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Oracle today announced Dell and HP will certify and resell Oracle Solaris, Oracle Enterprise Linux and Oracle VM on their respective x86 platforms. Customers will have full access to Oracle's Premier Support for Oracle Solaris, Oracle Enterprise Linux and Oracle VM running on Dell and HP servers. This will enable fast and accurate issue resolution and reduced risk in a company's operating environment.

I was really pleased to read the announcement that Lockheed Martin’s social networking platform, EurekaStreams, was released as an open source project today. Lockheed is a very conservative company, and while they’re happy to use open source internally and on projects for their customers, this is their first experiment with actually running a project themselves. I think it’s a big deal, not just for Lockheed Martin, but for large corporations who are considering a more open, more innovative approach to software development.

Do you remember the Frankencamera? The API used for the Frankencamera has been released for the Nokia n900 Phone, making the phones camera programmable.

Amazon announced a third generation of its Linux-based Kindle e-reader, featuring a lighter and smaller body, a screen claimed to have 50 percent better contrast, and a battery life of up to one month. Still available with 3G, the device is also offered in a Wi-Fi-only version that includes a WebKit-based browser, the company says.

A happy customer might tell someone. An unhappy customer tells everyone. Converting to Linux before taking a dose of reality might make you a very unhappy customer. Let's be perfectly honest. Linux isn't for everyone-yet. However, Ubuntu, Mandriva, and a few other distributions come close but for now, Linux is a little more difficult to use than Windows.

[For the edification of our readers, another KH article that leaves a bad taste in my mouth..- Scott]

Tabbed browsing has arguably had a significant impact on the way that people use the Web, but the feature hasn't really scaled to accommodate the increasing complexity of the average surfing session. The existing tab management and overflow handling mechanisms that are present in modern browsers are dated and suffer from some fundamental limitations that significantly detract from user productivity.

As part of his Python Development Masterclass, Kunal Deo drew up some golden rules when working with Python. Have you got any Python gems to share?

The recent history of the Amarok music player is like a scaled-down version of KDE's recent past. Like KDE 4, the Amarok 2 series was greeted with a user revolt that has only gradually quieted. And just like KDE 4 inspired Trinity KDE for those who preferred KDE 3, so Amarok 2 inspired Clementine, a fork of Amarok 1.4. The supporters of both Trinity KDE and Clementine make similar claims for their preferences: in both cases, the retro-apps are described as faster, easier to use, and outfitted with a better feature set than the most recent versions. But is that so?

A lot of people was looking forward to use Gnome 3.0 stable release this year on many distributions also known as Gnome shell ”technology part of Gnome 3.0“.

SimplyMEPIS is a simply wonderful distribution. It was the first to offer a complete out of the box experience all tied up in a pretty package. It would be fair to say that it was probably the inspiration for many of the easy-to-use distributions available today.

I’ve been using the latest version (10.04) of Ubuntu Linux since April and there’s a lot to like about it. I announced earlier this year that I was giving desktop Linux another look, and I went with Ubuntu because it is the Linux distribution most focused on a desktop OS. I have lots of observations about the Ubuntu experience and how it compares to Mac and Windows, but I’m going to save most of that feedback for another article.

Even though my goto operating system for servers is Red Hat Enterprise Linux, lately I have been working with Canonical’s Ubuntu Server 10.04 and I will admit that it has so far been a great experience. Just like what is expected of a server operating system, it is not intended for the general user base and focused more toward an experience Linux user; especially when by default there exists no GUI. That is one of the best parts in my personal opinions. Another great thing about the OS relates to its simplified installation process and how everything is automatically installed and to an extent configured should you choose to configure the server as a LAMP, DNS, etc. A couple of years ago, I had reviewed an older 8.10 release here and here and wasn’t impressed. Now, I can see things have changed for the better. Unfortunately I will not be discussing this. But before I get any deeper into this article, I wish to share my experiences with 10.04.

Since GNOME 3.0 has been delayed until March, 2011, it seems there's enough time to rethink the way GNOME Shell looks, especially since a lot of people don't like it (especially from the usability point of view). Some new GNOME Shell mockups were uploaded to GIT recently, showing a lot of similarities with Ubuntu / UNE:

Richard Stallman answers the top 25 questions from reddit readers.

A fascinating interview ...

This tutorial shows how you can set up an OpenSUSE 11.3 desktop that is a full-fledged replacement for a Windows desktop, i.e. that has all the software that people need to do the things they do on their Windows desktops. The advantages are clear: you get a secure system without DRM restrictions that works even on old hardware, and the best thing is: all software comes free of charge.

Since Intel’s N450 Atom processor boasts such excellent power-saving capabilities over previous chips, it has powered almost all netbooks released in the same period - Toshiba’s mini NB300 was no exception…

In my opinion Linux Mint is one of the top 3 distributions out today for basic desktop usage. It features incredibly useful Mint-specific tools that make it the perfect distro for beginners. All flavors of Linux Mint usually come with a jaw dropping look and feel. I decided to look at both of these while using the recent release of Linux Mint 9 KDE and take some screenshots along the way.

It's a sad truth that advancements in technology often make jobs obsolete, usually sooner than most people are ready. The more savvy workers learn to keep up with the times, and adapt their skills to make the best use of their experience, without becoming redundant themselves. The role of Systems Administrator may soon be one of these changing jobs, simultaneously much less, and much more, than what it is today.

I applaud the Indian effort, just as I applauded the effort by OLPC to create an ever-lower priced entry into what people hope is a more inexpensive way and effective way to deliver information to the masses of people unable to afford a 400 USD laptop or 300 USD net-book. In some countries the cost of these devices is almost doubled through import duties levied by the government, so every dollar in cost savings is effectively two dollars saved by the end customer. And for people who make a very low wage (or who are unemployed), this amount effectively doubles or quadruples again. Having the “pad” manufactured in India will reduce those duties to zero, and the pride of having developed something in their home land will encourage younger Indians to contribute to computer engineering.

On the heels of the highly-anticipated release of Wine 1.2, CodeWeavers, Inc. today announced the simultaneous release of CrossOver 9.1 and CrossOver Games 9.1 for both Mac and Linux.