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Linux doesn't have a CEO. Consequently, there's no annual keynote hosted by a charismatic alpha male. But if it did, and if there were a conference covering the first half of this year, the first speech would start with three words: "Linux is winning". Firstly, a market research firm in the US called The NPD Group revealed that sales of Google's Android platform overtook those of Apple's iPhone in the first quarter of 2010, propelling itself into second place behind the waning RIM.

We use HootSuite at the Los Angeles Daily News to manage a growing herd of social-networking accounts across Twitter and Facebook. But the one thing that HootSuite doesn't do is update Identi.ca, the free, open-source microblogging service powered by Status.Net that many FOSS advocates, including myself, use in addition to (or in some cases instead of) Twitter. Luckily there is a solution, which Paul Frields of the Fedora Project outlined for members of the Fedora marketing team.

LXer Feature: 10-Aug-2010

When discussing 'migration' costs from one platform or piece of software to another, I noted many people fail to understand the idea of 'exit costs'. In this article, I present my explanation of exit costs, and I hope this article may serve as a reference to exit costs in the future. Especially people involved with decision-taking in IT are encouraged to read this article!

This post provides a brief overview of each distro on today’s “DistroWatch 10? list, ranging from the beginner-friendly Ubuntu, to the sysadmin-oriented Gentoo.

iX in it’s current form is merely a basic port of Ubuntu to the armv6 architecture and uses xfce4 as it’s window manager, this is only a starting point to ensure that the hardware available in the iPhoneLinux kernel is used by iX. My long term plans are to create an X11 (or a similar alternative) based OS that can be used as a viable alternative to iOs or Android on the iPhone this will hopefully open up a whole new spectrum of oppurtunites for the device using packages available in Ubuntu’s ports.ubuntu.com repo and other sources that are compatible with ARM (the debian repositories for example).

The built-in IVR (Interactive Voice Response) engine is a powerful component of the FreeSWITCH system. It allows messages to be played and interactive responses (usually touch-tones) to be processed, in order to direct calls to particular destinations. It can ultimately allow callers to hear information without needing to speak to a live person, select options that enable/disable features, or enter data that can be used in account, billing, or other operations.

A program to help keep software and device makers on the right side of open-source licensing law has been unveiled by the Linux Foundation. The Open Compliance Program includes tools, training, consulting, and self-assessment to help you comply with the myriad of open-source licenses. Linux Foundation executive director Jim Zemlin told The Reg that the program provides a ready-made mechanism for companies to understand and deal with licenses.

If you have anything more than a small home network, you need to be monitoring the status of your systems to ensure they are providing the services they were designed to provide. Rihards Olups has created a comprehensive reference and usability guide for the latest version of Zabbix that anyone being tasked with implementing should have by their side.

Last time in the KDE contributor interview series, we talked with the KDE developer Stephen Kelly from KDE PIM. We've been digging around in the KDE interview vaults and found this interesting discussion we had with Albert Astals Cid on 12 May 2010. Albert is well known in KDE from his work with KDE España, as maintainer of Okular and the KDE Edu applications. The original interview in Italian is also available.

After months of silence, OpenSolaris supporters have had enough and launched the Illumos project. Described as a "spork" of OpenSolaris, rather than a true fork, Illumos is a misguided attempt to keep the Solaris legacy OS alive for another generation. Too bad it's doomed from the start.

Just like previous releases this new release Peppermint OS One-08042010 is based on Ubuntu and includes the LXDE desktop environment with web applications integrated into the desktop using Prism. It includes many bug fixes, new artwork and several new features.

Just uploaded to the Ubuntu Lucid repository for Ubuntu 10.04 LTS (and we imagine it will appear shortly in Maverick too for Ubuntu 10.10) is a new package called canonical-census, which marks its initial release. Curious about what this package provides, we did some digging and found it's for tracking Ubuntu installations by sending an "I am alive" ping to Canonical on a daily basis.

To be frank, though we had posts about Ubuntu Tweak and similar app like Ailurus before, I never liked the idea of 'application to control other applications'(over simplification may be). This time I decided to give a good neat try at Ubuntu Tweak 0.5.5. And I have to say, I was quite literally blown away.

This article explains how you can cache your web site contents with Apache's mod_cache on Debian Lenny. If you have a high-traffic dynamic web site that generates lots of database queries on each request, you can decrease the server load dramatically by caching your content for a few minutes or more (that depends on how often you update your content).

In which the world ends - or doesn't. You'll just have to read it to find out.

Every now and then, I need to fill a blank OpenOffice.org Writer document with dummy text. While OpenOffice.org comes with a built-in feature that allows you to do that (type dt and press the F3 function key), it generates only one paragraph at a time and doesn't allow you to specify your own dummy text.

The Sun PDF Import Extension is one of the most popular OpenOffice.org extensions ever created. For the last two years, it has been near the top of the list of most popular downloads on the OpenOffice.org Extensions site -- and no wonder, considering that it is a free replacement for Adobe Acrobat, which is currently priced at $449US. However, the extension does have some quirks and limitations that you have to learn to work around.

The Linux Foundation (LF) is offering live streaming of many of the keynotes and conference sessions from its LinuxCon conference, being held this week in Boston.

Thanks to DoctorMos it is possible to mount google docs as a folder on your computer using gdocs mount GTK. Now instead of uploading your documents to google docs using a web browser, you can edit them in your favorite word processor and save them to a virtual drive in Nautilus.

In the past few years we’ve seen a lot of hardware-based innovation (or at the very least expansion). New products and markets have arisen built around hardware and its use. Smartphones, tablets, netbooks and gaming systems are all examples of markets that have expanded and some if not most of the products make use of free software. This is great but why does it seem to be that the free-software products are second-generation, playing catch up. Where is the device innovation driven by free software? Read the full article at Free Software Magazine.