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Being powered by Linux Kernel 3.1, it provides a featureful Xfce 4.8 desktop environment, and the powerful Softmaker office suite, which includes Planmaker, Presentations and Textmaker components but also provides Microsoft Office documents compatibility.

At the end of 2010, I asked some of my friends and Linux Pro Magazine readers to make predictions for 2011. Now as we look back on the year, we get to decide whether our predictions were on target. Year of Linux on the desktop? Well, once again, Linux on the desktop wasn't really the sexy tech news of the year, which turned out to be the year of cloud, mobile, and tablet headlines. Carla Schroder was more on target with her predictions, such as "world governments will try to fence off and control the Internet" while "Linux and Free/Open Source software, and organizations like Wikileaks and the Electronic Frontier Foundation will continue to toil valiantly to protect our dwindling freedoms.”

Over the holidays, noted blogger Cory Doctorow delivered a keynote at the 28th Chaos Communication Congress in which he warned that one of the biggest problems on the technology scene is that control over our computing devices is about to be taken from us. There is a video of the address, called The Coming War on General Computing, available on YouTube. Doctorow warns that the copyright wars are only the beginning of a much bigger set of issues having to do with how much we control our own devices. The address has already drawn much reaction from the open source community, and is, in some ways, a defense of open source principles.

After 20 years, Linux continues to move forward. 2011 was another strong year for Linux as new kernels and distributions continued to advance the state of Linux. It was also a year of challenges as the kernel development community grappled with a security breach at kernel.org, and desktop users cringed as the GNOME Shell and Unity interfaces challenged normal usage paradigms.

Late last year, president Obama signed a law that makes it possible to indefinitely detain terrorist suspects without any form of trial or due process. Peaceful protesters in Occupy movements all over the world have been labelled as terrorists by the authorities. Initiatives like SOPA promote diligent monitoring of communication channels. Thirty years ago, when Richard Stallman launched the GNU project, and during the three decades that followed, his sometimes extreme views and peculiar antics were ridiculed and disregarded as paranoia - but here we are, 2012, and his once paranoid what-ifs have become reality.

What is Debian XFCE Live and how does it compare on the market? This is a distribution that we need to respect, because it is stable, universal and reliable. This is valid for anything in the Debian Stable branch, which is currently Squeeze. But usage of the XFCE Desktop Environment on top of Debian Squeeze has its own points, positive and negative.

At first glance, Zentyal seems to be making all the right moves — raising venture capital and building a partner network to promote Linux into the small business server market. But can Zentyal succeed where so many other Linux distributions have failed? Here's a reality check.

Nuclear engineer Brett Legree discusses his desktop Linux setup and his love of the Linux philosophy.

In his very first author interview, Thomas A. Knight gets the opportunity to talk to one of Magic:The Gathering's finest authors, J. Robert King, and discuss his latest work, his life, and publishing in general. Also catch a glimpse into what The Open Source Author has to offer in the coming year!

Because of the nature of Linux, when you boot into the Linux half of a dual-boot system, you can access your data (files and folders) on the Windows side, without rebooting into Windows. And you can even edit those Windows files and save them back to the Windows half. It is a very simple process, and requires very little work on your part. This brief tutorial shows you how it is done when dual-booting a distribution that uses the GNOME or KDE desktop environment.

Gentoo is the empire GNU/Linux distribution which enables a user to compile the entire OS from scratch, optimized for that particular machine. Many users, like me, dream if using Gentoo but can't due to the 'installation' process. However, there is a live version of Gentoo which you can use to test and play with Gentoo without it biting your fingers.

The famed Raspberry Pi Model B Beta Boards are now up for grabs on eBay. The first 10 are being auctioned off 2 at a time and 100% of the proceeds will benefit Raspberry Pi foundation.

Plenty of pundits say the cloud runs on Linux. Heck, even Microsoft appears to be gearing up to support Linux in the cloud — sort of. The specifics: Microsoft is preparing to “enable” Linux to run on Windows Azure — though it doesn’t sound like Microsoft will officially offer “support” for Linux on Windows Azure. Here's why.

The TouchPad tablet from Hewlett-Packard was one of the most closely watched new gadgets of 2011 — and quickly turned out to be the year’s biggest flop. The TouchPad, which was supposed to be a rival to Apple’s iPad, lasted just seven weeks on the market before H.P. killed it, citing weak sales. Analysts point to a long list of factors behind the tablet’s quick demise. But some of the people involved in creating the tablet’s core software now say the product barely had a fighting chance. That software is called WebOS, an operating system built on the same technology used by many Web browsers. It promised to be more flexible and open than Apple’s tightly controlled iOS software, and more beautiful than Google’s sometimes wonky Android system.

LXer Feature: 02-Jan-2012

You have my apologies for the lateness of my first Weekly Roundup of 2012 but I have been as sick as its gets over the weekend and have only just now come to realize what year it is. Enjoy!

This article is not about Steve Jobs. He died this year -- yes, we all know that -- but gone too is Dennis Ritchie, one of the creators of the Unix operating system that powers Apple's computers. Also departed are Jack Goldman, the man who came up with the idea to start Xerox PARC, where Jobs got his graphical user interface, Paul Baran, an important Internet pioneer who developed packet switching, and Nobutoshi Kihara, who was known as Sony's "Mr. Walkman," long before Jobs was flogging the iPod.

So here are 11 technology giants who left us this year, and the amazing legacies they left behind.

Frank gazed out over the immeasurably vast canyon that stretched for miles before him, bedazzled by the silent, bright sunlight of an early autumn morning. The enormity of the view was so overwhelming that the infinitely crenellated details of mesa and river, cliff and spire seemed dimensionless and unreal.

This tutorial shows how to prepare a CentOS 6.1 x86_64 server for the installation of ISPConfig 3, and how to install ISPConfig 3. ISPConfig 3 is a webhosting control panel that allows you to configure the following services through a web browser: nginx web server, Postfix mail server, MySQL, BIND nameserver, PureFTPd, SpamAssassin, ClamAV, Mailman, and many more. Since version 3.0.4, ISPConfig comes with full support for the nginx web server in addition to Apache; this tutorial covers the setup of a server that uses nginx, not Apache.

Dress 'em in pink, build them cute little doll houses and do their hair in pretty little pony tails and braids. Even after your best attempts to "socialize" them into their roles, many of them will disappoint you. They don't want to play with Barbie's little motorized car. They want to take it apart. And for that reason, we've set up the HeliOS Mentoring Program for Girls. Starting in January, The HeliOS Project will choose one girl per calendar quarter, between the ages of 8 and 12, and mentor them in all things computer. From the hardware to the software that controls it, we will teach them as far as they want to be taught.

Let's begin with Gnome. Gnome 3 currently has two official desktops that are installed by default. These are completely different software packages that are not related at all. One is called Gnome Shell, which is new and has received lots of attention. The other is the classic Gnome desktop and is called Gnome Panel. Even though these are completely different applications, people are referring to them as 'the Gnome 3 desktop'.