top, hardware interfaces and drivers are at the bottom and separate functions are shown in vertical bars

Sun today announced the yet-to-launch JavaFX programming language will gather data on end-users activities to help developers monetize software, by selling ads for instance. The company's Project Insight will see "instrumentation" added to PCs, mobiles and Blu-ray devices that run JavaFX, which feed data back through a special data stream to a hosted service. Codenamed Project Hydrazine, the service is run by Sun for the benefit of third parties.

Yesterday, I wrote in a comment that indeed Sun's performance in 2003 in signing the agreement with SCO, highlighted in the trial testimony, was making it look really bad. The motive in doing it seemed to me to be not just to open source Solaris but to also hobble Linux and promote a competitive product instead, and in the ugliest way possible. And then, when they had to power to stand up to SCO and protect Linux end users, they failed to do so.

Ext4 is the latest in a long line of Linux file systems, and it's likely to be as important and popular as its predecessors. As a Linux system administrator, you should be aware of the advantages, disadvantages, and basic steps for migrating to ext4. This article explains when to adopt ext4, how to adapt traditional file system maintenance tool usage to ext4, and how to get the most out of the file system.

Thomas Beale, Chair of the openEHR Foundation Architecture Review Board (ARB) has posted a message describing some goals for the coming year. These include a vision, roadmap and strategies for the architecture and clinical modeling.

Google is spearheading a volunteer workforce it hopes will become the centralized authority for responding to security issues in open source software. oCERT, short for the open source computer emergency response team, will aim to remediate security vulnerabilities and exploits in a wide range of open source programs by coordinating communication among publishers. According to Google's security blog, the group "will strive to contact software authors with all security reports and aid in debugging and patching, especially in cases where the author, or the reporter, doesn't have a background in security."

Ubuntu 8.04 LTS (long-term support) launched on April 24th for desktops and servers. There is something for everyone in this version, but the LTS release will have particular appeal to enterprises. As one corporate user said to me, "I have been waiting for the release of Ubuntu 8.04, because I am using Ubuntu 6.06 on my company laptop and we have to install exclusively long term support releases." The LTS release assures a reliable upgrade paths twice a year with security updates maintained for a full five years.

Now that a solid foundation for the OpenSolaris project is in place, the real work of putting Sun and Solaris back into the center of the IT conversation can commence. It's been nearly three years since Sun Microsystems kicked off its OpenSolaris project by releasing most of the code that comprises its Solaris operating system under an open-source license. And yet, it's only just now, with the release of the first official distribution of OpenSolaris, that the project begins in earnest.

For many years, there has been a growing concern about the emergence of a “digital divide” between rich and poor. The idea is that people who don’t meet a certain threshold income won’t be able to afford the investment in computers and internet connectivity that makes further learning and development possible. They’ll become trapped by their circumstances. Under proprietary commercial operating systems, which impose a kind of plateau on the cost of computer systems, this may well be true. But GNU/Linux, continuously improving hardware, and a community commitment to bringing technology down to cost instead of just up to spec, has led to a new wave of ultra-low-cost computers, starting with the One Laptop Per Child’s XO. These free-software-based computers will be the first introduction to computing for millions of new users, and that foretells a much freer future. read more here

The comments on the single distro story got me thinking about what I want/need/use. I have been using Linux since before Bill Gates heard of it and my uses, needs and interests have changed over time. Ten or more years ago I was in the "I need to get Linux to do X" mode. That included a web server, an office network and a bunch of desktops—some for geeks but also some for the rest of the office including the shipping clerk and the receptionist.

From the presentation, you might imagine that Adobe's announcement of the Open Screen Project was major news. According to the news release, the project's goal is "to enable a consistent runtime environment" by relaxing some restrictions on the Flash format and releasing some specifications. However, in the free Flash community, the small group of developers dedicated to producing non-proprietary Flash tools, the reaction to the news was polite at best -- and serves as a much-needed reality check to the over-enthusiastic announcement.

Sun and OpenSolaris.org on Monday released the first publicly available version of the OpenSolaris operating system since work on the project began in 2005. The operasting system, which is a single distribution that can be used for desktop, server and HPC deployments, is based on the Solaris kernel and uses Sun's ZFS as the default file system.

Purchase a new PC or motherboard soon, and the chances are good that it will come with two built-in network interfaces -- either two Ethernet jacks or one Ethernet and one Wi-Fi. Tossing in a second adapter is an inexpensive way for the manufacturer to add another bullet point to the product description -- but what exactly are you supposed to do with it? If you are running Linux, you have several alternatives.