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Earth Hour aside, 2008 may mark the year of "lights out" for power hungry computers. The gPC sold at Wal*mart and the Asus Eee PC led the way, both running Linux of course. The trend began in 2007 when we were introduced to the Koolu PC: I test drove a Koolu at the Ontario Linux fest last year and I was impressed with its speed and graphics capability.

"No cute April 1st shenanigans, just a regular -rc release that happened to come up today because I was waiting for the input layer oops-fixes to be ready and tested," began Linus Torvalds, announcing the 2.6.25-rc8 kernel on April 1st. "The big thing that is actually *noticeable* to most people is that this should fix the two top regressions. The other thing that bit a number of people and is now fixed (and that also probably often showed up as a suspend/resume regression) was some 'struct device' lifetime changes that broke the input layer. Thanks to people who debugged that one."

There is a new release of Mozilla Weave out this week, offering the promise of improved core synchronization and responsiveness. Mozilla Weave is an open source Mozilla Labs effort that debuted back in December of 2007 as an attempt to make Mozilla a platform play utilizing a Mozilla online services backend to store and synchronize data.

Just because OpenOffice.org Basic is designed to automate mundane tasks doesn't mean that you must use it only for serious work. It's a programming language after all, and nothing stops you from using it to write something fun. Today we'll use it write a simple game where you have to guess a word, a letter at a time, from among words you've stored in a Base database. Although this is not a particularly sophisticated game, it contains a couple of string manipulation techniques and a clever trick for picking a random record from a database, which you might find useful when writing your own macros.

A deal struck by government CIO John Suffolk and the Cabinet Office could save the public sector billions of pounds by supplying networked, supported PCs for around half the typical price. Suffolk said the Cabinet Office had cut the total cost of ownership for PCs by half, compared with the Gartner benchmark price of £2,000 per PC. The Gartner benchmark is widely used in the public and private sectors for pricing PCs. If just £100 a year were saved on every PC used by the UK's three to four million public servants, the annual savings would be at least £3bn over 10 years.

[Note that these PC's come with OpenOffice.org and not MS-Office. - Sander]

Prognosticators perennially say Linux is on the verge of gaining desktop traction, yet Linux PCs still represent less than 2 percent of the market. This time, though, there's actually evidence of momentum. While the best features in Vista require expensive top-notch configurations, one of the hottest segments of the industry involves inexpensive computers.

It’s almost 8 PM on a Tuesday night, and the lecture hall here at Virginia Tech University is filled nearly to capacity. The students – many of them computer science majors – have come to hear Richard Stallman, the grand forefather of GNU/Linux. The crowd is chatty and seems in a good mood. The Web page advertising this event referred to Stallman as a “legend,” and surely he’s influenced software development. He launched the Free Software Foundation way back in 1985, and led the drafting of the most recent GPL. He tends to provoke strong opinions among admirers and detractors alike, but no matter: Stallman is a tireless Free Software promoter, and he always makes his opinion known.

Linux represents 15 percent of the smartphone market, but that figure should grow considerably, says a market research report. The study, from Strategy Analytics, found that Motorola will continue to drive the growth for mobile Linux, along with Google. More than 25 million Linux-based cellphones have shipped to date, says Strategy Analytics. That figure represents 15 percent of the smartphone market, compared to Symbian's 50 percent and Windows Mobile's 18 percent.

Some people are suspicious about the growing power of Google - and some are downright upset. In the latter category we have bloggers Fabrizio Capobianco and Russell Beattie. They claim that Google is deliberately trying to slow the adoption of the Affero General Public License (AGPL) through not making it a choice for open source projects hosted by the Google Code public repository. Google in turn says they're just trying to combat license proliferation. Who's right in this he-said she-said argument?

The latest release of the GNOME desktop environment includes a number of significant architectural enhancements and new applications that offer increased power and usability. Released after six months of intensive development, GNOME 2.22 will be included in Ubuntu 8.04 and Fedora 9, which are scheduled for release in April. This article will examine many of the new features and programs included in GNOME 2.22 and illuminate how the changes and improvements impact the overall user experience. We will also provide some insight into some of the new architectural features and demonstrate how they can be leveraged by third-party software developers.

