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Remastersys is a complete system backup tool, but it can also be used to create your own customized remix of an Ubuntu and Debian installation. Basically, you customize a running system and create an install disk that will recreate it. If you've ever wanted to create your own distribution, you won't believe how simple this is to use.

Apparently Microsoft wanted to make a statement specifying that they could take any legal action Microsoft considered pertinent given the builder's lack of a Microsoft certificate of authenticity or original license included along with a computer built/sold by the independent builder. The builder states that given that they sell their computers with Free Software instead of Windows, the software has licenses...

LXer Feature: 27-Mar-2011

In the LXWR this week we have HP declaring its OS independence, the claims regarding Linux kernel headers in Android "seems totally bogus" according to Linus. Can free software idealism be pragmatic? Richard Hillesley thinks so. And our own Carla Schroder talks about the freeloading digital economy. Enjoy!

Hewlett-Packard's recent presentation of its plans to place webOS at the heart of a broad cloud strategy highlighted a route that Microsoft, Google and Amazon will also take, in their different ways. Essential to HP's desire to offer an end-to-end cloud platform – giving it control of a vast range of web apps and devices – is a new-style operating system that can be embedded in each of those end points. This is not a traditional OS: it does not need to participate in the OS wars and can live alongside other systems. It is stripped-down in function and footprint and largely based on the browser.

The discussion surrounding issues with the Linux kernel DRM code has been quite interesting. From the 40+ comments so far, there's been some interesting feedback from some of the key open-source driver developers along with AMD. In particular, the generation to succeed the next-generation of AMD graphics processors (what will be the "Radeon HD 8000 series" if they continue with the same marketing names) should be a pivotal moment for AMD's open-source strategy.

I liked from the beginning the idea behind Bodhi Linux and so I followed the progress of this young version of Linux and take advantage of version 1.0 (congratulations to Jeff and the entire team) to make a review. For the uninitiated Bodhi Linux is a recent project that taking as a base Ubuntu 10.04 “reconstructs” the Enlightenment desktop, it use the login system manager of LXDE (and also as the terminal) and offers its own package system (.bod); The system being based on Ubuntu is still compatible with .deb and dpkg and aptitude can be used without problems.

This is a detailed description about how to set up an OpenSUSE 11.4 server (x86_64) that offers all services needed by ISPs and hosters: Apache web server (SSL-capable), Postfix mail server with SMTP-AUTH and TLS, BIND DNS server, Proftpd FTP server, MySQL server, Dovecot POP3/IMAP, Quota, Firewall, etc. In the end you should have a system that works reliably, and if you like you can install the free webhosting control panel ISPConfig 2 (i.e., ISPConfig runs on it out of the box).

Microsoft pulled off a big surprise last week at its Microsoft Management Summit when it announced a new tool that not only lets you monitor Windows devices, but iOS and Android devices too, a surprisingly forward-thinking approach for Microsoft.

As some may have heard, via Twitter or in other communications, with Phoronix Test Suite 3.2-Grimstad we'll be ramping up several key areas of our open-source benchmarking software and with our collaborative testing platform, OpenBenchmarking.org, and our continuous integration system, Phoromatic. From this already, Half-Life 2 and 3DMark are running by the Phoronix Test Suite.

HP is freeing itself of Microsoft and mapping its own future. Right now just about everyone is talking about Google, Apple, iOS and Android but there is one player that most are overlooking - HP. The US$130 billion company, the world's largest hardware maker, has been noticeably quiet over the past couple of years but judging by recent declarations, is now ready to take a leadership role.

Zenwalk 7.0 is released, This release brings several major changes at user level and system level. In this release most packages have been updated to the latest stable version, LibreOffice 3.3.1, XFCE 4.8.1, Icecat 3.6.15, Icedove 3.0.4, Kernel 2.6.37.4 with BFS , scheduler and performance tweaks.

Since becoming interested in Linux I haven't really paid much attention to Debian. My first ever encounter with Debian was with Debian 5 and on a very old Mitac Laptop with an AMD Athlon Mobile processor. That was a positive experience because unlike the releases of Fedora, openSUSE and Ubuntu at that time it was the only distribution that worked on this laptop. However, it was a very brief experience. So here we are with Debian 6 which I have been waiting to try for a long time.

Here is a new addition to my series on common user interface mistakes in KDE applications. This time I want to talk about being GNOME friendly. While that may sound odd for a KDE developer to think about GNOME, assuming we want our applications to reach the largest possible audience, we should try to ensure GNOME users get a pleasurable experience. After all, a user is a user, there are efforts going on to ensure KDE works well on Windows and Mac OS X, I think we should also take care of GNOME users. They are at least as likely if not more likely to contribute back to our applications.

Just a few days after J.S. Bach's 326th birthday on 21 March, the Open Goldberg Variations project has achieved its first fundraising milestone, raising more than $16,000 in just 20 days on Kickstarter.com. The project's aim is to create a new score and studio recording of J.S. Bach's masterpiece, the Goldberg Variations, and donate them to the public domain

For the first time Ubuntu and Canonical seem to be running official advertising online. The ads right now are largely focused around Canonical services for businesses though the Ubuntu brand is proudly displayed.

Version 2.9 of the Low-Level Virtual Machine is set to be released in a little more than a week, but what will it mean much for users in terms of performance? We will be looking at the LLVM 2.9 and Clang performance in the coming days (along with GCC 4.6, which was just released). We are beginning this weekend by providing a look at how using LLVM 2.9 affects the performance of the Mesa Gallium3D LLVMpipe driver relative to the previous LLVM 2.6, 2.7, and 2.8 releases.

"In cooperation with the Dutch Digital heritage Foundation and the Club for History and ICT, we will be celebrating Document Freedom Day 2011 in Royal Library (National Library for the Netherlands) in The Hague this year on March 30th. The theme for this event will be "Open Heritage". The importance of information and open formats is in this branche very well known, because of broad availability, openness of information and endurable access.

After two more weeks of hacking and user feedback since our final release candidate the Bodhi Team and I are proud to announce the availability of the first ever stable release of the Enlightenment based Bodhi Linux (1.0.0).

One of my relatives who in the past rebuffed my attempts to install Ubuntu on said cousin's laptop is now happily using Ubuntu 10.04 and could even connect and configure a Lexmark printer without help.

Ubuntu Software Center got a really cool feature in Ubuntu 11.04: it lets you test drive applications without having to install them.