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I looked at three different ways how to popularize Linux and make it more mainstream as well as a household name. In the post I will look specifically at how I would sell Linux to schools, examining all the aspects of such a deployment and how I would do it and what distro and software I would use.

Like any messy love triangle, Nokia has a situation on its hands as it runs into the arms of Microsoft while trying to extricate itself from Symbian in a graceful way.

James Gosling, the father of Java, has joined Google – despite his previous criticism of the company's Java-happy Android operating system. Gosling announced his new job with a post to his personal blog entitled "Next step on the road", but did not provide specifics. "Through some odd twists in the road over the past year, and a tardis encountered along the way, I find myself starting employment at Google today. One of the toughest things about life is making choices. I had a hard time saying 'no' to a bunch of other excellent possibilities. I find it odd that this time I’m taking the road more travelled by, but it looks like interesting fun with huge leverage," he wrote

Big Fat Alien, a Kelowna based indie game development studio is coming up with new fun space explorer and platformer for Linux in this April called BEEP. In this game you play a role of robot that is sent to space to explore and find what lies beyond earth. You are in control of a space ship that can travel in the solar system. Land on any planet or a mass of land and your adventure starts.

Last week I introduced tmux, a handy "terminal multiplexer." This week, we'll take a look at basic tmux usage and configuration. To start tmux, just run tmux or tmux new-session if you're feeling verbose. Then you'll have a session with one window and your usual login shell. To add a second window, run Ctrl-b c. (Same thing if you want a third, fourth, and so on.)

OpenVPN, or Open Virtual Private Network, is a tool for creating networking "tunnels" between and among groups of computers that are not on the same local network. This is useful if you have services on a local network and need to access them remotely but don't want these services to be publicly accessible. By integrating with OpenSSL, OpenVPN can encrypt all VPN traffic to provide a secure connection between machines.

LXer Feature: 28-Mar-2011

Upgrading the default KDE email client (KMail) was supposed to be a trivial task, but it ended up as a divorce of sorts forcing me to re-kindle old flames from days gone past... in having to flirt with Google.

Editor's note: Please read Mr Stephenson's (of OpenSuse's KDE team) reply to this article here - hkwint

More cores mean better performance, right? That's not what Amdahl says. Learn one of the foundations of parallel computing in "Amdahl's Law." Prepare yourself for math. And lawn mowing.

Martin Gräßlin has been making some very interesting advancements to KWin in the past year or so, after having issues with open-source Mesa drivers, this German developer has made this compositing window manager for the KDE Plasma desktop run on OpenGL ES 2.0 and even optional support for OpenGL 3.x. He wouldn't mind some help though, so this summer for KDE's involvement in Google's Summer of Code he has proposed three fairly interesting projects, two of which benefit KWin on Wayland.

When tweaking photos in digiKam, you probably would want to keep the originals intact. And this is where the Versioning feature can come in rather handy. It allows you to save each edited version of an original photo as a separate image complete with a list of all applied actions.

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.