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When Microsoft killed Windows Small Business Server (SBS) ahead of the Worldwide Partner Conference (WPC12), The VAR Guy wondered: Can Linux somehow invade the small business server market in a big way? After a week of thought, The VAR Guy seriously doubts it. Here’s why.

Windows may still be the default operating system on the vast majority of mainstream PCs thanks to Microsoft's many longstanding OEM partnerships, but that's not to say it hasn't been possible for some time to buy desktop machines with Linux preloaded.

Stability enhancements and bugfixes thanks to a large, diverse and rapidly growing developer community Improvements in Calc, Impress, font handling and compatibility to third-party formats. This release fixes a number of bugs and further improves the stability of the software, making it the best version available for corporate and enterprise adoption. Among the changes are improvements in Calc, Impress, in the handling of fonts as well as enhancements with regards to importing and exporting third-party formats.

Google’s Chrome Web Store is getting some really nifty apps, and I will be writing about them at a regular basis as I plan to spend most of my ‘Internet’ time on the Chromebook and see if it can be a great device for writers and journalists.

RuneScape is a fantasy massively multiplayer online role-playing (MMORPG) web based online game. The game can run in a browser, but there are also downloadable clients for Windows and Mac, but not for Linux. However, there is an unofficial Linux port of the Windows RuneScape client (the game launcher is opensource, the client file jagexappletviewer.jar is closed source, but it's allowed to be used in ports if anyone decided to make one) which includes fixes and performance tweaks along with working language settings.

The developers over at Ubuntu One have today announced tat they are removing Facebook contacts import and sync as an option from the dashboard. Don’t worry if you’ve been using it though – while you won’t be able to sync new details to any existing contacts, you will be able to edit or delete them.

The GNU/Linux ecosystem is blessed with many tools to clone a hard drive image which can be used to reinstall your Debian-based distro in an emergency or duplicate on another machine, but sometimes you might want to do a clean install of Ubuntu on another machine and then add in the extra software you installed in the original distro. For that you need a combination of Synaptic, the GUI frontend for apt-get and a little command line magic.

Do you ever have that moment when someone asks you for a recommendation on a book, and when put on the spot you spin around in your office chair, scan your ever-growing library of books that you bought over the years of IT experience but either:A. Never read? B. Flipped through but never finished? C.Passed out halfway through the first chapter? 

If its dimensions were more compact, you could call it the latest Android tablet, but at 21.5 inches, the FT103 SmartDisplay from KOUZIRO Corporation of Japan does not readily fit into that popular mobile device category, even though it has all the other trappings of one.

While I've never been giddy with praise over a project-planning application, GanttProject has enough going for it for me to consider using as a regular go-to planning tool. Its user interface is structured clearly so it is easy to understand. GanttProject lets you break down a project into a tree of tasks and assign available human resources to work on each.

Terminology is a new terminal emulator. In fact as of the 12th of July 2012, it is only 1 month old, so all you see here is the result of some off-and-on work over approximately a month (so not full-time effort). This is an indicator of what is possible to do with EFL with some knowledge and effort in a fairly short space of time. This time included having to learn how terminal emulation works, pty's, escapes and so on and actually make a large selection of terminal applications work, so it's not perfect, but it's getting there.

UPDATED--In the wake of the Flame malware attack, which involved the use of a fraudulent Microsoft digital certificate, the software giant has reviewed its certificates and found nearly 30 that aren't as secure as the company would like and has revoked them. Microsoft also released its new updater for certificates as a critical update for Windows Vista and later versions as part of today's July Patch Tuesday (Secure Boot, anyone?--TC)

NitroShare is an application that works on Linux and Windows which can be used to easily send files to other computers on the same local network. It supports drag'n'drop, sending folders, file compression, comes with Nautilus integration and more.

Summary: A new cross-platform Trojan downloader has been discovered. It detects if you're running Windows, Mac OS X, or Linux, and then downloads the corresponding malware for your platform.

With Debian Wheezy now frozen for its release sometime next year, here are some early benchmarks comparing the performance of Debian 6.0.5 "Squeeze" to the latest packages for the Debian 7.0 "Wheezy" release. For this Squeeze vs. Wheezy comparison, both Debian GNU/Linux and Debian GNU/kFreeBSD were benchmarked from an Intel 64-bit system.

With the plethora of open source desktop environments available at the moment, it’s hard to keep track of all the different features sets. And since KDE, which has recently become my interface of choice, arguably enjoys less media love than alternatives such as GNOME and Unity, it seems only fair to highlight some of the feature changes in its next upcoming release, KDE 4.9. Read on for a look — and, just maybe, a few compelling reasons to give KDE a try.

This tutorial shows how to do data striping across four single storage servers (running Ubuntu 12.04) with GlusterFS. The client system (Ubuntu 12.04 as well) will be able to access the storage as if it was a local filesystem. GlusterFS is a clustered file-system capable of scaling to several peta-bytes. It aggregates various storage bricks over Infiniband RDMA or TCP/IP interconnect into one large parallel network file system. Storage bricks can be made of any commodity hardware such as x86_64 servers with SATA-II RAID and Infiniband HBA.

In conjunction with a new version of X Server, Linux 3.5 will offer better support for hybrid graphics. The Radeon driver will be a bit faster and support HDMI audio transport on more graphics chips. The audio drivers will support the Xonar DGX and Creative's SoundCore3D.

A wide spectrum of topics will be covered at Texas Linux Fest 2012, and the event announces the session speakers have been chosen for the Aug. 3-4 expo in San Antonio.

While it isn't the first inexpensive gaming console and open gaming platform to test the market, the open source Ouya gaming platform is generating buzz. A Los Angeles-based project, Ouya is billed as "a new kind of video game console" on Kickstarter, the open crowd funding online site dedicated to giving innovative ideas a chance in the market. As CNet notes, it only took about eight hours of crowdsourced funding on Kickstarter for Ouya's $950,000 startup goal to be met. Can this open, hackable game platform do as well in the actual market?