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No, I am not going to tell you her real name. She is a criminal now and I made her so. 86 years of lawful living, survived without so much as a speeding ticket. Her now-blemished essence is now the foulest of stain on my duplicitous hands.

One of the hiccups in Bordeaux, a for-profit, costs-$20 implementation of Wine that allows for easy installation of a variety of Windows applications in Unix/Linux environments, is that while installing the IrfanView image editor is clickably easy, users are on their own when it comes to the IrfanView plugins. Thankfully that's no longer the case.

Last week we provided an introduction to the Linux system logs. (See Logs: Your Linux System’s Lovable Worker Bees.) Now, what will you, as a system administrator, use to watch logs? Logwatch, of course. As so many others have succinctly put it, messing with log files is a royal pain in the backside. Logwatch makes the experience of keeping track of system activity almost painless for you.

The primary purpose of the slave server is to provide a backup to the primary master server should it go down for any reason. The major difference between the master server and the slave is where they get their data.

Linux's share of the desktop market grew to 1.13 percent, says Net Applications, making Linux the only OS to improve its position in May. Meanwhile, Linux server share dropped to 20.8 percent, but revenue share grew to 16.8 percent, says IDC, and UC Berkeley's Top500 survey shows Linux running on 91 percent of the world's 500 fastest supercomputers.

Profiting from Linux doesn't involve an obvious winning formula. There are as many different business models as there are distributions, and you seldom find much overlap between those that are working. Instead, you find something more like the world of medieval patronage. It's a place where the great distribution families fight for favour, sponsoring masked balls and conferences, while trying to attract geek heroes to work under their flags.

The Linux Professional Institute (LPI), the world's premier Linux certification organization, announced in partnership with Ma3bar a series of GNU/Linux "Train-the-Trainer" workshops for Linux professionals from throughout the Middle East on June 9-12 and June 14-17, 2010.

OpenOffice.org surpassed 150 million downloads, 30 million of which came from the 3.2.0 release earlier this year.

Application launchers play an integral part in making the Linux desktop a more productive environment to work and play. They represent small utilities which offers the desktop user a convenient access point for application software and can make a real boost to users' efficiency.

Ubuntu lives in a special place between Windows and Mac OS X reserved only for Linux: more shine than Windows, less than OS X, resulting in a steaming pile of mediocrity. Since I've been involved in the Ubuntu world, I've witnessed countless examples of settling for the middle ground - it works, it does what it's meant to, but it doesn't stretch that extra bit further to make the user experience more enjoyable and hence the customers happier.

Embedded Linux is more popular now than ever, but because of its ease-of-use, flexibility, and, importantly, free licensing cost, developers have taken the mobile OS in a variety of directions. Google's Android, Intel and Nokia's MeeGo, and Palm's webOS are just three Linux-based distros found on mobile device today, with Ubuntu Lite both entering the tablet scene later this year.

Vinux is a remastered version of the popular Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid Lynx distribution optimised for the needs of blind and partially sighted users.. It provides three screen readers, two full-screen magnifiers, global font-size and colour changing facilities

My Ubuntu rants hold not a candle to this reasoned, impassioned commentary on what's wrong with open-source software in general — and the Ubuntu project in particular — from Benjamin Humphrey, who just happens to be a Ubuntu contributor. It appears in the nearly never-negative OMG! Ubuntu! blog with the title "Many hands make the light work; few make it shine."

If you have multiple machines in the same workspace, you probably use a KVM to manage them -- or maybe you even have multiple keyboards and mice. There's a better way! Synergy lets you share a single keyboard and mouse between multiple networked machines -- even across operating systems!

Canonical, the commercial presence behind the Ubuntu Linux distribution for servers and desktops, is in business to make money as well as to put out the best free operating system it can. Some businesses won't pay for support, some want basic support, and others (particularly companies making big investments in Linux for the first time) want all the hand-holding they can get. To better address the needs of different sets of customers, Canonical is packaging up its support services in a new way, which it calls Ubuntu Advantage.

Dropbox is a great way to synchronize files across multiple machines. A free basic Dropbox account gives you 2GB of storage, while pro paid accounts give you 50GB or 100GB of storage space. Dropbox works great on desktops; there are clients for Linux, Windows, and OS X. There are GUI tools provided to manage the Dropbox and set it up for these operating systems.

While Ubuntu and its derivatives (such as Ubuntu Server and Ubuntu Netbook) are most popular on x86 and x86_64 systems along with a growing presence on ARM-based devices, ports of Ubuntu have been available for SPARC and IA64 architectures too. However, as the quality of these ports have been degrading, the IA64 and SPARC ports of Ubuntu Linux may be decommissioned during the Ubuntu 10.10 "Maverick Meerkat" development cycle.

Ever since I have started learning and using Linux, this is something I always thought "was happening" and never knew when it will "really happen". And the thing is called mass Linux adoption. Why is it necessary? How is the likes of Android, MeeGo and Chrome OS is going to change the world as we know it forever?

NPR Logo National Public Radio (NPR), a non-profit membership organisation, has announced that it plans to open source its NPR Android application. Created in 1970, NPR is a privately and publicly funded US media organisation that produces and distributes news, talk and entertainment programming. The NPR app for Android devices was created by Google developer Michael Frederick in his spare time. With the application, users can read, listen or create playlists of NPR stories, share them with friends and live stream audio from hundreds of NPR radio stations.

A simple guide to the many mobile operating systems available. Android, Symbian, Bada, WebOS. The list goes on. The list of smartphone operating systems is growing by the day. Many are open source, a good number are proprietary and some are barely out of beta.