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Read this article and become a cluster design expert! Use a new tool from the aggregate.org to determine price and performance before you buy! Get a handle on everything from Ethernet cables, to GFLOPS, to power and cooling.

In any conference, there comes a time when one has to wonder what the people who do the talk scheduling were thinking. For lca2007, that moment came when your editor realized that the talks on OLPC (Jim Gettys), real [Dave Airlie] time (Ted Ts'o), and Nouveau were all scheduled together. Nouveau won out, but it was not an easy decision.

Before Vim 7.0 was released last May, I usually had six or seven xterms or Konsole windows open, each with a single Vim session in which I was editing a single file. This takes up a lot of screen space, and isn't very efficient. With Vim 7.0, users now have the option of using tabs within Vim. With Vim's tab features you can consolidate all your sessions into one window and move between files more easily.

One longstanding Unix tradition is best summed up thus: "Write programs that do one thing and do it well. Write programs to work together." On a Linux machine, this philosophy is most clearly visible from the command line, where Unix hackers continue to provide simple, flexible tools that talk to one another and don't have the huge overhead of a graphical user interface.

I was intrigued when I heard about SuperGamer, a beta live DVD based on PCLinuxOS. The DVD includes, in demo version for the most part, 3-D shooters America's Army, Doom 3, Postal 2, Cube, Enemy Territory, Nexuiz, Quake 4, Soldier of Fortune, UFO: Alien Invasion, and Wesnoth. Unfortunately, my SuperGamer/PCLinuxOS experience was as bad a Linux experience as I can remember having.

A free presentation about writing Linux drivers for USB devices is available for download from Free Electrons, a French embedded Linux training and consulting firm. The 92-page presentation is available in English and French, in several document formats, under a Copyleft license.

There is a distinct sub-culture in the Unix-type operating universe made up of gnarly old geekbeards who were raised up in the green-screen command-prompt era. They think X Window is for amateurs and any executable over 100K is bloatware. These are the wizened gurus who can touch-type 100 words per minute, remember every option for hundreds of commands, and who take pride at keeping antique hardware in service. Throw away an old 386 or 486? Never. Not when it makes a perfectly good firewall, printer server, Ethernet bridge, or network router.

ClarkConnect, IPCop, m0n0wall, and Smoothwall are among the Linux distributions currently available that are targeted for use as a firewall or network server. However, shortly another contender will be launching into this arena and that is the Open Linux Router.

There was a time when the OSI (Open Source Initiative) was one of the hotbeds of open source activity. After the retirement of its co-founder and leader, Eric S. Raymond, in January 2005, the OSI lost much of its fire. That may be changing soon, though. An investigation by Linux-Watch has found that there is still heat in what appeared to be the organization's quiet ashes.

Microsoft AJAX tools now formal, Microsoft's Atlas has made it through to its official Release To Web (RTW) as ASP.NET AJAX 1.0. The beta version has enjoyed some 180,000 downloads since November last year.

At the Open Source Meets Business Conference organized by Heise publishing house, European start-ups presented their projects yesterday in Nürnberg, Germany. The first to be presented was the Open Source car called OScar. For eight years, a community that has grown to far over 1,000 people has been working on the development of a car based on Open Source, though the project's founder Markus stressed that the goal is development, not production. The automotive industry has, however, already showed interest in the concept.

As India opens up to open source more rapidly that ever, the three-day annual event brings together the who's who of the open source world on one stage, once again.

The term Linux desktop is a bit of misnomer since there are actually many Linux desktop environments, including KDE and GNOME. Xfce is another Linux desktop option. Xfce 4.4 is now available, boasting new features that will change the way that its Linux desktop looks and works. Both KDE and GNOME have been known to be resource-intensive desktops that limit their use and practical functionality on low-end hardware. But Xfce is a stripped down graphical environment that will run on low-end hardware and run faster due to its reduced resource requirements.

If you're running more than one Debian or Ubuntu computer on your network, you can speed up downloads and updates considerably by using a local package mirror. Packages need only be downloaded once to be available to all of your local clients.

Macraigor has joined Eclipse.org, and is offering free plugin-based GNU toolchains that support its low-cost JTAG probes. The "Macraigor Eclipse + GNU Tools Suite" includes ARM, MIPS, PowerPC, and x86 toolchains, sample programs for popular boards, and an optional, tested Eclipse 3.2.1 IDE for Windows hosts.

Linux distributor Red Hat said last week that is has brought on Petra Heinrich to be its new director of channels an partners in its Europe, Middle East, and Africa region.

A full-service application server like Apache Geronimo needs to have a full-service security implementation, and that means more than just supporting SSL connections. It means securing the internal requests made within an application. In this installment, David Jencks talks to the renegade about the current and future view of Geronimo's security implementation.

Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything is one of the first efforts to explain open source and Web 2.0 to the traditional business community. This goal is revolutionary enough for the book's dust jacket to be covered with enthusiastic blurbs from major corporate executives and business academics. However, your opinion of the book is likely to depend on your familiarity with the subject.

Microsoft Corporation's products have been locked out of the on-going World Social Forum (WSF) in Nairobi Kenya. With over 300 computers provided for participants and the press, organizers of the WSF have preferred to provide open source software products and blocked all Microsoft related products for the forum's usage and its related activities. Participants attending WSF, which for the first time is entirely taking place in an African country say that this was a gesture done as a way of promoting the free social movement at the same time also as a way of fighting Microsoft's 'imperialistic tendencies.'

Mozilla Thunderbird 2 Beta 2 includes a theme update for Mac OS X, improved message preview text in new mail alerts, easy account setup for gmail and .Mac accounts, and many bug fixes based on Beta 1 feedback. It is available for Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux in over 30 languages. en-US beta 1 users will receive beta 2 via automatic software update.