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Some months ago I described how the XO laptop is used in some Nepali schools. This time I interviewed Bernie Innocenti, an italian developer who worked on that project and now is doing the same thing in Paraguay. Says Bernie "Even if OLPC deployed here in Paraguay only 4000 laptops, I believe that the project is turning out as a huge success."

Most Linux distributions include attractive graphical interfaces, but you can do a lot more from the command line interface once you know your way around. For tasks like controlling and monitoring the distro's underlying system, the command line remains indispensable.

Pandora FMS (for Pandora Flexible Monitoring System) is software solution for monitoring. Pandora FMS allows monitoring in a visual way the status and performance of several parameters from different operating systems, servers, applications and hardware systems such as firewalls, proxies, databases, web servers or routers.

Linux consulting should provide a bigger picture for the client so they better understand the implications of choices they make. This aspect means that as a consultant you need also to train the client so they best understand the situation.

Opera Software has released a version of its flagship mobile web browser that runs on Linux, Windows, and Macintosh desktop computers. Useful for testing mobile websites, Opera Mobile 10 runs in a variety of resolutions and in both touch and keypad-only modes, the company says.

Over on the GCC mailing list is a rather lively discussion (especially for being a Friday evening) that only started earlier today. No, it's not about the recent GCC 4.5 release or even our GCC vs. Clang/LLVM benchmarks, but it's about development participation. A developer is asking why you don't participate in contributing to GCC?

After calling Flash a "CPU hog," Steve Jobs has given Adobe the chance to live down this now famous insult. And Adobe is taking it. Steve Jobs also called Flash "buggy" and littered with security holes. And he summarily banned it from both the iPhone and the iPad - even when it's translated into Jobsian machine code. But with the latest update to the Mac OS X version known as Snow Leopard, the Jobsian cult has added an API that allows third parties to hardware-accelerate H.264 video on the Mac, and Adobe tells The Reg it's already working to tap that API.

Why is virtualization so important? The short answer is that virtualization enables businesses to lower their technology Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) while increasing their Return on Investment (ROI). This is done primarily through the multitude of server consolidation projects proliferating every organization's infrastructure in some fashion today. What do the top UNIX vendors have to offer with respect to virtualization? IBM offers PowerVM, formerly referred to as Advanced Power Virtualization, and has just released their POWER7 Systems, which alter the virtualization space (see What's on the horizon in 2010?). HP offers their Virtual Server Environment, which supports both their Integrity and HP9000 server base. Sun offers a new name, the xVM server, along with their mature container-based technology.

Lucid Lynx, otherwise known as Ubuntu 10.04, is now in the final stretch. Yesterday the Ubuntu Developers announced the Release Candidate, the penultimate release before its final April 29 release.

Daniel Gerzo with the FreeBSD project has issued a status report concerning work going on within FreeBSD and related projects for the first quarter of this year. Catching our interest in particular were the updates surrounding LLVM/Clang as the compiler for FreeBSD's base, the Chromium web browser porting efforts to FreeBSD, and ZFS file-system enhancements.

System Administrator Dilemma #942: Send a Data Center Service Tech out to pop open the case to tell you what's in your system or use two simple commands. Do you rely on proc files or dmesg to tell you everything you need to know about a system? If you do, you’re only seeing part of the picture. But what about when you want more detailed information about the system on which you’re working? Do you have to have the manufacturer’s spec sheet handy to know which components your system contains? It’s inconvenient to have someone open a system case in a remote data center to tell you how many memory DIMMs are in, or are not in, your target system. Linux systems include two native commands that tell you almost everything you need to know: dmidecode and biosdecode.

Ben Cato Clough and Luke Upchurch's "When Copyright Goes Bad" (from Consumers International) is a great, 15-minute mini-documentary on what copyright can do, what it is doing, and what it needs to stop doing. Appearances by Fred Von Lohmann - Electronic Frontier Foundation; Michael Geist - University of Ottawa Law School; Jim Killock - Open Rights Group; and Hank Shocklee - Co-founder of Public Enemy.

The Neufbox 4 is a BRCM63xx based DSL router the french ISP SFR provides to its customers, and more than 3 million units are currently in use. The device is developed by Efixo and the OpenWrt based sources are available through a subversion repository and documentation is placed in a Trac wiki.

I have decided, should any of my kids ever develop an interest in Computer Science, that I'm going to send them to a Scandinavian university. Clearly, these institutions of higher learning have got it going on.I recently came to that conclusion after meeting Mark Burgess, who put together an entire configuration management system in 1993 while doing a post-doctorate fellowship at the University of Oslo, just because he was tired of managing his systems manually with scripts and wanted to do it better. Which is right up there with some other Scandinavian student named Linus who ended up putting together the kernel for some operating system you might have heard of here and there.

Linux's NetworkManager has evolved into a solid tool that manages wired and wireless Ethernet, mobile broadband, Bluetooth, roaming, IPv6, and offers both a GUI and command-line interface. Joe Brockmeier gives us a tour of the new features in NetworkManager.

SAINT PAUL, Minn. (April 23, 2010) -- 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 9.0.1 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.

Dell is planning to release a bevy of ARM-based mobile devices, according to what Engadget says are leaked company documents. The devices include four Android-based phones, two Android tablets, and the company's first Windows Phone 7 device, the website says.

After a recent O/S version upgrade (to openSUSE 11.2) I noticed that bash started being a bit more intelligent when I did something stupid: it started giving me a useful error message when I typed the name of a command that wasn't in my PATH but that was in an "sbin" directory. My reaction at the time was "huh, that's nice", but today I decided I needed a bit more information.

In the last couple of years I have tested many Linux distros. I was never a diehard fan of any of them, kept an open mind and was willing to simply use the one that best fit my needs. Fedora, Mandriva, OpenSuSE, Ubuntu, Linux Mint, Debian and others have been put to the test at some point or another. PCLinuxOS was one of the few popular ones I had not tested. Being based off Mandriva, I was assuming it would be similar to the Linux Mint - Ubuntu case, so no surprises expected. After all, I had tested several Mandriva releases, so what could be that interesting about PCLinuxOS? Now, let me tell you... boy, was I wrong!

Version 2.6.34 of the Linux kernel will be the first to support the Ceph and LogFS file systems. A number of changes to the Btrfs and XFS code promise improved performance. The kernel should now be better at working with drives with 4 KB logical sectors.