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Linux User & Developer magazine reviews four of the best netbook distros currently available in a bid to uncover the ultimate open source user experience for your netbook computer…

..“Netflix used an open-source network, the U.S. Postal Service, to launch an alternative distribution business without asking anyone for permission,” said Tim Wu, a Columbia University law professor and author of “The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires.” “Now they are using another open-source network, the Internet, to transform the business. It is much easier for Netflix to change, because they don’t have to undergo a kind of religious conversion like media companies will have to.”

Community interest in continuing the development of Google's Wave communication platform has led to a proposal to migrate portions of the code base to the Apache Software Foundation (OSM). The proposal was posted to the Apache Incubator wiki by Google and Novell employees, as well as several independent developers. The Apache Incubator is the place where potential future Apache projects can be submitted to the open source organisation for consideration.

With Xen Domain 0 support finally going into the mainline Linux kernel, those interested in virtualization atop Fedora are now looking at getting the Fedora Xen host support back up to speed for the next release (Fedora 15) or by the time that Fedora 16 rolls out. The Linux kernels since Fedora Core 8 have not been capable of Xen Dom0 hosting, but with the Linux 2.6.37 upstream merge that brings pvops-based support, work is getting underway within the Fedora community to better prepare this KVM alternative.

The latest beta release of Pardus Linux sports a slew of tweaks and under-the-hood improvements. But does the new release make the distro a viable alternative to the Ubuntus and Fedoras of this world? Dmitri Popov investigates…

Novell has moved to quell growing concerns that it has sold Linux out to Microsoft as part of its Attachmate deal. On Wednesday, Novell chief marketing officer John Dragoon issued a short statement saying that Novell – not Microsoft – owns the copyrights on Unix. Sentence two of Dragoon's terse, three-sentence statement said simply: "Novell will continue to own Novell's Unix copyrights following completion of the merger as a subsidiary of Attachmate."

CPUfreq is the part of the Linux kernel that changes your CPU's frequency to save power or increases it to make your system run faster. Obviously the settings you use there are essential for you performance and battery consumption. I read an extensive article by IBM some time ago analysing the different Linux cpu frequency governors. It makes lots of fancy tests and has great diagrams etc. What it boils down to is that these are the perfect setttings for low power at high performance in Linux.

Opera does it again. Latest Opera 11 beta comes with a new impressive feature called Tab Stacking which is in many ways similar to Tab Candy in Firefox 4.0, but a lot more practical approach to the same problem.

Its days are numbered and the downfall of the Wintel monopoly has been forecast for some time. Intel has indeed lost significant ground to ARM chips, and Microsoft faces equally annoying competition from the likes of Google's Android, which is climbing onboard practically every computer that isn't a desktop PC or server.

This might not be a news at all for most among you, but I was totally surprised when I first came to know about Nero Linux 4, a Linux version of Nero CD burning tool.

One way of creating a mobile version of your Drupal website is to use the Mobile Tools module with the Nokia Mobile Drupal theme. Though the theme is named "Nokia Mobile", it will allow visitors to view your site on any modern platform: Android, Iphone, Windows Phone 7, Blackberry, Ipad etc. I tested it after installation using my G1 and I was extremely happy with the results.

Yesterday we shared benchmarks of the ATI R600 Gallium3D driver compared against the classic Mesa R600 driver and then the proprietary AMD Catalyst driver. The proprietary driver was much faster than the open-source drivers were, but the Gallium3D driver did possess higher performance in most of the tests than with the classic Mesa driver. This is similar to the R300 Gallium3D driver being faster than its now-deprecated R300 classic driver. Meanwhile though Intel continues to back only their classic Mesa DRI driver and there are no signs of them switching over to the Gallium3D architecture anytime soon. It is not as if Intel's current Mesa driver is feature-complete and performance-optimized as our tests from earlier this year show Intel's Linux graphics performance being far behind their Windows driver. In this article though we are seeing where the Intel Mesa performance is at when using the very latest DRM and Mesa code.

To be honest, I am one of those troglodytes who hates KDE4 and GNOME, and I prefer some good ol' KDE 3.5.x. Until recently, I had been using XFCE4. It came closest in offering me the features I was wanting, but something still rubbed me the wrong way. I had known about the Trinity project for some time. Trinity is the continuation of KDE 3.5 and they've made a release. KDE 3.5.12. It's relatively stable and feature complete.

Open source has won. Oh, how time flies. When I started writing in Database in May 2003, my first column was about how the ICT Ministry had got the budget PC programme all wrong. ICT Minister Surapong had announced his great success at negotiating the inclusion of Windows XP and Office XP at just 1,500 baht, a 90 percent discount. He saw it as success. I saw it as capitulation.

You thought you had it all working, didn't you? And then you find out that your process you thought was running and collecting data hasn't reported anything for two hours. Or maybe it's something on the desktop -- your browser has frozen and isn't responding. Or suddenly everything's gotten really slow and you're not sure why. And this happens every few days, and you're tired of it.

The Selenium project has some very useful tools for testing your web applications, including an excellent Firefox extension. In this tutorial we get started with Selenium IDE and RC…

Novell's copyrights for the Unix operating system will remain under Attachmate's control as part of the companies' pending merger, a Novell spokesman has revealed.

"Canadian copyright law promises to dominate discussion in Ottawa over the coming weeks as hearings on Bill C-32, the controversial copyright bill, are set to begin within a few days."

Two days have now passed since Novell announced the high-level terms of its proposed sale, and so far the press has not been able to prize any additional details out of the parties involved.  But if you know how to read between the lines, there's a lot more information there for the taking.

One of the major concepts of creating checks is to remember that all plugins with Nagios will require three elements to be configured. There must be a host definition, a service definition and a command definition. Think of it as a triangle each time you want to use a plugin.