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Sysreport is a diagnostic utility. It collects information about the running system, which is used for Red Hat Support to analyze current problems with the system. While sysreport is generally considered non-invasive, diagnostic utilities should always be run with caution.

LXer Feature: 10-Dec-2007 Back in 1999 I remember the first PC entered our house coming preloaded with Windows 98. One of the things I liked about it was the defragmentation screen where blocks presenting 'datablocks' on the harddrive were moving over the screen for almost eternally. I remember at that time it seemed like a logical maintenance requirement for any filesystem.

However, when I started using Linux four years later, I was told that with Linux I didn't need to defragment my filesystems anymore, since Linux filesystems don't get fragmented in first place. At that time it left me puzzled, but after a few years of using Linux without defragmenting my filesystems - and without any problems! - it seemed defragmentation was something antique. Nonetheless I still wondered how on earth it was possible the 100k+ files in Gentoo's portage system - updated every time I synchronize the portage tree - didn't fragment my filesystem. Or was my filesystem fragmented and did I not know?

Only recently, I found a script that is actually able to put numbers to all this gut-feelings, and the results were quite surprising in my opinion.

The Linux Phone Standards (LiPS) Forum has announced the completion of the LiPS Release 1.0 specifications, aimed at setting up interoperable standards for the development of applications on Linux-based cellphones.

"That is why Microsoft is handing out $100m checks to studios just embrace the HD DVD and not the leading, and superior Blu-ray," he continued. "They want confusion in the market until they perfect the digital downloads. Time will tell and you will see the truth."

SourceForge has launched a free online marketplace for buying and selling service and support for open source software (OSS). Building on its well-established position as a free software distribution and development site, the site has already attracted more than 600 service listings, further undermining the old argument that one can't get support for OSS.

In 1980, Microsoft was a small software vendor that had built its business primarily on downsizing computer languages created for mainframes to a point where they could be used to program the desktop computers that were then coming to market. In that year, its total revenues were $7,520,720, and BASIC, its first product, was still its most successful. In contrast, Apple computer had sales of $100 million in the same year, and launched the largest public offering since the Ford Motor Company had itself gone public in 1956. And ten years later? What a difference a decade can make.

A pseudonym by the name of "Paul Murphy" over at zdnet blogs writes a pretty poor FUD piece about Linux/Linux users, and creates a straw man argument using linux.org. This article by HackFUD debunks and tears the article apart.

The world of Linux moves quickly with new releases every day. Here are a couple of the releases that caught our eye this past week: OpenSuse 11.0 alpha and Geubuntu Luna Nova.

Nokia has filed a submission with the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) objecting to the use of Ogg Theora as the baseline video standard for the Web. Ogg is an open encoding scheme (On2, the company that developed it, gave it and a free, perpetual unlimited license to its patents to the nonprofit Xiph foundation), but Nokia called it "proprietary" and argued for the inclusion of standards that can be used in conjunction with DRM, because "from our viewpoint, any DRM-incompatible video related mechanism is a non-starter with the content industry (Hollywood). There is in our opinion no need to make DRM support mandatory, though."

Although most Eee PC owners are satisfied with their $350 to $399 USD purchases, they have been faced with the prospect of voiding their warranty by simply removing two screws from the bottom access panel to upgrade the memory. ASUS covered one of the screws holding the access panel with a yellow "WARRANTY VOID IF REMOVED" warranty sticker. As pointed out by Cliff Biffle, this action violated the Magnuson-Moss Warranty Act with regards to "unacceptable tie-ins."

Cebu is scheduled to hold an international open source conference next year, following a visit from an open source advocate, the Cebu-based executive director of an information and communications technology group has said. Bonifacio Belen, executive director of the Cebu Educational Development Foundation for Information Technology (CEDF-IT), said the open source conference is slated for June 2008.

Addictive 3D games for Linux users to fill their time with. These games are really good and some have won awards or have been featured on magazines. Most are cross platform and all of them completely free. You don’t have to use ‘Wine’ to be able to play as they come with Linux installers.

Google has a preview release of Picasa 2.7 for Linux. The previous version launched last year didn't include the features from Picasa 2.5+ for Windows (like the Picasa Web integration), so this is a good opportunity to add these features to Linux. Here's what is new in Picasa 2.7 for Linux:

The best innovations tend to be cheap and disruptive. Hand in hand as they're usually found, these characteristics go some way to explaining why I like the EeePC (Asus's new laptop) so much. The other reasons are obvious, it's small, it's light, it has WiFi, Firefox and Open Office, and judging by the reactions of those who saw Paul and I with them at Bar Camp Leeds, it's cool enough for everyone to want one!

Tristan Nitot, president of Mozilla Europe, talks to ZDNet U.K. about the security of Firefox and Internet Explorer, online privacy, and the future of open source.

Today, you will learn how to install Ubuntu Gutsy (as a second operating system) on your PlayStation 3 gaming console. For those of you who think for a second (and who are scared) that this will replace their PS3 operating system, well you guys are wrong, because this will NOT erase your PlayStation 3 native operating system (called XMB) and it will run as an alternative OS on your PS3 console. Ready? Are you excited? Let's go!

Wide-screen monitors are great for productivity, but they have a dark side, too: they tempt you into keeping dozens of Firefox tabs open at the same time. Before you know it, the page titles in a long row of tabs become indistinguishable. But the ChromaTabs extension has a novel solution to the problem: it renders each tab in a different color -- a unique color for each site that remains the same on every visit.

Welcome to this year's 50th issue of DistroWatch Weekly! One of the indications of Ubuntu's popularity is the number of derivatives based on Canonical's operating system, available for every taste and purpose. Last week, two such distributions were added to the DistroWatch database - Mythbuntu, a project delivering MythTV in an easy-to-setup package, and Geubuntu, an eye-catching distro featuring the latest Enlightenment window manager. Read our exclusive review of the latter. Also in this edition: openSUSE kickstarts the development of version 11.0 with the first alpha release, a link to article discussing the importance of "libre" distributions, information about a free online RHCE study guide, and some observations about the new ASUS Eee PC. Happy reading!

Thanks to LXer for republishing this. Due to some information that was published in the initial report, we had to pull the blog down until we got legal clarification and that we were sure that a good deed was not going to get punished. This is a tragedy for this family and anything you can do to help is appreciated far beyond this families ability to express it. - h

The Aleutia is a small $1000 Linux based low power consumption computer designed to run on a solar panel in areas were there is no power. The problem is, the Eee PC with a third-party solar panel has better specs and costs less.