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There is no shortage of EXT4 benchmarks from comparing this evolutionary file-system's performance on netbooks to how it battles the Btrfs file-system to its performance recession. We have even benchmarked it on USB flash drives and on high-end SSDs. We have also delivered numerous Btrfs benchmarks. In this article though we are finally delivering something that has long been requested and that is Reiser4 file-system benchmarks running directly against EXT4 and Btrfs. We have also thrown in the original ReiserFS file-system for comparison too.

It was almost exactly one year to the day that FFmpeg 0.5 was released after this major free software project had not encountered a new release in quite a while. Yesterday a new FFmpeg release also made it out the door and it's FFmpeg 0.5.1...

The hedge fund Elliott Associates said Tuesday afternoon that it had made an offer to buy Novell in a deal that valued the business software company at about $2 billion. Elliott said it would pay $5.75 a share in cash for Novell, a price that is 21 percent higher than Novell's closing stock price on Tuesday. Wall Street's initial response to the bid, announced after the stock market closed, was to anticipate the possibility of a higher offer.

A hedge fund has offered to acquire Novell, developer of SUSE Linux, for $1.8 billion. Moments ago, Novell confirmed that it plans to review the unsolicited buyout offer. Now, Wall Street pundits wonder if folks like Microsoft, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Oracle or SAP will step in and offer a higher bid for Novell. Here’s the chatter so far.

Microsoft chief executive Steve Ballmer has insisted that one day, the company's Google-battling Bing search engine will actually make money. "Search is going to be an ever-growing share of Microsoft's profits," the big man bellowed - literally bellowed - during a wide-ranging question and answer keynote this morning at the search-obsessed SMX West conference in Silicon Valley. "First, we've got to get to break even. And then we're got to get to profitability. And then we've got to grow share. That's how I do my math."

Gnome Nanny is an easy way to control what your kids are doing in the computer. You can limit how much time a day each one of them is browsing the web, chatting or doing email. You can also decide at which times of the day the can do t his things.

A few weeks back the girl I have been dating for awhile now had idly made a complaint about her laptop being poky at certain tasks. I'd used the thing once or twice to check my email and recalled it was running Vista - no surprise there. I like this girl a lot and figured it was time to take that next step in our relationship: I offered to put Linux on her laptop.

In preparation for the Ubuntu 10.04 (Lucid Lynx) release, Canonical is reaching out to independent software vendors (ISVs). In fact, Canonical says there are 10 reasons why developers should embrace Ubuntu 10.04 Desktop Edition, and nine reasons why they should support support Ubuntu 10.04 Server Edition. Here the are.

Out of the box, Linux runs just fine for many uses. But if you find yourself needing to ferret out performance problems or tune the kernel for better performance, Linux has more than enough tools to measure and tweak system performance. In this guide, we'll take a look at five of the best utilities to measure system performance and tweak the Linux kernel. You'll find many, many, many utilities for measuring and improving Linux system performance. The utilities discussed here are chosen because they're widely available, and provide a good scope functionality. Also, I chose to avoid tools that have too steep a learning curve. As an example, SystemTap is a bit more complex than should be covered in an overview article. I left out some of the more basic tools such as ps and top because most Linux users are exposed to them fairly early on. And I didn't try to tackle any application-specific tools.

Video and photo editing tools are a necessity in today’s world of personal media. We have lots of photographs and videos these days that could look even better when presented nicely. The tool should be powerful yet simple to use so that average Joe can use it easily. Windows and Mac have had good video editing tools for sometime now, Linux had a big void in this area until recently. The void has been filled by OpenShot. It is truly amazing and the best, free video editor out there for Linux, suiting the needs of many. OpenShot will be available via Ubuntu Software Center starting with Lucid Lynx. Till then you would have to add the PPA to software sources.

All Android phones sold in the U.S. will be eligible for an Android 2.1 update, although some older phones may need to be wiped first, says an industry report. Meanwhile another report says Google's Nexus One is heading to Verizon on Mar. 23, and an AdMob study explores Android users. News last week that Adobe's Flash Player 10.1 may bypass devices running Android versions prior to 2.0 may not be so dire after all, according to an AndroidandMe story. Citing several unnamed inside sources, Taylor Wimberly writes that every Android phone currently released in the United States will be receiving an upgrade to Android 2.1.

If you click on http://www.sun.com, you get redirected to http://www.oracle.com. Sun is no more. The network is no longer the computer. The "Dot" in .COM is now a database. I'm really sorry to see Sun go. I have a long and varied history with Sun. What went wrong?

One Android developer is earning more than $400 a day from his find-your-car application, proving it's not just Apple fans who'll pay for basic apps. Much has been made of the millions awaiting those who decide to develop for Apple's iPhone: the UK government even sponsored a help guide. But Google fans will be pleased to hear that there's money in Android too with one developer reporting earnings topping $13,000 a month for an application that remembers where you've parked your car.

Firefox is on a decline. It may not be as steady as Internet Explorer's death spiral, and it certainly has not been going on for as long, but if the last three months are any indication, Firefox will never hit that 25 percent market share mark that looked all but certain just a few short months ago. Meanwhile, Chrome is still pushing steadily forward; in fact, it was the only browser to show positive growth last month.

The Linux from Scratch (LFS) project has released version 6.6 of its building instructions for Linux. The project's manual contains about 300 pages of instructions on how to compile a custom Linux system from the Linux sources. The LFS project aims to help people understand how Linux works internally and to enable them to build compact, flexible and secure Linux distributions of their own.

Latest Release Boasts New User Interface, Lets User Build Their Own Installation 'Recipes'. CodeWeavers, Inc., a leading developer of software products that turn Mac OS X and Linux into Windows-compatible operating systems, today announced the release of CrossOver 9.0 for both Mac and Linux. CrossOver allows Windows software to be used on Mac and Linux PCs without the need for a Windows operating system license.

This tutorial shows how to set up a high-availability storage with two storage servers (Fedora 12) that use GlusterFS. Each storage server will be a mirror of the other storage server, and files will be replicated automatically across both storage servers. The client system (Fedora 12 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.

I don't have the expertise to fully comprehend these NPRMs that were recently issued, but did spend the last few hours reading large chunks of all three. The area they cover is huge, and I fear open source and small EHRs are about to lose big, and big corporate EHRs are about to get total lock-in courtesy of our government. The bills cover a lot of territory, proposing many requirements that I do not think support "meaningful use" requirements. There are numerous interesting items, one surprising to me was that the ONC expects a Certified EHR will cost $163 million over 3 years to develop, excluding costs for testing and certification. The majority of the NPRM is framed with that mindset.

Multimedia apps for Ubuntu is really coming around. Now its the Songbird, the long forgotten multimedia application. Songbird has really turned around since I last tried it out an year ago and it now even have a PPA. Lets see how to install songbird in Ubuntu Lucid, Karmic and Jaunty.

CodeWeavers, supporter of the open source Wine project, have released their latest version of CrossOver for Linux and Mac. CrossOver 9.0 (codenamed “Snow Mallard”) is a commercial product that makes installing Windows applications via Wine extremely easy for Linux users. We’ve been waiting for this new release for several months, and it seems it was worth the wait. So far, we’ve tested it with Office 2007 and IE 7 with great results. Look for a full review at a later time. For now, here is an overview of the new features and some screenshots.