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Metropolitan Bank Group is a large conglomerate in Illinois, comprising 10 banks and $3 billion in assets. As Metropolitan acquired more banking interests, IT Director Tom Johnson needed to find a way to reduce costs and increase efficiency in the face of the company's rapid growth. The solution was a migration from Windows to Linux.

I've been shuttling CDs in and out of my Gateway Solo 1450 laptop, just seeing what works and how well. I've also been fiddling around with the BIOS settings, trying to get the CPU fan under control in both Linux and the various BSDs. A select few Linux kernels do this automatically ... most don't. I can control the fan with a cron job, but I've never, ever been able to do this with any version of BSD. Until today. For some reason, I ran DesktopBSD 1.6 as a live CD, and the fan fell silent, turning on at various intervals, then off.

Canonical chief Mark Shuttleworth has revealed the name of the next Ubuntu release - Meeky Meerkat. Er, well, it's really called Intrepid Ibex and will likely arrive in Oct. as Ubuntu 8.10. It sounds as if Intrepid Ibex will center on laptop features such a tool to switch automatically between Wi-Fi and dial-in services.

Seven years ago, Strathcona Baptist Girls Grammar School, which is situated in a suburb of Melbourne, took a step that made it stand out from other educational institutions. The school decided to adopt Linux on the desktop on a fairly large scale, with about 350 workstations being installed with the free operating system. The Linux era ended in December 2007. Today all the Linux machines are back to running Windows.

Adobe AIR is a cross-operating system runtime for delivering rich Internet applications on the desktop. Developers using Flex, Flash, HTML, JavaScript, and Ajax can easily build applications for the desktop using Adobe AIR. As of today there have only been releases of Adobe AIR for Windows and Mac but Adobe is committed to also delivering a version for Linux. The Adobe AIR team is now in the phase of development where they need a handful of additional testers to begin testing initial builds of AIR on Linux.

Combining multiple photographs taken at different exposures lets you create a single image with good highlight and shadow detail. Tone-mapping applications like Qtpfsgui are the traditional way to do this, but tone-mapping is slow, difficult to use, and can produce strange visual artifacts. A new tool on the scene is easier, faster, and produces nicer results: Enfuse.

Amazon.com offers a variety of web services to make building highly scalable web applications easier. One of those services is called the Simple Storage Service (S3). It provides a way to store and retrieve files (up to 5 GB each) on Amazon's distributed servers. S3 has both a SOAP and REST API. You can use the S3 REST API with only the native command line utilities installed by default in OS X Leopard and Linux.

Zenoss Core has been named a finalist in the Software & Information Industry Association's (SIIA) 23nd Annual CODiE Awards. Since 1986, The CODiE Awards have recognized outstanding achievement and vision in the software, digital information and education technology industries. Zenoss Core is an integrated open source IT management software solution that allows IT administrators to track the configuration, performance and health of their IT environment.

Everex's CloudBook aims to one-up the Asus Eee PC with a larger hard drive and a flashy new operating system. Along with our review of the CloudBook, we're taking a closer look by using this new UMPC to perform everyday activities from blogging to editing images to listening to music. Follow along with our CloudBook adventures.

I've taken a few days off from OpenBSD, and in the interim I ran the NetBSD live CD for the first time on the Gateway Solo 1450 (the $0 Laptop). Again, it looks great, but I'm so far from figuring out how to manage the CPU fan in any of the BSDs that I'm not optimistic about running any of them on this laptop. I wish it were different, but until the heavens open and the path forward is made much more clear, I'll stick to desktops (and my old 1999-era Compaq Armada pre-ACPI laptop) for BSD. During that time, I booted into Debian Lenny on the Gateway and installed 141 updates.

Asus struck technological gold with the Eee PC, a two-pound mini-dynamo that defied industry convention by packing a fully functional Linux-powered PC into a machine whose price shames even budget systems, but how does it stack up against more featured packed computers? LAPTOP assigned staff writer and office guinea pig Jeffrey Wilson to the task of answering this question by asking him to explore the ins and outs of this small wonder. Join him on his Eee PC adventure.

The Linux kernel has merged three hypervisors into its mainline tree, starting with KVM in 2.6.20, and continuing with Xen and lguest in the 2.6.23 release of the kernel. Hypervisors let users run multiple operating systems on a host system. Lguest is the simplest of the three in terms of usability and implementation, which makes it a good candidate for helping you learn how virtualization works.

It seems there is a disquieting trend in IT: concepts are getting steadily vaguer, and claims harder to verify. Take web services, for instance. The very name is disingenuous. They are services of a kind, but they don't have much to do with the web. Their key protocol is SOAP, which stands for Simple Object Access Protocol. Well, it is a protocol, all right. But it isn't simple, and it doesn't access objects.

Agave is a color palette selection tool used to pick design layouts for desktop themes, web site designs, icon creation, and much more. It simplifies the process of choosing colors by generating a palette based on an initial color selection according to the selected rule and color set. Supported color sets include GNOME Icon, Tango Icon, Web-Safe, and Visibone.

This is mainly a technology preview for those that are interested in the new ideas and technologies of the KOffice 2 series. The Alpha 6 release is a work in progress. This release introduces improvements in almost all the components as well as in the common infrastructure. All the applications saw big changes, both bugfixes and new features.

linux.conf.au has an interesting structure which differentiates it from most other events. Every year, a completely new set of organizers takes over the event, moves it to a new city, and puts its own stamp on it. They have a great deal of freedom in how they run LCA, but there is still a group of Linux Australia members and past organizers who keep an eye on things and help ensure that the event does not run into problems. The result is a conference which has a lot of fresh energy every year, but which is also reliably interesting. Many attendees consider it to be one of the best Linux events to be found anywhere in the world.

A decade from now, when high-tech historians retrace the history of Linux, they will identify February 2008 as a defining moment. It will be known as the month when Linux laptops made the leap from open source geeks to the consumer masses. Here's why, according to The VAR Guy.

Brasero will replace Serpentine as the CD-writing utility in the upcoming April release of Ubuntu 8.10 (code-named Hardy Heron). Brasero extends the functionality of Serpentine to include data CD and DVD projects, file integrity checking, and multisession support. Why replace Serpentine, a dead simple solution for burning audio CDs? It features tight integration into the GNOME Desktop Environment, with support for Rhythmbox playlists and drag and drop file management from Nautilus, as well as the ability to extract audio from video files.

The European Union yesterday announced that it will invest US$1 million in a study to find the best open source tools for use in Africa, Asia and Latin America. The grant of €703 000 was awarded to a consortium of 11 members, including Canonical, backers of Ubuntu Linix, and the University of the Western Cape.

There were other curious funds that SCO received throughout its lifetime, even when its main role was that of a plaintiff in court. These include court declarationan investment from BayStar, a venture capital firm. In a court declaration it emerged that Richard Emerson, a Microsoft employee, was involved in BayStar's investment in SCO. A BayStar representative later added: "Yes, Microsoft did introduce BayStar to SCO."