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It’s been a bumper beta 24 hours here on the brewing-browsers El Reg desk, after Google shoved out a Chrome 6.0.472.33 build yesterday. A developer build of Chrome 6 has been available since June, and now Google has effectively promoted most of that code to beta status for Windows, Mac and Linux fans. But there are exceptions.

Besides features like SystemD replacing SysVInit and a much faster JPEG compression/decompression library, one of the other proposals for Fedora 14 was to actually ship it on time. Red Hat's Fedora project has had a poor track record lately of shipping their alpha, beta, and final releases on time and none of the past five releases at least have actually made it out on their due date. John Poelstra, the Fedora Program Manager, sought to change this with Fedora 14, but the entire release schedule has already slipped.

One the coolest file systems in User Space has got to be GlusterFS. It has a very unique architecture that allows it to be configured for specific storage requirements and scenarios. It can be used as a high-performance parallel file system, or a cloud based file system, or even a simple NFS server. All of this in user-space. Could GlusterFS represent the future of file system development for Linux?

New Versions of the KDE Development Platform, the Plasma Desktop and Netbook workspaces, and many applications are released today with the version number 4.5.0. The KDE team focused on the usability, performance and stability of many previously introduced new features and technologies. Below, find the 3 separate announcements for each of KDE's products: The Development Platform, the Applications Compilation and the Plasma Workspaces.

Linux is broadly available on mobile devices, but competing implementations could lead to problems down the road for developers and confusion for customers, according to a Qualcomm executive.

This tutorial describes the installation of a clustered web, email, database and DNS server to be used for redundancy, high availability and load balancing on Debian 5 with the ISPConfig 3 control panel. GlusterFS will be used to mirror the data between the servers and ISPConfig for mirroring the configuration files. I will use a setup of two servers here for demonstration purposes but the setup can scale to a higher number of servers with only minor modifications in the GlusterFS configuration files.

Ubuntu Light themes were introduced as part of the larger Ubuntu branding overhaul that took place just before the release of Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid Lynx. Now for the first time, major changes are happening to Ubuntu Light themes prior to the next major release, Ubuntu 10.10 'Maverick Meerkat' ie.

Vector Linux is a lightweight Linux distribution based on Slackware Linux. Today the SOHO (Small Office/Home Office) Edition of Vector Linux 6.0 was released, this edition is targeted at modern computers in an office environment.

Make no mistake about it: Open source developers can be a very passionate bunch. At the LinuxCon conference, the topic of why Google Android code is not part of Linux was the subject of some intense discussion. One such discussion became so heated that a panelist wound up telling a combative audience member to "shut up" before asking them to leave.

While Linux 2.6.36 development continues apace, a number of new stable releases iron out various quirks in previous versions. New versions of PowerTop and graphics drivers for AMD and NVIDIA graphics chips offer numerous enhancements and bug fixes.

Hewlett-Packard (HP) is preparing a "Zeen" Android e-reader that interfaces with a new HP printer, says an industry report. Meanwhile, HP has postponed its WebOS-based "Hurricane" tablet to 1Q 2011, and the company -- beleaguered by the recent resignation of CEO Mark Hurd -- lost the lead designer of the WebOS-based Palm Pre, say reports.

Two brother Linux distros battle each other. It's a war of the peppermint gargantuas! When I was a kid, I used to watch the Creature Double Feature on channel 56. The Creature Double Feature was something I loved tuning into every Saturday, it was basically a double blast of monster movies. What could be better than two monster movies for a kid to watch on a Saturday?

If LinuxCon 2009 was all about the desktop, then the underlying theme of LinuxCon 2010 is the desktop is dead, at least as we know it and the new desktop meme will be a mobile device. But, as pointed out by Rob Chandhok in his keynote, the mobile platform has a long way to go, both in terms of hardware standardization and software. The problem is there are simply too many choices.

Linux is not known for gaming, and when most people think of Linux games, they think of a few free and open source games that are good but not numerous. Nevertheless, there is a growing pool of free and commercial independent gaming developers who are pushing the envelope by offering their games on multiple platforms, including Linux. They are available for purchase and download right over the Internet (often DRM-free), and some of them are pretty high quality. Here are five more you might not have played but are definitely worth giving a try.

Zenoss Inc., the corporate sponsor of Zenoss Core, today announced the release of the 2010 Open Source Systems Management Survey. Based on more than 950 completed surveys gathered at the USENIX Large Installation System Administration conference each year from 2006 and 2009 and within the Zenoss open source systems management community from 2007 through 2009, the survey’s purpose was to determine usage patterns for systems management software and particularly the usage of open source software to solve IT management needs of large organizations.

Journalist and digital rights activist Danny O'Brien came to GUADEC to try to educate GNOME hackers about the threats facing journalists, their computers, and their online communication from governments and organized crime. But free software can help, so he wanted to outline the features that he thinks could be added to desktops to help secure them and protect the privacy of all users, not just journalists. Part of his job as internet advocacy coordinator for the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) is to talk to internet developers and "persuade them to think about how journalists in repressive regimes are affected" by the choices those developers make.

There's no question that gaming on the Android platform has heretofore been relatively underwhelming, but that looks like it's all about to change. It seems that Sony Ericsson -- a company that has yet to even introduce an Android 2.0 device -- is at work on a project to redefine gaming on Google's mobile platform. We now know (via a trusted source) that the company is actively and heavily developing a brand new gaming platform, ecosystem, and device (possibly alongside Google) which are already in the late stages of planning. And we've got the goods on it.

In this article we focus on "Global" Actions, that is, those that should always be enabled. These types of Actions are not very different from standard Swing Actions. For example, you might want to create "New Task" and "Edit Task" Actions that can be invoked from the menubar and toolbar of the TaskManager.

Remobo is a free software which can be used to replace the paid versions of existing difficult to use VPN setups as it can create a VPN instantly and securely. It lets you login easily and add users to your buddy list, and create a secure network for you. In private chat messaging, the file sharing client helps share information within the buddy list as well. Remobo lets you control your computer and access files securely while away from the system.

Here is yet another small hack that a lot of you might find really useful. This hack adds a useful 'Open in Terminal' option in the right click menu in GNOME/Nautilus.