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We’re hearing reports that Microsoft is having trouble pushing copies of the whiz-bang don’t-call-it-metro Windows 8 even at reduced fire sale prices, with one tech writer suggesting a Vista-esque rollback to Windows 7. The new Microsoft Surface Pro tablet that was supposed to make Microsoft the new Apple and Steve Ballmer the new Steve Jobs has brought less than enthusiastic reviews. What’s a down on it’s luck technology company to do? If you’re Microsoft, you do what you’ve always done: round up the usual suspects, buy some genetically modified FUD seeds and start sowing them.

Playing with ansible, its "ec2" module came to my attention: it is intended to manage virtual machines in Amazon's EC2 cloud. The idea is that you describe a system with the property "needs to run in Amazon's cloud", and ansible then starts the machine if it isn't there already. In order to get to the point where this can be played with, a working version of the euca2ools package was required first. Packaging was mostly a no-brainer, and a package is currently under review and will end up in pkgsrc eventually. The more interesting part was to verify if the pkg actually worked as expected. This proved tricky for two reasons: 1) my overall lack of how to use the Amazon AWS command line tools (ec2-ami-tools, ec2-api-tools), and 2) the fact that euca2ools is mostly written for the Eucalyptus Cloud infrastructure, which just happens to be compatible with Amazon AWS. To give future parties something to google, here are the steps that to fire up a NetBSD machine in the Amazon cloud.

If you're wondering what graphics hardware / driver is best if you intend to do much gaming within Wine or CrossOver on Linux, a CodeWeavers' developer responsible for much of the Direct3D layer spoke about his experiences with gaming on Wine for the best results.

Semi-manual LVM disk partitioning guide for Fedora 18 provides a step-by-step guide on how to customize the disk space allocated to the root logical volume, so that it gets just enough disk space required for the life of the installation.

This is a short tutorial on how to find out weak passwords for your mail users. This will save you you a huge headache since spammers will find out mail accounts with weak passwords and send spam emails which will result in your mail server being blacklisted.

A new Ruby 1.9.3 implementation has appeared in the form of Topaz, announced by its creator Alex Gaynor. Topaz's design goals were simplicity and performance and it was written on top of the RPython translation toolchain, building on the work of the PyPy developers. RPython is a restricted implementation of Python that was developed by the PyPy developers as a route to translating RPython programs into LLVM code. Topaz inherits a high performance garbage collector and "state of the art" just-in-time compiler from RPython, making for a fast Ruby implementation.

The tallies are in, and we'd like to announce the winners of the 2013 People's Choice Awards! Plus, a few extraordinary contributors that have elevated the opensource.com community.

More ways of confusing the firmware on some Samsung laptops in UEFI mode to the extent that they will no longer boot are being discovered. It appears that even some Windows applications are able to trigger the problem

UK to launch first-ever satellite controlled by a mobile phone… and the scientists have chosen a Google Nexus handset.

Linux shop man on app servers, business and keeping devs interested Seven years after Red Hat snatched JBoss out from under Larry Ellison’s nose, the enterprise Linux distributor is continuing to squeeze the juice from the open-source application server.…

In this edition: a camera for the Raspberry Pi, Firefox 18.0.2, Joomla 2.5.9 and 3.0.3, Ruby 1.9.3-p385, Piwik switches to GitHub, a petition for Oracle to remove the Ask Toolbar from the Java installer, code completion for Vim and Webconverger 17

Morphlabs, which as built itself up as a provider of OpenStack products designed for service providers and enterprises, has launched a modular, OpenStack-based public cloud platform. Designed for cloud services providers, mCloud Osmium enables them to quickly implement highly-scalable public clouds without the need for large amounts of research, development or capital investments.

Cleaning up the code has been a major focus. "The resulting code base is rather different from the original one, as several million lines of code have been added and removed, by adding new features, solving bugs and regressions, adopting state of the art C++ constructs, replacing tools, getting rid of deprecated methods and obsoleted libraries, and translating twenty-five thousand lines of comments from German to English," the Document Foundation said in its LibreOffice 4.0 announcement. "All of this makes the code easier to understand and more rewarding to be involved with for the stream of new members of our community."

Red Hat (NYSE: RHT) has introduced technical account management (TAM) services for cloud computing, virtualization and storage. The consulting offerings are highly important as the open source company attempts to compete more aggressively against VMware (NYSE: VMW) and EMC (NYSE: EMC), in particular.

The openSUSE project would like to announce the first release candidate of version 12.3 of its popular Linux distribution. Major updates include the KDE desktop environment 4.10, GNOME 3.6 and Linux kernel 3.7.6. This preview includes a large number of fixes made to Factory since the beta, as well as the last major set of version updates. RC1 needs a real workout to ensure we fix any remaining issues in time, so don't wait for RC2, put it on your spare disk and give it a try now. Major changes include: PackageKit 0.8.7, Apper 0.8, fcitx 4.2.7, MariaDB replaces MySQL.

The cron daemon is a core component of any Unix-like operating system. On the surface, cron is a scheduler, meant to run a command at regular intervals. However, if we dig a little deeper into the configuration options, we find that we can configure cron to be as detailed and granular as we need. If you need a script to run every seven minutes, five days a week, between the hours of 8AM and 4PM, cron has you covered.

LibreOffice 4 has just arrived and, at first glance, this popular open-source office suite looks really good.

SolusOS is a new Debian-based distro that uses the GNOME 2.3 desktop. SolusOS comes with such core applications as Firefox, VLC, and LibreOffice. It’s a relatively easy way to get both Debian and a GNOME 2 desktop in one, convenience package.

Linux Australia, the umbrella organisation for all Linux user groups in the country, has decided to pick up the remainder of the tab for the visit to Australia and New Zealand by Sir Tim Berners-Lee.

Last weekend at FOSDEM 2013 in Brussels, Ian Romanick expressed plans to enhance the "out of the box" / automatic configuration experience for games on Linux. He wrote in his talk's abstract, "Every game for desktop PCs has the ability for the user to tune quality and performance settings. However, for the out-of-the-box experience, these games also need to detect the hardware installed in the user's system to select the initial settings. On Windows and Mac, there are a number of system interfaces provided for this purpose, but on Linux it is surprisingly difficult. This talk will cover some current best practices used by shipping Linux games. It will also introduce some interfaces under development to improve the current state of affairs."