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One of the constants in my interactions with the Linux and open source communities is that they--all of them--are out there, in the big wide world, while I remain ensconced in my fortress of solitude here in Northern Indiana.

The NEW PCLinuxOS Magazine staff is pleased to announce the release of the June 2010 issue of the PCLinuxOS Magazine.

Novell have today announced their intention to release SUSE MeeGo as a fully supported netbook operating system. Novell expects their new OS, which is built on the codestream from the MeeGO Project established by a collaboration between Intel and Nokia, to be pre-installed on a wide variety of devices from OEMS in the next twelve months.

Security researchers will demonstrate a malicious "rootkit" program they've written for Google's Android phone next month at the Defcon hacking conference in Las Vegas.

Pidgin 2.7.1 which was released today fixes a 3-year-old bug related to MSN file transfers. Until now, Pidgin didn't support direct file transfers with the official MSN client making the direct file transfer very slow:

Google has made it clear by recent actions that it's going straight after Apple and Microsoft, but is this the smartest approach for a company that sells ads for a living?

Free/Open Source software is great for Public Administrations, but Free/Open data are even more important. Making public sector information really accessible, that is publishing online raw data in open formats and under open licenses, can both improve transparency in government and foster local economical and cultural activities. I have just started a research project on this topic, for an Italian University. Feedback is welcome!

With Apples market share growth increasing you really dont see a lot of companies moving from Windows-based computers to Macs. Sure, you will find mixed environments, with Macs predominantly in the creative departments. But, you dont typically see a complete departure from Windows. Well, Google is making the move from Windows based computers to Macs and Linux based computers.

As everyone knows, GNU/Linux grew up as a project to create a completely free alternative to Unix. Key parts were written by Richard Stallman while living the archetypal hacker's life at and around MIT, and by Linus Torvalds – in his bedroom.

This guide explains how to set up WebDAV with MySQL authentication (using mod_auth_mysql) on Apache2 on an Ubuntu 9.10 server. WebDAV stands for Web-based Distributed Authoring and Versioning and is a set of extensions to the HTTP protocol that allow users to directly edit files on the Apache server so that they do not need to be downloaded/uploaded via http://FTP. Of course, WebDAV can also be used to upload and download files.

People who use and promote free software cite various reasons for their choice, but do those reasons tell the whole story? If, as a community, we want free software to continue to grow in popularity, especially in the mainstream, we should understand better the true reasons for choosing it—especially our own.

Learn how to create and manage hard and symbolic links to files on your Linux® system. You can use the material in this article to study for the LPI 101 exam for Linux system administrator certification, or just to explore the differences between hard and soft, or symbolic, links and the best ways to link to files, as opposed to copying files.

Yukyung Technologies showed off a Viliv-branded, Android-based tablet at Computex equipped with a 10-inch, 1366 x 768 touchscreen. The Viliv X10 Tablet with Android offers an SD card reader, USB port, HDMI, webcam, and WiFi, and "could be an incredible iPad alternative," according to a hands-on Laptop story.

Once again, the buzz has grown surrounding rumors that Novell may soon be snapped up in a buyout. As many as 20 companies may have registered bids for the company, according to the Wall Street Journal. Matt Asay notes that an auction of the company could become a patent troll bonanza, and I have to agree. Let's remember that Novell is no spring chicken. It owns lots of patents and lots of legacy applications. Overall, it would not be good to see Novell bought out, partly because it's one of the few U.S.-based public companies focused primarily on open source.

The iPad has finally landed in the U.K., and I spent much of the past holiday weekend playing with mine. While investigating its use to sys admins, I came across this photo of someone using it to read shared docs from a server room. Trying out GoodReader, I established that you can transfer files from desktop to iPad. However, that's controlled from the desktop end, with the iPad viewed as a network share. I wanted to control the transfer from the iPad -- less forward planning required! You can also do this from an iPhone.

Check out how well the X-fi USB works for surround on my netbook in combination with VAAPI accelerated HD video. CPU load figures inside.

Intel's Computex press release highlight a variety of initiatives by the company, and slipped in added netbook support for the Linux-based MeeGo operating system, an open source joint venture between Nokia and Linux itself.

KDE has issued another update to the 4.4 desktop, applications and development libraries. KDE SC 4.4.4 brings, in addition to its funny version number, mainly small bugfixes that further polish the user experience. Most notable are probably sorting fixes for natural sorting in Dolphin, our nice file manager. The KDE release team also decided to do another release in the 4.4 series, 4.4.5, to come out next month, before fully concentrating on the 4.5 tree. SC 4.4.4 though is a stable update that is recommended to everyone running 4.4.3 or earlier. Packages from your favorite OS vendor will become available soon.

One of the companies that we have been collaborating with on some of the features for the Phoronix Test Suite has been CloudHarmony, which is a company that seeks to provide an assortment of information on different cloud computing platforms and offerings from the various firms. Using the Phoronix Test Suite they have been benchmarking a plethora of different cloud computing platforms and today they have published a huge batch of results -- benchmarks from over 150 different cloud server configurations from 20 different providers!

Spring is a lovely time of year, when the flowers bloom, the birds sing and community Linux projects release the fruit of their winter labours. Specifically, the Fedora and Ubuntu projects come to the end of their six-month cycles in the April/May time frame. This year’s yield is a bumper crop, with Fedora 13 including a number of interesting technologies and improvements and Ubuntu putting on its finest polish for a Long Term Support (LTS) release…