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Microsoft’s new Surface Pro tablet (128GB edition) running Windows 8 Pro apparently is sold out at Microsoft Store, Best Buy (NYSE: BBY) and Staples (NASDAQ: SPLS) locations across the United States. But what were inventory levels before sales started?

Done deal? Hardly. Dell’s $24.4 billion deal to go private apparently faces pushback from at least four major shareholders, Reuters reported. And don’t forget: A special Dell committee is managing a 45-day “go-shop” period, during which the committee is actively soliciting alternative bids. So who will wind up owning Dell, and how will the current variables impact partners and the PC maker?

Linus Torvalds announced a few hours ago, February 8, that the seventh Release Candidate of the upcoming Linux 3.8 kernel is available for download and testing.

Eucalyptus, provider of open source software for private clouds, has confirmed two executive departures. CEO Marten Mickos downplayed the changes to GigaOm, but Talkin' Cloud has heard about other employee departures in recent months.

Looks like Linux has finally challenged the dominance of decades of proprietary office document software. As the market share of Android devices continues to make an impact Microsoft has already announced its Android port for Office Suite, their proprietary office documents management software.

The Linux Foundation proudly announced a few hours ago, February 8, that they have officially unleashed the highly anticipated UEFI secure boot system for all Linux distributions, courtesy of the Microsoft Corporation.

The C++ Programming Language by Bjarne Stroustrup, the creator of C++, is widely regarded as the most trusted, definitive reference, and de facto standard book for C++. The book is worthy of the highest praise as it provides the most authoritative coverage of the C++ language. Whilst none of the books featured in this article could never replace that masterpiece, there is a good selection of books that teach C++ that are available to download without charge.

There's been a lot of information scattered around the internet about these topic recently, so here's my attempt to put them all in one place to (hopefully) settle things down and give my inbox a break. Last week I spent a number of days at the GNOME Developer Hackfest in Brussels, with the goal to help make the ability to distribute applications written for GNOME (and even more generally, Linux) in a better manner. A great summary of what happened there can be found in this H-Online article. Also please read Alexander Larsson's great summary of what we discussed and worked on for another view of this. Both of these articles allude to the fact that I'm working on putting the D-Bus protocol into the kernel, in order to help achieve these larger goals of proper IPC for applications. And I'd like to confirm that yes, this is true, but it's not going to be D-Bus like you know it today.

Question2Answer (Q2A) is a popular open source Q&A solution, currently in use on thousands sites world-wide in 40 languages. It is built on the standard PHP/MySQL platform, and runs safe and fast. A Q&A engine helps you to create an online community to share knowledge. People with questions quickly get the answers they need. The community dynamic is enriched by commenting, voting, notifications, user points and rankings. In this guide we will show you how to install this popular software on Ubuntu LAMP.

David Herrmann has provided an update on his ambitious initiative to kill of the Linux kernel console. Herrmann has long been working on making the Linux kernel CONFIG_VT option unnecessary for providing a Linux console by punting it off to user-space. The Linux kernel VT console hasn't been changed much in the past two decades and Herrmann is hoping to see it replaced with a user-space solution he's been developing that would allow for multi-seat support, a hardware-accelerated console, full internalization, and other features.

Did anybody else notice Novell BrainShare 2013 occurred last week in Salt Lake City? It was a prime opportunity to promote Novell’s progress under Attachmate’s ownership. Plus, SUSE Linux (Novell’s sister business) could have published some updated business milestones of its own. Did Novell and SUSE deliver? Here’s the scorecard.

Dario Faggioli, a member of the Xen project, describes how you can easily install Xen and xen-tools on the Fedora distribution. If you thought that Xen and Fedora don't mix, think again!

As promised, here is the Linux Foundation UEFI secure boot system. This was actually released to us by Microsoft on Wednesday 6 February, but with travel, conferences and meetings I didn’t really get time to validate it all until today. The files are here

LinuxCertified,Inc. a leading provider of Linux training, will offer weekend Linux system administration bootcamp on February 23rd - 24th, 2013 in South Bay (CA). This workshop is designed for busy information technology professionals and is designed to cover the most important Linux administration areas.

While there's plenty of code pouring into the Linux world for bettering open-source graphics drivers from desktop graphics cards to ARM SoCs, in the *BSD world they are struggling with their graphics driver support. Matthieu Herrb gave a presentation on the (rather poor) state of graphics on Unix-like platforms outside of Linux.

For someone who works with, writes about and teaches cutting-edge technologies, I tend to be a bit of a laggard when adopting new ones. I upgrade my laptop and servers very conservatively. I got my first smartphone just earlier this year. I still use the Apache HTTP server, even though I know that nginx is a bit faster. And until recently, Mozilla's Firefox was my default browser.

This week we look at Android's market dominance, the fall of BlackBerry in the enterprise and why cloud computing needs standards.

Not satisfied with the experience on current forum software packages, Stack Exchange co-founder Jeff Atwood founded Civilized Discourse Construction Kit Inc to come up with a software package to replace them. Its open source Discourse software is built with JavaScript, Ruby on Rails and PostgreSQL and, according to the developers, can be used whenever a mailing list or forum is needed. According to the team: "Discourse is a from-scratch reboot, an attempt to re-imagine what a modern, sustainable, fully open-source Internet discussion platform should be".

Senscape, the people who brought Shivers to the PC world are doing a new expanded world of psychological horror : Asylum. This could be the greatest horror genre game available on Linux since Amnesia: The Dark Descent. But it needs our help. A Kickstarter campaign is going on now:

Which Linux operating systems are the most popular among home and small business users? Which Linux desktop is the best choice for enterprise users? Questions like these are meaningless and unanswerable, even for Linux developers. "Measuring Linux adoption ... has always been -- and will likely always be -- a difficult task, due to the lack of empirical data," said Jeremy Garcia, founder of LinuxQuestions.org.