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The Ubuntu One Music Store beta is up and running! Check out the pics and let us know what you think. Will you be converted, or is it all just hype?

I began the day listening to Dru Lavigne's BSD talk at SCALE. That same day I installed FreeBSD 8.0-release, which I've been running since last week.

This tutorial shows how to combine four single storage servers (running CentOS 5.4) to a distributed replicated storage with GlusterFS. Nodes 1 and 2 (replication1) as well as 3 and 4 (replication2) will mirror each other, and replication1 and replication2 will be combined to one larger storage server (distribution). Basically, this is RAID10 over network. If you lose one server from replication1 and one from replication2, the distributed volume continues to work. The client system (CentOS 5.4 as well) will be able to access the storage as if it was a local filesystem. GlusterFS is a clustered file-system capable of scaling to several peta-bytes. It aggregates various storage bricks over Infiniband RDMA or TCP/IP interconnect into one large parallel network file system. Storage bricks can be made of any commodity hardware such as x86_64 servers with SATA-II RAID and Infiniband HBA.

Domain Name Service (DNS) was created in 1983 out of the necessity to convert IP Addresses like 192.168.9.2 to domain names like example.com. DNS is a distributed database, what this means is that no one computer is used to maintain a complete database of all of the domains on the Internet. Instead this information is distributed across many computers. To further understand how this works, take a look at the DNS structure:

There is an ongoing discussion on a Gnome mailing list which points out that Gnome and KDE might collaborate for a new project: a FLOSS alternative to Dropbox. The Gnome and KDE approach is more towards an collaboration tool, but which is very close to Dropbox. The DE independent FLOSS Dropbox alternative idea came because Google Summer of Code is approaching and both Gnome and KDE have a collaboration tool on their list:

KDE document reader Okular doesn't just read multiple document formats; it also allows you to add annotations to files as you read them. Note that to get this functionality, you need version 0.8, which is in Ubuntu Karmic, or Debian Squeeze (see my howto if you want to install this on a Lenny box). To bring up the reviews toolbar, go to Tools->Review. You'll see various highlighters, drawing, and note options down the left-hand side of the document window. Be warned that the inline text annotation option will hide anything underneath its box. Right-click an annotation for a context menu that allows you to delete it or add a pop-up note. You can view all annotations by clicking on the 'Reviews' tab on the far left of the Okular window.

I hate having to change. I do not know a lot of people that really enjoy it, but there are just certain aspects to change that bug me. And when it comes to changing technologies, it is even more of a headache, both in the short term and in the long term.

MySQL has been the defining company for the second free software era. Now, it seems, leadership in the open source database market is moving on.

The Roboat is an autonomous robotic sailboat powered by Linux. It's able to autonomously navigate towards any given target without human control or intervention.

Although its name sounds like that of a bacterium, Coccinella is a nice cross-platform open source Jabber client. While Jabber, and IM clients in general, are a dime a dozen, Coccinella sports a few nifty features that make it worth considering if your are in the market for a Jabber client.

...things have been pretty quiet on the Linux Game Front...at least to my ear, but then again, I'm not much of a gamer. Sure, I've played all the repository shooters...bloody chunks flying and monsters galore. I have a short attention span...mostly because I suck at shooter games. I just don't play them often. But every now and then, one game catches my eye.

BAR is backup archiver program to create compressed and encrypted archives of files that can be stored on a hard disk, CD, DVD, or directly on a server via FTP, SCP, or SFTP. A server mode and a scheduler are integrated for making automated backups in the background. A graphical front end that can connect to the (remote) server is included.

I installed Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid from a daily build yet couldn't boot into my fresh new desktop because I needed to add nomodeset to the grub2 boot line and didn't know how to do that because there was no boot screen visible.

Ubuntu One Music Store has been in closed beta for a long time, but today it finally entered the public beta so everyone can start using the new service which is available as a plugin for Rhythmbox, the default music player in Ubuntu Lucid (but soon, other music players will also support Ubuntu One Music Store).

Earlier this month AMD rolled out a new workstation graphics card driver, which is effectively the same Catalyst driver used by the consumer-oriented Radeon graphics cards but with greater testing and certification for the ATI workstation offerings. The press release announcing this new driver was titled "Application Performance Increases By Up To 20 Percent with Latest ATI FirePro Graphics Driver," so we decided to see if this proprietary driver really lives up to its claims under Linux.

If you like gaming or you are looking for a nice free game for your children, then try one of the games listed bellow. These games are open source and free for use.

The fact is that if you run a business website, you need to perform proper backups, and not just the stuff that gets put on a tape and thrown in a closet each evening.

According to the company, Novell would consider being acquired should the right buyer come along. Could that buyer be Microsoft? And what would that mean for SUSE and the Linux ecosystem?

Novell CEO Ron Hovsepian and Chief Marketing Officer John Dragoon offered me a financial and partner progress report on March 22. Here’s a recap.

The Ubuntu project released its first beta of Ubuntu 10.04 ("Lucid Lynx"), offering two new themes, social-networking tools, cloud-related enhancements, faster boot-times, and an updated Firefox browser with Yahoo search as default. Meanwhile, an oddball icon placement in one theme has Ubuntu users up in arms.