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The HURD was meant to be the true kernel at the heart of the GNU operating system. The promise behind the HURD was revolutionary – a set of daemons on top of a microkernel that was intended to surpass the performance of the monolithic kernels of traditional Unix systems and in doing so, give greater security, freedom and flexibility to the users – but it has yet to come down to earth.

KontrolPack is a cross-platform network controller. You can manage your computers and execute the same shell commands on them regardless of the operating system. On top of this, it provides an easy interface that can be used to view your LAN activity and manage your network without difficulties

In previous articles I have hinted that at Phoronix we are working to take advantage of the Btrfs file-system within the Phoronix Test Suite and Phoromatic to provide an interesting feature that will further expand our automated testing capabilities, but how does this file-system come into play? Well, here is what's being worked on and it should be of terrific value to many people. One of the features of Btrfs not found in other Linux file-systems (like EXT4) is support for copy-on-write snapshots / sub-volumes. With this Btrfs snapshotting support is the ability to mount different snapshots in a very easy manner and since they are copy-on-write, the disk storage requirements are not extreme

Cisco announced an enterprise-focused tablet based on a 1.6GHz Intel Atom, using Intel's upcoming x86 Android port. Due in the first quarter of 2011, the Cius offers a seven-inch touchscreen, 32GB of flash, 3G and 802.11 a/b/g/n communications, a 720p-capable front-facing videocam, a five-megapixel still camera, plus an optional HD audio docking station equipped with a telephone handset.

The cloud values Internet-based computing above all else, but maybe the comprehensive flexibility of FOSS (Free and Open Source Software) would provide a better vision for the future of computing?

Cross-platform efforts to provide interoperability with Windows on Linux systems may cease to be of importance in future as the acceptance of alternative OSes widens, say industry watchers. Linux users have relied on various methods to access Windows programs, one of which is the Wine project. The open source effort offers users a way of running some Windows programs by providing a substitute layer that encompasses APIs (application programming interfaces) and DLLs (dynamic-link libraries) for the Windows kernel.

A guest post from Mårten Mickos in response to Simon Phipps's statement of opposition to so-called "open core" models. Mickos argues that "for an open source company to become commercially successful, it needs to have an unfair advantage against its competition". He is the CEO of cloud start-up Eucalyptus and former CEO of MySQL.

It's common knowledge that Linux has a fair number of file systems. Some of these are unappreciated and can be very useful outside their "comfort zone". OCFS2 is a clustered file system initially contributed by Oracle and can be a great back-end file system for general, shared storage needs.

There are hundreds (at least!) of different Linux-based operating systems. Most people will be familiar with some of the big names — distributions like Ubuntu, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Debian and Mandriva. Most of the well-known Linux distributions are designed to be used as general purpose desktop operating systems or installed on servers. Here are some of the more unusual distros.

Paul Frields, who has been getting his paycheck from Red Hat to run the Fedora development Linux variant since 2008, is moving back inside the company to work on Enterprise Linux, and an outsider named Jared Smith is being brought in as the new Fedora Project Leader. Frields joined Red Hat in February 2008, replacing Max Spevack, another Red Hat employee who ran the open source Linux development product from February 2006 until Frields took over. Smith will take over the FPL position (which is a full-time job with a Red Hat paycheck) to steer the development of Fedora 14, something that Frields already got the ball rolling on.

Red Flag Software has demonstrated a 10.1-inch tablet running its new MeeGo Linux version of Midinux 3.0 on an Intel Moorestown Z6xx processor, says Tech.qq. Equipped with Wi-Fi and 3G, the NPad tablet will go on sale in the third quarter, says the report.

Sugar desktop environment was originally conceptualized to become the default desktop for OLPC (One Laptop Per Child) project. Sugar desktop is designed with the goal of being used by children for learning. The original Sugar desktop environment was repackaged and remixed for Ubuntu and it was called Ubuntu Sugar Remix.

When Red Hat, Synnex and a dozen major open source application providers launched the Open Source Channel Alliance in April 2009, it appeared to be a watershed event. But fast forward to mid-2010, and the Open Source Channel Alliance has been largely silent in recent months. Here’s the update.

If making money from open source was hard, extracting it from clouds might prove to be even more difficult. Particularly when your main rival on the x64 server is none other than Microsoft. Red Hat got its start as Linux magazine publisher that tucked a Linux CD in the back, and then evolved into the largest commercial Linux distributor in the world. The company added middleware from JBoss and created other middleware, such as its Enterprise MRG messaging, grid and realtime Linux variant, and virtualization software for desktops and servers. And now it has to position itself as an alternative to Microsoft as the platform upon which customers can build x64-based clouds.

As a homeschooling parent, I'm a big fan of educational software and I've written quite about about various programs in the past. But, as a programmer, I'm also a big fan of any program that makes computer programming more approachable by younger children. So, when I heard about Scratch, I was pretty enthusiastic.

The grep command is a hugely powerful way to search through files. Like many command line utilities, once you're comfortable using it, you will discover that it is surprisingly fast and accurate. However, many Linux users only bother to learn one or two grep options and then use them as a kind of one-size-fits-all approach to searching. A little time spent learning what grep can do will pay dividends – and there's nothing more satisfying than knowing exactly how to use a command to find something in a jiffy.

Desktop applications for 'Information Management' that go beyond conventional card-index style databases are hard to find. The ideas behind such software are perhaps not that well known, so a prototype program, Knowledge, has been developed to put them firmly into the public domain.

We have to face it. Linux isn’t going to win the desktop war any time soon, but perhaps we don’t need to. With products like MeeGo and Android, Linux is going to complete its domination of the embedded space, and find itself in every single home.

A few of us here at MTE have a bit of a crush on Chrome OS. It’s not just the system itself, it’s the fact that someone is finally taking the concept of an operating system in a new direction. We wrote a brief synopsis of Chrome OS shortly after the first announcement that showed how things stood at the very beginning, then more recently did a manual build guide. Building Chrome OS from source code can take several hours, and can be a somewhat challenging process even for an experienced Linux user. To help solve that problem, some developers have begun releasing custom Chrome OS builds with included installers and software tweaks. This guide will show you where to find the images and how to get the latest Hexxeh release, Flow, on to your netbook or VM from a Linux host.

In the early hours of June 18 the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the Tor Project released a beta of a Firefox extension dubbed “HTTPS Everywhere” with the intention of providing encryption of user data when visiting certain sites. According to the official announcement, “HTTPS Everywhere” will provide SSL encryption to sites like Google Search, Wikipedia, Twitter and Identi.ca, and Facebook.