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One of the reasons the Ubuntu project is doing so well is that it puts a cleaner, slightly more polished face on what starts out as Debian. The new user doesn't know that Ubuntu pulls a lot of packages from Debian Unstable. Instead, they think of the Canonical-run distribution as "a Linux for the rest of us." Sure, marketing is involved, but at the core, Ubuntu is a fairly solid system -- mostly because it's based on Debian.

In the tech business the name Red Hat refers specifically to the publicly traded Linux vendor Red Hat that has been in business since 1995. There is however another Red Hat, that seems to come up in my Google News alerts for the term 'Red Hat'.

Five years from now, software historians will point to April 24, 2008, as the start of the Ubuntu Server revolution. Mainstream IT users don't know it yet, but the revolution has really begun. Here are five reasons why.

To the developers at OLPC, and the tireless volunteer community contributors unsettled by Nicholas’ plans — remember that no matter what happens, your work has not been for naught. Far from it. You brought the smiles to children’s faces in Escuela No. 109 in Florida, Uruguay. Your work astounded me with the results, after little more than half a year, in the mountains of Arahuay, Peru. Bryan Berry’s team is kicking ass on establishing a pilot in Nepal because of your work. And if you haven’t read the linked articles yet, now’s the time. Nothing can take away the real, palpable impact you’ve already had on children’s lives.

If there appears to be more interest in the release of Ubuntu 8.04 (Hardy Heron) than the average distribution, I think I should take some of the blame. Last month, a piece which I authored about what I perceived to be the significance of the release commanded extraordinary interest. And thereafter I noticed a spate of something in the nature of copycat pieces springing up all over the web - with no attribution at all.

MySQL Query Browser, one of the open source MySQL GUI tools from MySQL AB, is used for building MySQL database queries visually. In MySQL Query Browser, you build database queries using just your mouse—click, drag and drop!

LXer Feature: 25-Apr-2008

The html form can be an effective means of allowing screened content onto a web site. My focus is upon trusted members that need to deposit articles and news. Moreover, this route is designed to circumvent restricted environments that do not allow them logging directly onto the site. While security is certainly an issue, my suggestions will be limited in scope.

The Apache-licensed GChart utility lets you quickly generate nice-looking charts on your Web site. GChart is implemented with the Google Web Toolkit (GWT), which we introduced recently. To install GChart, just extract the distribution zip file. You can work with GChart in your own GWT applications by using it in Eclipse. You first have to tell Eclipse where to find the extracted gchart.jar file and modify your GWT module file to include GChart. These last two setups are described in detail in GChart's installation instructions.

This document describes how to get the NetGear WG311 wireless PCI card to work under Ubuntu Linux using Ndiswrapper and wpasupplicant software with WPA / WPA2 encryption.

In early February, Sun Microsystems had released a second preview release of Project Indiana. For those out of the loop, Project Indiana is the codename for the project led by Ian Murdock at Sun that aims to push OpenSolaris on more desktop and notebook computers by addressing the long-standing usability problems of Solaris. We were far from being impressed by Preview 2 as it hadn't possessed any serious advantages over a GNU/Linux desktop that would interest normal users. However, with the release of OpenSolaris 2008.05 "Project Indiana" coming up in May, Sun Microsystems has today released a final test copy of this operating system. Our initial experience with this new OpenSolaris release is vastly better than what we had encountered less than three months ago when last looking at Project Indiana.

Brazil's Ministry of Education ("MEC") is installing Linux in labs used by 52 million schoolchildren, reports KDE developer Mauricio Piacentini. Piacentini's blog post describes MEC's "Linux Educacional 2.0" as "a very clean Debian-based distribution, with KDE 3.5, KDE-Edu, KDE-Games, and some tools developed by the project."

"HAMMER is going to be a little unstable as I commit the crash recovery code," began DragonFly BSD creator Matthew Dillon, adding, "I'm about half way through it." He went on to list what's left for crash recovery to work with HAMMER, his new clustering filesystem, "I have to flush the undo buffers out before the meta-data buffers; then I have to flush the volume header so mount can see the updated undo info; then I have to flush out the meta-data buffers that the UNDO info refers to; and, finally, the mount code must scan the UNDO buffers and perform any required UNDOs."

So, Microsoft gives customers of now defunct MSN Music a final farewell kick in the teeth by pulling the plug on any future downloads or license activations. Your existing music will work until the authorized PC dies, after which it’s back to the store to repurchase the music. As of August 31st, we will no longer be able to support the retrieval of license keys for the songs you purchased from MSN Music or the authorization of additional computers.

Douglas Wightman, Director of Software Engineering at Cluster Resources, Inc., will present a technical session on Moab’s Energy-Saving and Green Computing Solutions for Data Centers and HPC Environments at the 9th LCI International Conference on High-Performance Clustered Computing, to be held at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications, University of Illinois, Urbana, Illinois, April 29 through May 1, 2008.

Financial and ERP applications are arguably the last bastion of proprietary software giants, but the Kuali Foundation wants to eliminate those remaining barriers to open source enterprise systems, at least in the educational realm. Kuali is a nonprofit collection of colleges, universities, commercial companies, and consultants who hope to "bring the proven functionality of legacy applications to the ease and universality of online services." Kuali's first project, Kuali Financial Systems, is already working on its 3.0 release, scheduled for the end of this year.

The PolishLinux article goes through multiple WhereIsIt alternatives for GNU/Linux like: GTKtalog, CdCat, Kat, Katalog and GWhere. For those interested, one more read is recommended: Tellico: manage your collection of CDs, coins and… wines.

Following last week's release of Phoronix Test Suite 0.3.0 and the 0.3.1 hot-fix, a surprising amount of changes have wound up in this week's development release known as version 0.4.0. In fact, there are 21 major changes in this new release not counting general development work and minor bug fixes. Among the changes are new test profiles, a number of new PTS options, PTS External Dependencies support for new Linux distributions, reworking how results are saved, and the graphs are now rendered locally when saving the results.

YouTube is a very popular web service that allows people to share video content online. Although YouTube and other streaming video websites satisfy many users, you may have reasons to create your own streaming video website. Perhaps you work for a company that wants a more professional face on their media. Or, you may want more control over exactly how your videos are presented.

I was left without the GRUB bootloader. In order to restore GRUB, I started with the Debian Lenny business-card CD in the "rescue" mode. All I want to do is reinstall GRUB, and I'm being asked all kinds of questions about my drives, how I want them formatted, waiting for the base system to install ... I got out of there quick. I didn't want to screw up my current Lenny install, which I'm actually relying on heavily at the moment.

gpgdir uses GNU Privacy Guard (GnuPG) to encrypt and decrypt files or a directory tree. You could accomplish the same objective by tarring the filesystem up and then encrypting the tar.gz file with GnuPG, but then you would still have to shred or wipe every file in the original directory tree. With gpgdir the whole tree is encrypted in one command.