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Asustek Computer Inc. on Friday confirmed that it will launch the Eee PC 900 in the U.S. on May 12, and will set $549 as the list price for the new ultralight notebook. The Eee PC 900, which the Taipei-based computer maker unveiled last Tuesday, can be configured with either Microsoft Corp.'s Windows XP Home or the open-source Linux. The price for both configurations, said an Asustek spokesman, is identical: $549. But there are differences. Users who purchase an Eee PC 900 with Linux, however, receive a laptop that boasts 20GB of flash memory-based storage space. Customers who opt for Windows XP, meanwhile, end up with a machine equipped with only 12GB of solid-state storage.

Well, it looks like Richard Stallman, the father of FOSS, is going to have to cut his hair and get a suit because the warmed-over hippie movement he’s been leading is no longer the radical anti-software establishment counter-culture his rag-tag army fancies it is. Nope, it IS the software establishment.

[Yes, I know. It's Maureen O'Gara on SYS-CON. I can't believe my eyes either... - Sander]

We have already discussed how to install mail server with postfix+Devcot+SASL +Squirrel Mail in this article we will see how to add spam filter for postfix mail server.Apache SpamAssassin is an extensible email filter that is used to identify spam. Once identified, the mail can then be optionally tagged as spam for later filtering.

LXer Feature: 20-Apr-2008

In this week's Roundup we have lots of Linux and Open Source news including how Sun has started working on a free video codec, Ken Starks comes "back from the mountain", The missing five-minute Linux manual for morons, A new spin on Xfce and the one place Novell can beat Microsoft along and other MS related articles. Plus, we have Blue Jeans Cable's response to Monster Cable, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective Linux Users and in our FUD section we have Seagate killing Linux support, Linux wanting to destroy things and how Open Source is costing the IT vendors $60 billion. Enjoy!

PostgreSQL is a powerful, open source relational database system. It has more than 15 years of active development and a proven architecture that has earned it a strong reputation for reliability, data integrity, and correctness. It runs on all major operating systems, including Linux, UNIX (AIX, BSD, HP-UX, SGI IRIX, Mac OS X, Solaris, Tru64), and Windows.

Hardy Heron, the latest version of Ubuntu, arguably the world’s most well known version of Linux, is set to be released in a mere four days. Keen as I am on – shock horror – Windows Vista, and less of a shock, Mac OS X, I await the release of Ubuntu’s newest bird with great anticipation.

This tutorial shows how you can set up a Mandriva One 2008 Spring (Mandriva 2008.1) desktop (with the KDE desktop environment) that is a full-fledged replacement for a Windows desktop, i.e. that has all the software that people need to do the things they do on their Windows desktops. The advantages are clear: you get a secure system without DRM restrictions that works even on old hardware, and the best thing is: all software comes free of charge.

While the ability to create a LiveUSB stick from the LiveCD media has been a feature of Fedora for a while, a new feature in Fedora 9 is the ability to have persitant data. I originally thought that the persistant data feature was only for user data but as it turns out it applies to the complete system... so not only can you store your documents... you can also install updates, new applications, create accounts, and save settings. There is nothing special you have to do... it works just like a hard drive would.

A couple of months ago I got a couple of wonderful birthday presents. My lovely geeky girlfriend got me two Western Digital 500 GB SATA 3.0 drives, which were promptly supplemented with a 3ware 9550XS 4-port hardware RAID card. Immediately I came up with the idea for this article. I had just read up on mdadm software RAID so I though it would be perfect to bench mark the hardware RAID against the software RAID using all kinds of file systems, block sizes, chunk sizes, LVM settings, etcetera. Or so I though… As it turns out, my (then) limited understanding of RAID and some trouble with my 3ware RAID cards meant that I had to scale back my benchmark quite a bit. And to top it off I discovered some nasty problems with 3ware 9550 RAID cards under Linux that quickly made me give up on hardware RAID. I still ended up testing various filesystems using different blocksizes and workloads on an mdadm RAID 1 setup, so the results should still prove interesting.