Amanda is the most popular open source backup and recovery software in the world, protecting more than half a million servers and desktops running various versions of Linux, UNIX, BSD, Mac OS X and Microsoft Windows operating systems. Amanda allows system administrators to set up a centralized backup server to back up multiple hosts to a tape- or disk-based storage system. Amanda development community espouses a relatively conservative development philosophy, which is a must-have feature for backup software! Amanda 2.6.0 was released on April 1st 2008 (no this is not a joke!). Amanda 2.6.0 represents a huge step forward in Amanda's evolution - improving ease of installation and configuration, security, and scalability. Furthermore, this release makes Amanda a platform to develop advanced backup and archiving applications and makes it easier for developers to contribute significant functionality.

So you got a brand spanking new Aastra 5xi phone that you want to connect to your Asterisk PBX. Implementing XML on your phones opens up a whole world of possibilities. I'll show you how to do it. These have all been tested on my Aastra 57i phone. It should work on the 55i as well. I am not sure what will work on other phones. Some things will and some things won't. This should work on trixbox and pbxinaflash as well but I haven't tested it. I may create my own RPM but for now I will show you how to set it up manually so you can get a better idea what is going on.

I would venture to say that I’m enjoying my time spent on Twitter. I’ve been using it as sort of a micro-blog that lets me connect with friends I’ve made on this site and keep my pulse on the collective tech industry. One of the things I noticed when looking at the website was that some people were posting updates from desktop clients, instead of the usual channels of web, IM, or txt message. I found the Twitter “Fan Application” website and sure enough, there’s 12 different Linux apps for me to try out. I can send tweets from inside emacs? Sounds geeky enough for me to investigate! Let’s take a look at what we have available for Linux:

From this point onwards, it is worth starting to argue in favour of ODF because of its merits rather than its ISO rubber stamp. Microsoft has single-handedly redefined the meaning and significance of ISO. It rendered ISO moot. The aggressive lobbying (and at times even well-documented bribery) has not gone unnoticed. It has gone well over the fine line and even involved bullying, smear campaigns, and libel.

Windows may boast the lion's share of the desktop education market, but the economic and technical benefits of open source software has seen many schools and education institutions implement various flavours of Linux across their desktops and server back-ends. In a two-part series, Computerworld investigates the role of Linux and open source software in education institutions in Australia and North America. In this, Part 1, the technology co-ordinator and network support technician from two large school districts in Canada and the US explain why Linux and other open source software is the plat du jour on their education menu. The institutions Computerworld spoke to are linked through School Forge, an open forum that unifies independent organisations that advocate, use, and develop open resources for education.

Why are search engines so fast? They farm out the job to multiple processors. Each task is a team effort, some of them involving hundreds, or even thousands, of computers working in concert. As more businesses and researchers shift complex data operations to clusters of computers known as clouds, the software that orchestrates that teamwork becomes increasingly vital. The state of the art is Google's in-house computing platform, known as MapReduce. But Google is keeping that gem in-house. An open-source version of MapReduce known as Hadoop is shaping up to become the industry standard.

Why, in the midst of a major Windows Home Server push, would HP introduce a little Linux-based NAS at half the price? And why would HP make the $300 Media Vault mv2120 so full featured and easy that its $600-and-up MediaSmart Servers look A) too bulky B) too expensive C) too overloaded D) all of the above? Is HP telling Microsoft there's no need for Windows Home Server, especially in light of its recent troubles? Or is HP saying that WHS is nice, but it'd be nicer if it was actually priced as an accessory? Whether the new Media Vault is a lurch away from Microsoft's gravitational pull, or whether it's a placeholder until Redmond can come up with a formula for $300 WHS boxes, it's a pretty cool little machine.

This April Fools’ Day it needs to be special. And by special, I mean truly EPIC. I’ve been brainstorming for weeks about what I would do, and I’ve had some real killer ideas that would unfortunately fall flat on their face during execution. One idea I had was to bridge the #emacs and #vim internet chat rooms with clones that relayed messages from one room into another, one clone per person. When I saw there was 250+ people in each room, I figured it would be nearly impossible to pull off without a lot of help - someone would notice all the clones and it would be over. Then a stroke of genius struck me: For this April Fools’ day, I’ll call Microsoft to help me uninstall Linux. Yes, that’s right.

LinuxCertified,Inc. a leading provider of Linux training, will offer weekend Linux system administration bootcamp on April 12th - 13th, 2008 in South Bay (CA). This workshop is designed for busy information technology professionals and is designed to cover the most important Linux administration areas.

Programming problems can be solved using multiple solutions. Discover the first approach in a four part series for creating an Asynchronous JavaScript plus XML weather badge, a reusable widget that's easily embedded on any Web page.