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A few minutes ago, July 1st, The Document Foundation company announced the first maintenance release of the LibreOfficeb 3.4 open source office suite for Linux, Windows and Macintosh platforms, bringing several bugfixes.

This week we look at Firefox dissing business, a Windows Server 2012 wish list and why you want developers with a back bone and an opinion.

In my opinion, one area where successive Ubuntu releases continuously under-performed is on the overall system performance front. Every new Ubuntu release feels more and more bloated, especially so with latest Ubuntu 11.04 Natty Narwhal.

Android left nude as enemies shrug on extra IP armour Apple, Microsoft, RIM, EMC, Ericsson and Sony all chipped in to buy the patents, which cover critical 4G and wireless broadband technologies, leaving Google empty handed.…

Last month when publishing Fedora 15 vs. Ubuntu 11.04 benchmarks in some of the disk workloads the Fedora Linux release was behind that of Ubuntu Natty Narwhal. Some users speculated in our forums that SELinux was to blame, but later tests show SELinux does not cause a huge performance impact. With Security Enhanced Linux not to blame, some wondered if Fedora's use of LVM, the Logical Volume Manager, by default was the cause.

Ripple lets people make financial transactions through their social networks. This new video illustrates how the free and open project works.

This is a tutorial about how to set up a PostgreSQL replicated hot standby server with streaming replication, and we also set up repmgr to monitor and manage the replication cluster. Unlike most tutorials that copy the database file from master to slave (or standby) in the middle of running pg_start_backup() and pg_end_backup(), repmgr is used to simplify the whole procedure.

There were a couple of comments posted to my previous write-up of PCLinuxOS KDE 2011.6 which said that the LXDE version was already available. In fact I had noticed the ISO files for it when I downloaded the KDE distribution, but since it had not been "announced" on the PCLinuxOS Web Page I decided not to write about it at that time. Those comments pointed me to the Release Announcement for the LXDE version, so I have now downloaded it and installed on a couple of netbooks. Here are my first impressions.

Google needs to show me some love with a Google+ account. There’s no one more deserving than me to have one of those golden tickets. I’m your Charlie Bucket.

As an FTP server, ProFTPD offers several advantages. For starters it’s controlled by a single configuration file. If you have configured an Apache web server (and what admin hasn’t) you’ll be at home with ProFTPD’s configuration file. It’s also lightweight and modular, meaning you can add extensions to it, for example to encrypt file transfers, or hook it up with a directory server.

Untangle it’s a software appliance (based on Debian) that can help you in managing your network from content security to web caching, remote access to policy enforcement, all from one simple, drag & drop command center. Untangle is a privately held company that provides an open source network gateway for small businesses. They offer the core modules (12) as GPL software and others at payment, the cost depend on number of “client” and which modules you want to install, to start (or for home use) the Lite Package (free to download and use) is enough.

Mozilla released the latest version of thunderbird, Thunderbird 5.0, after 1 and a half year of Thunderbird 3.1. The major release has the version number 5.0 to match the latest Firefox version 5.0 that was released a week back. The open source cross-platform email client and news reader promises to be efficient fast and better! The post reviews the new features of Thunderbird 5.0!

I was interested in using rollApp for two reasons. First, it seems to provide a neat way to access those few Windows only applications that Linux users occasionally need access to. Although the functionality to upload an application and make it available through the rollApp infrastructure is not currently available, it is going to be a large part of the attraction of the service. Second, I wanted to be able to access my cloud based files, such as those stored on Dropbox, without having to sync my files on every device I use.

You’re addicted to virtual machines. You spin up a new one for every little niche workload. It’s like any other addiction, it’s costing you and the price is too high to pay.

Even after using the Linux 2.6.38 kernel power regression workaround for those systems affected by the ASPM (Active-State Power Management) bug that was detected by Phoronix, some Linux users still don't have their netbook/notebook battery lasting as long as they'd wish. For some, Microsoft Windows 7 is still performing better on the battery and/or Ubuntu 10.04 LTS and earlier. As I've said, there's still at least a couple more Linux power regressions and other areas for optimization that I've discovered and still haven't yet publicly documented in full, some in part due to still analyzing what's happening.

You energy-conserving* system administrators will enjoy learning to use loops in your scripts. Looping is a technique that allows you to repeat a process or set of commands indefintely or until the loop exhausts a particular list of items. For example, you want to copy a particular file to everyone’s home directory. How do you do it? Don’t say that you have a junior-level administrator do it. The correct answer is that you’d create a looping script to handle the job.

Nautilus Elementary Ambiance GTK theme by simplygreat is perhaps the most beautiful mod of default Ubuntu Ambiance theme. We have featured it already in our top themes for Ubuntu 11.04 post. Few things have changed lately and the latest Nautilus Elementary Ambiance theme now comes with a PPA. Installation has now become a breeze.

"Identi.ca still doesn't have a proper share button. For a long time I've looked for a good Identi.ca share button. One like Twitter's, one that: displays a count of posts, and lets people share the page with the post automatically containing the page title and URL. I looked so long without finding anything that I wrote one myself. And I've talked a little bit about the half-PHP-half-JavaScript Identi.ca share button that I wrote, but I really haven't shown it off or explained how to use it. It's kind of pointless to write it just for myself. So allow me to explain a few things."

This document describes how to install a Postfix mail server that is based on virtual users and domains, i.e. users and domains that are in a MySQL database. I'll also demonstrate the installation and configuration of Courier (Courier-POP3, Courier-IMAP), so that Courier can authenticate against the same MySQL database Postfix uses. The resulting Postfix server is capable of SMTP-AUTH and TLS and quota. Passwords are stored in encrypted form in the database. In addition to that, this tutorial covers the installation of Amavisd, SpamAssassin and ClamAV so that emails will be scanned for spam and viruses. I will also show how to install SquirrelMail as a webmail interface so that users can read and send emails and change their passwords.

I'm happy to announce the start of the second Fuduntu programming challenge! Situation - What we need in Fuduntu is a game! After all, we're the distro with the joke name and the home of the Linux lulz..