We need a new conversation about infrastructure. That's what Linux, the Net, and half a million FOSS (Free and Open Source Software) applications require. Because they're all part of a new infrastructural system that cannot be explained in terms of the old one — especially since infrastructure itself is not well understood. Or rather that it is too well understood in a general way, though not in the specific.

The final release of Fedora 9 has been delayed by two weeks, so I thought I’d take this chance to look at what you can expect from Fedora 9 and why you should be excited!

There are many new and innovative features brewing within the X.Org development community right now -- among the many are Gallium3D, the TTM memory manager, and MPX (Multi-Pointer X) -- but one of the features that has risen towards the top of the list and delivers visible benefits to the end-user is kernel-based mode-setting. As implied by its name, kernel mode-setting involves moving the mode-setting code for video adapters from the user-space X server drivers into the Linux kernel. This may seem like an uninteresting topic for end-users, but having the mode-setting done in the kernel allows for a cleaner and richer boot process, improved suspend and resume support, and more reliable VT switching (along with other advantages). Kernel mode-setting isn't yet in the mainline Linux kernel nor is the API for it frozen, but Fedora 9 shipping next month will be the first major distribution carrying this initial support. In this article we're looking more closely at kernel mode-setting with the Intel X.Org driver as well as showing videos of kernel-based mode-setting in action.

I'm always using a mix of machines and OSes for my work, but until this week, my main "home" machine -- The $0 Laptop (Gateway Solo 1450) -- has been mostly used at home for a bit of Web browsing, testing Linux distributions, and my daughter's favorite educational games (gCompris, Childsplay, TuxPaint, Potato Guy). But this week I've needed to use the laptop a lot more while I'm in the office.

Bradley Kuhn is one of the founding team members of the Software Freedom Law Center, and a longtime advocate for the cause of Free Software. Many consider him one of the most influential voices in the worldwide FLOSS community. Kuhn, formerly the executive director of the Free Software Foundation, took some time recently to catch us up on his latest work.

Security with Apache is an important topic, of which SELinux is a part. However, the frustration that results in trying to manage SELinux and how it relates to an Apache Web Server is huge. Most of the time, administrators bail and shut down SELinux because they do not have the time to correctly configure the system. SELinux can be a key to good security for the Apache daemon. This tutorial with help you develop several skills that will provide some level of SELinux management for the Apache Web Server.

Well you know sometimes when you use an OS for as long as I have... One can get bored with it. Maybe it is just my personality but I was just sitting around the old computer the other day and well... I decided to upgrade Ubuntu 7.10 to the new beta release 8.04.

Since I put my workstation, which is at the same time the MythTV server / backend streamer for the family into a new case and added another TV card, I had some issues. I had read about udev already, but never actually cared much for it, not even to make rules for hot-pluggable stuff like USB sticks and so on. However, now I had to read, so this is what I did.

when I woke up today (after sleeping in for the first time with my new roll-top in front of my bedroom window) I was surprised & confused by a couple of "congratulations!" messages in my irc away-log. it took me a bit of time & coffee (& looking into my mailbox) to begin to realize that my Debian account had indeed been created while I was asleep. — in fact I guess I still haven't completely realized my new status as Debian Developer.

[So the wheels are turning once again for Debian - Steve]

The Ubuntu development team today made available a release candidate version of the soon-to-be-released Ubuntu 8.04, codenamed Hardy Heron. The release candidate is the final testing release of Hardy ahead of next week’s final release. What we like: A better selection of default desktop applications, much-improved CD and DVD burning interface and much-needed audio improvements. What we don’t like: Boot speed is still a little slow.

In 10 years, Luis Villa has seen his career expand side by side with free and open source software (FOSS). Starting as bugmaster at Ximian, one of the companies that shaped GNOME as we know it today, he has been a mid-level manager at Novell, the coordinator of testing with the GNOME project, and a frequent member of the GNOME Foundation Board. More recently, Villa has been a student at Harvard Law School. When he graduates, he hopes to use his knowledge of how FOSS and business interact to benefit both.