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One of the common complaints about Linux is that there are too many different editions (or “distributions”) to choose from, and only a hardcore nerd can tell them apart. Well, it's true, but you can safely ignore 99 per cent of them. Welcome to The Register's guaranteed impartiality-free guide. Tomorrow, we'll tell you how to get them, burn them and set them up to dual-boot with Windows and on Wednesday there will be a guide to tweaking your new setup and getting it ready for use.

OpenOffice.org is a flagship for free and open source software, released under free software licenses and achieving downloads in the hundreds of millions. OO.o is a success by most measurements, but there have long been murmurings of discontent among developers resulting in complaints of "non-responsiveness and lack of leadership" on the project. The argument is not that the project is a failure, but that OpenOffice.org could be so much more, given a less top down approach to project management and a looser rein on developers' ability to get involved.

A Dell executive has revealed that the company is in talks with Google and is exploring the possibility of shipping netbooks with Chrome OS, the search giant's cloud-centric Linux-based mobile operating system. The news reflects Dell's interest in experimenting with new platforms.

Last month we looked at the cost of running Compiz by means of looking at how the window manager affected the frame-rate of several different games and whether compositing was used. We also tested out several different drivers and pieces of hardware. When Compiz was running rather than GNOME's Metacity it often caused a measurable drop in the OpenGL performance and then we later found this to be the case too with KDE's KWin. Today we are seeing if and how using Mutter, the window manager for the GNOME 3.0 desktop that uses Clutter-based compositing, will affect the performance of several different open-source games.

LXer Feature: 21-June-2010

In this week's Roundup we have a battle between KDE3 and KDE4,Linux versus the world: The unwinnable war?, Dell removes "Ubuntu is safer than Microsoft® Windows® " statement from website and today marks my three year anniversary as E-i-C for LXer. You know, I think my grammar has gotten a little better.

My father-in-law Ron is 88 years old, a member of what Tom Brokaw called The Greatest Generation, those who survived the Great Depression and went on to fight World War II -- in Europe, in Ron's case. Time is taking its toll now on all of those folks: limited mobility, slower reaction times, often reduced vision. It can happen to all of us who live that long.

"Seeking real freedom of choice in a technology ecosystem where vendors are exerting more and more control" ... "I'm not religious about technology. My strategy is to use what works best, period. This is why, for more than a decade, I've been using a Mac as my primary computer (and had been using Macs for some of my work long before that). Apple's personal computers continue to be the best combination of hardware and software on the market today."

To the chagrin of their competitors, GoogleMail seems to have become almost as synonymous with webmail as Google has with search engine (recently my six year old was explaining to me how he Googled for something at school). GoogleMail is a useful tool and has a lot of advantages over traditional client-server mail accounts, particularly if you are on the move. To be honest those sorts of advantages are present in pretty much any webmail setup: I’m just concentrating on GoogleMail because it’s by my experience the most popular. But GoogleMail has one disadvantage, all your messages are stored on Google’s servers. If you lose access to Google service or to your account then you lose your e-mails. Fear not oh free software lover, help is at hand in the form of the very useful getmail. Read the full howto at Free Software Magazine.

This article shows how you can install the PowerDNS nameserver (with MySQL backend) and the Poweradmin control panel for PowerDNS on a Fedora 12 system. PowerDNS is a high-performance, authoritative-only nameserver - in the setup described here it will read the DNS records from a MySQL database (similar to MyDNS), although other backends such as PostgreSQL are supported as well. Poweradmin is a web-based control panel for PowerDNS.

Colin Watson (Ubuntu Development Manager) just announced on the Ubuntu-Devel mailing list that you can now perform installations with a BTRFS root filesystem using the latest Ubuntu 10.10 Maverick Meerkat daily iso.

Your prime directive as a system administrator is to keep those systems whipped into shape and running without interfering with user’s daily operations. Sometimes the systems put you in a difficult position when their disks overflow with files. The simple solution is to remove files. But, what if you can’t do that? You have to add disk to your ailing system. But, how and where do you add that space? And, how do you keep this from happening again?

This guide explains how you can install and use KVM for creating and running virtual machines on a Fedora 13 server. I will show how to create image-based virtual machines and also virtual machines that use a logical volume (LVM). KVM is short for Kernel-based Virtual Machine and makes use of hardware virtualization, i.e., you need a CPU that supports hardware virtualization, e.g. Intel VT or AMD-V.

Earlier this week AMD released the Catalyst 10.6 driver that on the Linux side of the table had finally made use by default of their new 2D acceleration architecture, offered official support for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.5, and formalized their OpenGL 3.3/4.0 support. Since the release of the Catalyst 10.6 Linux driver, we have been running a new set of tests on their new ATI 2D acceleration architecture, but the results are not what you may expect when compared to the open-source ATI Linux driver.

Bisgi themes just won't stop improving. They stunned everyone before with their incredible collection of themes downloadable via bisigi PPA. Now a new theme called ECO is released which for me is the best so far. Another important USP of Bisigi themes is that, they include everything. From login window theme, to icon theme to metacity theme to everything else. You get a unified integrated experience.

Found a lot of themes while surfing websites for the best Dark Gnome Themes, those themes will required GTK 2.x , Emeraled, compiz for extra visualization. you can make your own customization using Emeraled or basically customize theme from Appearance Preferences.

Over the past decade, The Apache Software Foundation (ASF) has been supporting the Apache community’s development of some of the most ubiquitous products in Open Source, benefiting billions of users worldwide. Its collaborative, consensus-based development process, affectionately dubbed "The Apache Way", is one of its secrets to creating dozens of high quality, industry-leading software products that all began with a single project.

The default menu application in Ubuntu is functional, but it is also down to earth basic. GnoMenu tries to replicate the looks and functionality of KDE's Menu application. And I have to say, it almost does. GnoMenu comes with a number of themes and a easy to use configuration menu.

Apple's iPad was hardly the first tablet to appear on the scene, but it is unquestionably responsible for the recent spike in tablet development. Now it looks as if Ubuntu — the Linux distro everybody loves to hate, but uses anyway — will be entering the field as well.

The Wine development release 1.2-rc4 is now available. The source is available now, Binary packages are in the process of being built, and will appear soon at their respective download locations.

Econometrics is the application of statistical or quantitative methods to understand economic issues and test theories, and models. It is the study of economic models, mathematical statistics, and economic data. It is also a set of tools which can verify or disprove economic theory using real-world data.