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A month ago the Canonical crew working on Ubuntu 10.04 LTS received an unreleased Catalyst 10.4 driver from AMD for inclusion with the Lucid Lynx since the publicly available ATI Catalyst drivers had not -- and to this day still do not -- support the X.Org Server 1.7 used by this next Ubuntu release. Similar pre-releases for Ubuntu have happened in the past when AMD hasn't been quick to the game in supporting new Linux kernels and X Servers.

Setting up Last.fm streaming and scrobbling in Ubuntu 10.04, Lucid Lynx, is fast and easy. The Rhythmbox music player provides scrobbling support and the Last.fm client will let you stream your favorite stations in a nice stand-alone application. Here’s a screencast and written instructions on exactly how to set things up.

Due to absence in meantime pygrub support for ZFS 24 in Xen 4.0 unix kernel and boot_archive have to be copied off the disk to Dom0. In my case OSOL 134 PV DomU was able to obtain IP address just once after first boot up configuring SMF . Afterwards it required restarting ( or reenabling) service svc:/network/physical:nwam, what finally brought me to accomplish this procedure as OSOL service , because no analog of /etc/rc.local exists on OSOL.

"With the introduction of HTML5 and its implementation in all major web browsers, it's becoming clear that Adobe is now in a place where a lack of innovation from the company could cause not only a loss of profit for Adobe, but also the eventual abandonment and deprecation of the product "Adobe Flash" by every product and service that currently supports it."

In this article I will describe how you can monitor your Mandriva 2010.0 server with munin and monit. munin produces nifty little graphics about nearly every aspect of your server (load average, memory usage, CPU usage, MySQL throughput, eth0 traffic, etc.) without much configuration, whereas monit checks the availability of services like Apache, MySQL, Postfix and takes the appropriate action such as a restart if it finds a service is not behaving as expected. The combination of the two gives you full monitoring: graphics that lets you recognize current or upcoming problems, and a watchdog that ensures the availability of the monitored services.

Why spend your hard earned money on proprietary software when open source software provides a similar (or better) amount of functionality? That's a very good question.

This happens lot of times. I login as a normal user and start to edit httpd.conf or lighttpd.conf or named.conf in vim / vi text editor. However, I'm not able to save changes due to permission issue (all config files are owned by root). How do I save file without creating a temporary file (/tmp/httpd.conf) and then move the same (mv /tmp/httpd.conf /etc/httpd) as root using vim / vi itself?

Patents could lead to the mutually assured destruction of the software industry and the parading of pledged patents in the opening of a dispute between IBM and TurboHercules threatens to upset the only progress towards a safer world for open source.

Apple might have just tipped its iPhone OS 4.0, but Android has jumped to nine percent of the U.S. smartphone market, according to ComScore. Meanwhile, Nielsen says U.S. smartphone sales will eclipse feature-phone sales by 2011, and ABI Research predicts that over 800 million Android apps will be downloaded this year, making it the fastest-growing OS in app downloads.

Open source developer at Microsoft, Garrett Serack announced today plans to bring a native running open source platform to Windows. In a blog posted today, Serack announced the Common Opensource Application Publishing Platform (CoApp). The post outlines the challenges of developing open source applications in a Windows environment and the differences between developing on UNIX and Linux and Windows.

While most Linux users are fine with just using the kernel supplied by their distribution vendor, there are some enthusiasts and professional users who end up tweaking their kernel configuration extensively for their needs, particularly if they are within a corporate environment where the very best performance and reliability is demanded for a particular workload. Unfortunately, with there being hundreds of different Linux kernel configuration options, this is often a deterrent for any hobbyist to sit down and invest a great deal of time in testing out the different combinations of kernel options to generate the best performance for one's needs. Even for the experienced professionals the process of tuning the kernel configuration for a specific workload can require significant man hours and manual testing. But how would it be if you could find the optimal kernel configuration for your specific workload without any real human involvement? Well, it's possible to quite easily generate an ideal Linux kernel configuration in an autonomous manner.

When you run a webserver, which could be Apache, Nginx or Lighttpd, you may want to know how it is performing, actually, usually any web server can handle a normal day of work, but what happens when the server under your administration gets, stumbled, or appears in Slashdot, or digg front pages, now a days even twitter may drive a lot of traffic to a webpage. If that event occurs your server will be under real stress, and it is in that day when you want it to perform well, and survive the "attack". It is usually not possible to know how it will do that day, until the D. day arrives, but you can figure out how it will be. In this article you will find how to perform a simple test to have an idea of the health of your web server.

While Linux is a power to be reckoned with in the enterprise server room it continues to struggle for acceptance on the consumer desktop. On the desktop the most popular distributions, far and away, are Ubuntu and Fedora. Which one is more popular is an ongoing debate between the companies. However, when it comes to Linux media and the wider tech press there is no contest: Ubuntu has mindshare and gets the lion's share of media coverage. For Linux on the desktop Ubuntu is the de facto standard bearer. To whatever part of the general non-geek public is even aware of Linux the names "Linux" and "Ubuntu" are all but interchangeable. Over the past few years I've come to the conclusion that this state of affairs is, at best, unfortunate.

If you liked the script in our "What To Do After Installing Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid Lynx? Run This Script!" post, you'll be glad to know that version 0.2 is out. What's new in "Ubuntu 10.04 First time use script":

Generally, all Linux distributions needs a scheduled reboot once to stay up to date with important kernel security updates. RHN (or other distro vendors) provides Linux kernel security updates. You can apply kernel updates using yum command or apt-get command line options. After each upgrade you need to reboot the server. Ksplice service allows you to skip reboot step and apply hotfixes to kernel without rebooting the server.

Vimscript is a mechanism for reshaping and extending the Vim editor. Scripting allows you to create new tools, simplify common tasks, and even redesign and replace existing editor features. This article (the first in a series) introduces the fundamental components of the Vimscript programming language: values, variables, expressions, statements, functions, and commands. These features are demonstrated and explained through a series of simple examples.

Yesterday we delivered benchmarks showing how the open-source ATI Radeon graphics driver stack in Ubuntu 10.04 is comparing to older releases of the proprietary ATI Catalyst Linux driver. Sadly, the latest open-source ATI driver still is no match even for a two or four-year-old proprietary driver from ATI/AMD, but that is with the classic Mesa DRI driver. To yesterday's results we have now added in our results from ATI's Gallium3D (R300g) driver using a Mesa 7.9-devel Git snapshot from yesterday to see how this runs against the older Catalyst drivers.

In early March Stuart Jarvis wrote an article published here on the Dot which announced the winners of the poll results for suitable KDE software labels. Since then work has begun on coming up with suitable logos for these labels. This work is still underway and in need of volunteers if you have time and artistic skills.

TinyMe is a lightweight linux OS, it is aimed at making the computing experience as bloat- and lag-free as possible. It is well-suited to older computers, enthusiasts devoted to small/fast systems

Simple Invoices is a simple, lightweight web-based invoicing application. It’s an open source application that you have to install on a computer running a LAMP stack. Its hardware requirements are quite minimal, depending upon your level of usage. Simple Invoices opens in your web browser and has a simple, yet aesthetically pleasing user interface.