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On Saturday, April 10th, I was in Austin Texas for the inaugural Texas Linux Fest (TXLF), a community-run FLOSS conference. The idea to stage the show arose last August during OSCON, picked up steam in the fall, and in the end a little under 400 people turned out — including speakers and volunteers — which most considered a successful number for a first year event.

There are very few things that you can accuse Linux of sucking at, but one thing that most geeks can agree on, is that Linux sucks at hardware support. So is hardware support the main hurdle that Linux has to overcome to become mainstream?

PlayOnLinux 3.7.6 is now available. Two major bugs fixed Using an old wineversion to install a program caused problems and Compatibility with Lucid Lynx Install window crashed when the user clicked on Install button.

..ECMA CLI would have given the web both strongly typed and loosely typed programming languages. It would have given developers a choice between performance and scriptability. A programming language choice (use the right tool for the right job) and would have in general made web pages faster just by moving performance sensitive code to strongly typed languages.

For the first time in five years Novell is hosting a BrainShare conference for EMEA (Europe, the Middle East and Africa) partners and customers. Novell Chief Marketing Officer and Channel Chief John Dragoon says the event is sold out. Here are the details.

In which Area 51, the Roswell UFO Incident and our hero, Frank Adversego (of course) figure prominently

Virtually all of Chrome's April expansion came at the expense of Microsoft Corp.'s Internet Explorer, which dropped 0.7 percentage points to finish the month at 59.95%, the first time that IE has fallen under the 60% mark.... Mozilla Corp.'s open-source Firefox, on the other hand, was up last month, albeit by only 0.07 percentage points to 24.6%. April was the second month in a row that Firefox trended up, a victory of sorts in light of the fact that it had lost ground for four straight months starting in November 2009.

While you wouldn't spot me in the wild wearing the "scanner ring" I would certainly not mind owning this beauty. This is the W200 Wearable Computer it's a powerful computing device designed to be attached to the user's wrist for hands-free operation. Depicted here with windows CE, but it's available running Linux. The ultra rugged version is Linux only. (obvious as Linux is much more "rugged" after all ;-)

Understanding the fundamentals of Linux is the basis for being productive as a system administrator. Coupling each of the tools available, and knowing which tool to use at the right time, is the key to effectively managing complex administration projects. Mark Sobell has again compiled a great collection of applications and utilities in A Practical Guide to Linux Commands, and his experience shows in this second edition.

Sys-V init has long been the standard solution for booting. It's kind of easy to work with, it kind of works and everybody kind of knows it. However, being open minded, let's look at an alternative approach. There are quite a few alternatives. All of them focus on improving boot times. This is accomplished by starting and running different processes simultaneously and asynchronously. Doing type of boot attempts to use all (more) parts of the hardware simultaneously and avoid having to wait for slow hardware.

LXer Feature: 03-May-2010

The big news this week was Ubuntu 10.04 being released and all the hoopla surrounding it, but not to be missed was HTC's settlement with Microsoft over a Android patent deal, the challenges of Linux netbook design, Sony starts to feel the heat for blocking Linux installs on its PS3 and put windows to its most appropriate use, make a bootable Linux USB stick with it. Enjoy!

The Linux and the open source community doesn't just create great desktop and server solutions. They also create worthy router solutions, many which are open, free, and/or Linux-based. You'll find firmware replacements for open Wi-Fi routers that you flash or upload to the router. Additionally, there are Linux-based distributions that install onto generic Intel/AMD PCs or run as LiveCDs. Plus there are options for embedded systems, servers, and appliances.

Schema worked so nicely on Ubuntu Karmic Koala doesn’t help any longer.Virt-install crashes right away attempting to launch VNC console. Set up Xen 4.0 Dom0 with pvops kernel 2.6.32.12 on top of Ubuntu 10.04 Server . Install just two packages virtinst and python-virtinst.

The success of Linux takes place largely in the background it is a quiet take over that much of the world is not yet aware of. And yet, providing services built around Linux is big business.

First off, I was amazed by the fact that I could quickly and easily download the ISO for the 32-bit desktop. It was only about 24 hours after the initial release when I gave it a shot, and there were no delays at all. I find torrents obnoxious, so I did the download directly from Ubuntu.com. No muss, no fuss.

I recently upgraded to Ubuntu Netbook Edition 10.04 Lucid Lynx (previously Ubuntu Netbook Remix) on my netbook and noticed the Gnome Panel was locked. Here is a work-around which will allow you to add or remove applets from the Gnome Panel in Ubuntu Netbook Edition 10.04 Lucid Lynx.

If you know a thing or two about Android, and a free trip to the next TED conference is your kind of thing, then the app developers at Snaptic may have just the contest that you've been looking for. The competition in question, Snaptic's "Move Your Apps" developer challenge, calls on Android developers to create new applications that move users to move. Co-sponsored by the non-profit HopeLab — which works to improve the quality of life for young people with chronic illness — the challenge will reward coders who come up with unique ways of promoting activity via Android apps.

While Linux has long been talked about as being a faster operating system than Microsoft Windows, in 2010 is this still the case? It seems every time we deliver new benchmarks of the EXT4 file-system it's actually getting slower, recent Linux kernel releases have not been delivering any major performance enhancements for desktop users, the open-source Linux graphics drivers are still no match to the proprietary drivers, and "bloated and huge" is how Linus Torvalds described the Linux kernel last year. This is all while Windows 7 was released last year, which many view as Microsoft's best operating system release to date. Even after using it a fair amount the past few months in preparation for this about-to-be-shared work, it is actually not too bad and is a huge improvement over Windows Vista, but is it really faster than Ubuntu Linux? We have used six uniquely different systems and ran Microsoft Windows 7 Professional x64 and Ubuntu 10.04 LTS x86_64 on each of them with a set of 55 tests (actually, more than 165 if considering that each test is usually run at least three times for accuracy) per installation.

Mark Shuttleworth just announced the plan for the empty space on the right created by moving the window buttons (controls) to the left: Window Indicators or "windicators". Window Indicators will be just like the current Panel Indicators: they will have an icon which indicates the state and clicking it brings up a menu.

This article by Kim Schulz, author of Hacking Vim 7.2, will contain recipes focusing on the following subjects: * Tips for when you develop Vim scripts * How to debug a Vim script * How to use other scripting languages when writing Vim scripts