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Acer Inc. is expected to announce quarterly results sometime today, according to Yahoo Finance. If the PC maker’s latest quarterly earnings do surface, they could provide new clues about Windows 8 tablet and ultrabook sales as well as Google Chromebook sales. Acer President Jim Wong in January suggested that Chromebook sales were heating up but Windows 8 wasn’t doing much to give Acer a lift. Has that trend continued? Hmmm…

Extend PostgreSQL's capabilities with PostGIS 2.0 and discover all the magic of spatial databases. Even if you're unfamiliar with GIS, I am pretty sure you know what Web mapping is. GIS stands for geographical information systems, and it originated in the early 1970s as a set of tools and techniques for scientists (cartographers, land planners and biologists). Since then, the field has been experiencing an amazing evolution, as in many other computer-related fields. One of the most revolutionary things is that now maps, and especially Web mapping, are a common experience for millions of people in everyday life. Not only in the past few years have we seen people using more and more mapping apps, there has been an explosion in personal Web mapping. Today, a lot of blogs and personal Web sites have maps.

Matthias Clasen had the pleasure of announcing on February 9 that the fifth development release of the upcoming GNOME 3.8 desktop environment is ready for testing.

It’s useful for me to have a transparent terminal in the background that show information from one or more system logs, such as dmesg,messages or get an interactive process status of the system with htop or glances, there are many ways to achieve this, let’s take a look at: xrootconsole, Tilda and Eterm.

In the past week, the 4.0.1-incubating release passed its VOTE on the general@incubator.apache.org list, work continued on 4.1.0, and there were active discussions on using Gerrit, cloud-init, and whether memory usage has increased following the adoption of the Spring framework.

With the publishing this morning of the article about the state of the HelenOS micro-kernel, all of my notes from this year's Free Open-Source Developers' European Meeting (FOSDEM) have been published along with information on the other interesting tracks that happened during this event that brings thousands of open-source developers from around the world to Brussels, Belgium for one weekend. Here's a recap of all that happened at FOSDEM 2013.

LEMP is an alternative to LAMP, the Linux based web server configuration stack using MySQL and PHP. However, instead of Apache LEMP is deployed with Nginx ( pronounced engine-x or en-juhn-eks ) web server. Nginx is a free, open-source, high-performance HTTP server and reverse proxy, which can be also used as a mail proxy. Nginx is acclaimed for having low memory usage and thus it is favored solution for a low RAM web server deployments such as VPS, etc. The difference in a memory consumption and serving speed between Apache and Nginx is likely to be noticeable under a heavy load. Thus, configuring Nginx should also help you to protect against sudden traffic spikes. However, the choice of using Ngnix over Apache is a matter of your environment where many aspects needs to be taken into the consideration. These are the content to be served, configuration settings, number of modules enabled, etc. In this tutorial we will setup a basic LEMP configuration on Ubuntu Linux.

On behalf of the Linux Foundation, kernel developer James Bottomley has released a Microsoft-signed mini bootloader whose signature is trusted by typical Windows 8 PCs and which allows such PCs to be started when Secure Boot is active. Commenting on the release, Matthew Garrett, the main developer of the Shim Secure Boot bootloader that has been available for some time, announced that he intends to integrate some of the features of the Linux Foundation's mini bootloader into Shim as well.

CoreSec Gnome-Amd64 10.04 is available. CoreSec Linux is a Linux Distribution or Linux Operating System based for Penetrating Security holes Online and Offline, Its your Ultimate penetration testing Operating System with Multi-user and Multi-tasking and a user-friendly distribution for Multimedia and Office lovers.

Aside from the GNU Hurd talk, HelenOS was the subject of another talk at FOSDEM 2013, the Free Open-Source Developers' European Meeting, that happened one week ago. HelenOS has been under development since 2001 and is self-described as an "open-source multiplatform microkernel multiserver general-purpose operating system written from scratch."

But problems with its graphical package manager, and the fact that latest releases do not even have one, has seen it drop off my list.

I would definitely recommend Ubuntu over Fedora any time, the only problem is that you have to clean it a little, as every obscure open-source functionality ever invented is started by default.

In theory, the public cloud is the ideal answer for leveraging extra computing resources when local and private cloud infrastructure aren’t enough. But deploying internal software in the public cloud is much easier said than done. Ravello Systems, however, thinks it has a solution in the form of a hypervisor for your hypervisor. The concept may sound loopy, but it actually represents what could become a crucial new way of taking advantage of virtualization and the cloud.

Users not in possession of root privileges will in future be able to set up containers in which to run software which requires them. Linux 3.8 will, under certain circumstances, use less memory and will include improvements for NUMA systems. Support for Intel 386 chips has been dropped.

Anyone who reads eBooks is aware that a number of content vendors are using proprietary platforms in an effort to lock you into their content libraries. But there is a way out, if enough vendors get on the bandwagon.

Federal Parliament has issued documents formally compelling major technology vendors Apple, Microsoft and Adobe to compulsorily appear before its committee investigating price hikes on technology products sold in Australia, in a move that finally ends months of stalling by the vendors, who have proven unwilling to voluntary discuss their pricing strategies in public.

Computer security is always a concern, network security even more so. Wireless networks are a favourite target for hackers. This is simply because there is no physical link between machines: everything goes over the airwaves. One of the first steps to tightening security is simply to see what the current activity is, and what machines are involved. The tool that should be your first stop is Wireshark.

The open source configuration management framework has moved from Ruby to Erlang for its core API server to enable better scaling and performance

The Kool Desktop Environment, later known as K Desktop Environment or KDE, was launched after Matthias Ettrich issued a call for programmers on de.comp.os.linix.misc in October 1996, and soon had 40 programmers contributing. In the mid Nineties, Linux had X and a variety of diverse and ingenious window managers, but no unified toolkit for the development of applications with a common look and feel. A typical Linux desktop would use a window manager – probably FVWM, which looked a little like Windows 95 – and a scatter of applications, some of which ran in the terminal window while the rest used a variety of widget sets, no two of which looked alike or behaved in the same way.

Linux developer Matthew Garrett, who does a lot of research into UEFI topics, writes in a blog post that by storing a large amount of data in UEFI variables, he managed to disrupt a Samsung notebook running Windows to such a degree that it subsequently refused to start. In his post, the developer also points to some sample code of the Windows program that he executed at administrator level to disable the notebook. The developer had previously speculated that some Samsung notebooks with UEFI firmware may be rendered inoperative under Windows in the same way that they were when starting Linux under certain circumstances. The experiment to confirm this was successful.