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Microsoft Corp. struck a deal with San Francisco officials to provide an online email system for the city's workforce, beating out competing products from Google Inc. and IBM Corp. Company and the city representatives said the new tool, Microsoft Exchange Online, will reduce costs, increase efficiency and improve stability. Most of San Francisco's roughly 23,000 workers are currently using desktop versions of Microsoft Exchange and IBM's Lotus Notes, with seven different installations running in various departments. The city will pay the Redmond, Wash. software company a little more than $1 million per year for the new product. There will be some up front migration costs, but the city expects to save money in the second year of the deal.

Attachmate named Nils Brauckmann president of its new SUSE business unit -- and also affirmed its commitment to SUSE Linux, the OpenSUSE project, SUSE Studio, and SUSE Manager. Aside from shedding the Mono project, all SUSE projects will be continued, and there are no plans to change packing or pricing, says the company.

The Japan Prize, one of the highest honors awarded for outstanding contribution to science and technology, was awarded jointly this year to Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie for the creation of UNIX. The prize is normally given to the recipients at a lavish banquet in Tokyo attended by the emperor. However, due to the April earthquake and tsunami, the prizes this year were distributed at the honorees' place of work. I was able to attend the ceremony for Ken Thompson, held at Google headquarters, where he currently works. After the ceremony, he consented to this exclusive interview.

BoxeeBoxTips.com has launched its first "Win a Boxee Box" contest. The contest, which continues through June 30, will award a D-Link Boxee box to the submitter of the most popular Boxee Box tweak, how-to, or tip aimed at helping users get the most from the iconic Linux-based devices.

Eveinstaller is great tool similar to Ubuntu Tweak, it lets you install the basic applications in Ubuntu 11.04 and LinuxMint with a simple click, also using this tools, you can add Medibuntu, getdeb , Playdeb repositories , or install elementary theme, Mint theme..., for Desktop, install also with a simple click Gnome3, Unity 2D, Unity 3D and more.

This morning I wrote about the troublesome experience of Intel Sandy Bridge graphics under Ubuntu 11.04 as the packages found in the Natty repository are outdated and contain only the initial "SNB" support. In the mainline upstream code, Sandy Bridge is supported much better, offers faster performance, and possesses other new features (e.g. VA-API encode), except in the past week the Intel SNB Linux code temporarily broke hard.

A major new independent report to the UK Prime Minister on his country's intellectual property laws is out. Digital Opportunity: A Review of Intellectual Property and Growth could hardly make its position clearer: the UK has lost its way when it comes to copyright policy.

The latest VirtualBox 4.0.8 finally comes with GNOME Shell support. I've tested it in Ubuntu 11.04, using a Fedora 15 virtual machine and Gnome Shell worked great.

Many long term Ubuntu users have been quite critical towards Ubuntu's new Unity interface. Unity has its share of issues which Canonical is hopeful of rectifying by the next major release, Ubuntu 11.10 Oneiric Ocelot. In the mean time, if you are not at all able to adjust with the revamped albeit buggy Unity desktop, there are a bunch of absolutely awesome Ubuntu based distros which runs on other interfaces like KDE, XFCE, LXDE etc. Here is how you install each of them as a different session in Ubuntu 11.04 Natty Narwhal.

To celebrate CodeWeavers 15th Birthday, we've rolled out our finest product ever: CrossOver Platinum Edition! CrossOver Platinum encapsulates the very best of what it means to be a part of the CodeWeavers family. It's not just software it's a lifestyle!

Open source web content management systems may have a lot going for them, but they are going to need to appeal to marketers if they want to succeed in the enterprise -- and that may mean getting less geeky.

CodeWeavers, Inc., which provides the celebrated CrossOver software enabling Mac and Linux users to run Windows software on their computers without the need of a Microsoft license, this week marks its 15th birthday by releasing its birther video and offering its new CrossOver Bundle product at a price that corresponds with the day of the month.

Computers have long been a rather expensive luxury for those who could afford them. Desktops have drastically fallen in price, but with a cost of roughly $300.00 for a modest machine the price is still nothing to laugh at. Laptops have fallen in price as well, but $500.00 is still a lot of money. Worldwide, our economies are not in the best shape. Along with coffee, people tighten their technology budget. It's a natural reaction. Food, water, gasoline, car maintenance, and home maintenance are far more important in the survival sense. The tightening of that budget may negatively impact children who are interested in technology. It's also rather obvious that there are parts of the world that are not quite as well off as others. Luckily, their are some very bright, very clever people in the world. It just so happens that a few of them love technology and Linux. The Raspberry Pi Foundation is a UK based charity that has found a solution to this problem.

When Google introduced ChromeOS last week at Google I/O, it might have added to consumer and IT confusion by adding yet another operating system to Android and Honeycomb.

The Google Chrome developers at Google proudly announced last evening (May 17th) the immediate availability for download and testing of the first development version for the upcoming Google Chrome 13 web browser, for Linux, Windows, Macintosh and Chrome Frame platforms.

Linux has a reputation for being available in many shapes and sizes, but now there is a version of Linux that promises to beat all-comers on both size and price. The new Linux PC, created by UK game developer David Braben, is not much larger than a thumb, but packs enough power to replace a lightweight laptop.

Last week marked the official release of Adobe Flash Player 10.3 for Linux and other supported operating systems. Sadly, however, the Linux release was limited to 32-bit and their x86_64 Flash binary remains living in the "Square" 10.2 land. There also is no Linux video acceleration support outside of NVIDIA's VDPAU interface. To the pleasure of many Linux users, this is changing.

Step aside, Google Docs, there's a new JavaScript tour de force in town. I'm talking about the latest project from programmer Fabrice Bellard, a JavaScript program that emulates an x86 processor fast enough to run Linux in a Web browser. The JavaScript PC Emulator can do the work of an Intel 486 chip from the 1990s, but doesn't have a built-in floating point unit for numeric processing, Bellard said. Happily, Linux itself can emulate that, and a version of the operating system's core--2.6.20--runs on the foundation.

Part 2 of this series details how pseudo's root emulation works by tracking the path of an intercepted call to the database and back. Get a detailed explanation of various mechanisms in pseudo; the basic IPC model, interactions with the database, and an analysis of what exactly happens when the client needs to talk to the server. If you want to replace open(2) with your own code, this is where you find out how.

Have you ever wondered how Google, Facebook and other Internet giants process their massive workloads? Billions of requests are served every day by the biggest players on the Internet, resulting in background processing involving datasets in the petabyte scale. Of course they rely on Linux and cloud computing for obtaining the necessary scalability and performance. The flexibility of Linux combined with the seamless scalability of cloud environments provide the perfect framework for processing huge datasets, while eliminating the need for expensive infrastructure and custom proprietary software. Nowadays, Hadoop is one of the best choices in open source cloud computing, offering a platform for large scale data crunching.