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The GIMP has been a poster child for the open source movement ever since it came out. It has been compared to Photoshop and has often been spoken of as the only worthy open source contender in the graphics editor category. While that statement may or may not be true, it is definitely a rival to photoshop when it comes to complexity. And I’m not the only one who thinks that the GIMP is complex. Apparently the Ubuntu development team also thinks the same way and have removed GIMP from their default distribution. It is still available in the online repository but the Ubuntu 10.04 CD will not ship with GIMP on it. The point is that with all that power comes complexity and GIMP is definitely not a tool for casual users.

To most people, boot loaders aren't the most exciting aspect of an operating system, but they are extraordinarily important. Without a functioning boot loader, nothing else works. Currently, a transition from the old Grand Unified Bootloader (GRUB) Legacy tool to the new GRUB 2 is underway. GRUB 2 is the default boot loader in Ubuntu 9.10, and it's an option in most other major Linux distributions. Sooner or later, other distributions will deploy GRUB 2 as the default boot loader.

The Perl 6 project, which aimed to radically reinvent the open source programming language, first began to take shape in 2000. A decade later, there are several implementations with varying levels of completeness, but it is still not ready to replace Perl 5 in production environments. In order to ensure that Perl doesn't completely stagnate during the protracted revamp, a group of developers have decided to pull Perl 5 out of maintenance mode and begin actively enhancing it with new features. The result is Perl 5.12, which was officially released this week. It was preceded by 5.11, an experimental development release that was issued last year.

Intel announced a new Atom processor aimed at embedded devices and in-car infotainment platforms. The "Tunnel Creek" CPU offers an onboard graphics controller, memory controller, and audio, linking to a separate I/O controller via a standard PCI Express interface, according to the company.

A pair of vendors that offer proprietary solutions based on the open source memcached project are updating their products this week. While both Gear6 and Schooner are adding their own proprietary bits to enhance their respective memcached-based offerings, both vendors are also ensuring that they also are contributing back to the open source core.

Well, actually, no they won't. I'm talking about purchasing and installing a brand new Linux cluster in a pure Windows shop and having any expectations that it will be used. Your co-workers will probably look at you funny, and they might stand way over on the other side of the elevator during that ride up to the fourth floor, but don't count on them knocking your door down begging for access to your shiny new Linux resource.

Oracle presented a beta of what it called a "much faster" MySQL at the O'Reilly MySQL Conference and insists it will be continuing to invest in the open source database. Oracle's Chief Corporate Architect, Edward Screven, presented the beta version of MySQL 5.5 which will now use InnoDB as its default storage engine, saying that the switch offers a 200% performance improvement and over ten times faster recovery times. He assured the audience that despite the switch to Oracle's InnoDB, Oracle will be maintaining the pluggable storage engine architecture and that the company would continue to ship the same code base in the community and enterprise editions.

Fonality is jumping off one bandwagon and leaping onto another. The company previously positioned itself as an open source IP PBX phone system provider. But going forward, Fonality is pitching itself as a leading provider of cloud-based phone systems and unified communications for small business.

RAID has still not been adopted by most end-users despite its inherent quality such as performance and reliability. Reasons such as complexity of RAID technology (levels, hard/soft), set-up, or support may be given. We believe the main reason is that most end-users own a vast amount of heterogeneous storage devices (USB stick, IDE/SATA/SCSI internal/external hard drives, SD/XD Card, SSD, etc.), and that RAID-based systems are mostly designed for homogeneous (in size and technology) hard disks. Therefore, there is currently no storage solution that manages heterogeneous storage devices efficiently. In this article, we propose such a solution and we call it PROUHD (Pool of RAID Over User Heterogeneous Devices). This solution supports heterogeneous (in size and technology) storage devices, maximizes the available storage space consumption, is tolerant to device failure up to a customizable degree, still makes automatic addition, removal and replacement of storage devices possible and remains performant in the face of average end-user workflow.

Does using a lightweight Linux desktop always mean trading lower resource usage for usability and features? Juliet Kemp reviews LXDE, one of the newest lightweight Linux desktops.

The Fedora project released a beta version of Fedora 13 (codenamed "Goddard"). The updated community Linux distribution is touted for features including automatic print-driver installation, the Btrfs filesystem, enhanced 3D driver support, revamped Python bindings, and the Zarafa groupware package, says the project.

Submissions for the Plasma Javascript Jam Session closed at the end of March and the judging commenced, with the community joining the judging panel as a collective "5th member". Every Plasmoid that was submitted was a success and a joy to try out: congratulations to all of those who participated. It was a competition with prizes up for grabs, however, so we had to make the required tough calls and declare some winners. Without further ado, here are your 2010 Javascript Jam Session competition crown bearers!

Despite the fact that version 2.1 of Google's mobile operating system has been available for several months, most devices are still running older versions. According to a device dashboard by Android developer Raphaël Moll, over the last 14 days only 27% of Android smartphones accessing the Android Market were running version 2.1. The majority – 38% and 32% respectively – were running versions 1.5 and 1.6. Version 2.0.1 accounts for just under 3% of users accessing the site and versions 1.1 and 2.0 barely troubled the scorers, presumably because updates are available for popular devices supplied with these versions.

Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid Lynx gets 14 new wallpapers, these wallpapers will be included by default in Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid Lynx.

Learn how to choose and configure a boot manager for your Linux system. You can use the material in this article to study for the LPI 101 exam for Linux system administrator certification, or just to learn for fun.

hile reports suggest that Google is planning an Android or Chrome driven slate computer to rival the iPad, fuelled by some loose party talk by CEO Eric E. Schmidt, others have a date and price for their iPad-alike machine already. Take the Windows 7, sorry I mean Linux, powered WePad for example.

Finally Mark Jonson submitted to xen-devel mailing list patch for ZFS 24 support at Xen 4.0. Patch mentioned bellow was successfully tested at Xen 4.0 Dom0 with pvops kernel 2.6.32.11 on top of Fedora 12 via modifying Michael’s Young xen-4.0.0.7.fc12.src.rpm and direct patching xen 4.0 official tarball on Ubuntu Karmic Koala Server.

I've 10Mbps server port dedicated to our small business server. The server also act as a backup DNS server and I'd like to slow down outbound traffic on port 80. How do I limit bandwidth allocation to http service 5Mbps (burst to 8Mbps) at peak times so that DNS and other service will not go down due to heavy activity under Linux operating systems? You need use the tc command which can slow down traffic for given port and services on servers and it is called traffic shaping.

An article headline declares, "This is the year of the death of Linux on the desktop." These stories scroll along on the same news websites on the same day. To top it off, squeezed in between these headlines are even more predictions about things I thought were really dead… SCO for instance.

Z-push is an implementation of the ActiveSync protocol which is used 'over-the-air' for multi platform ActiveSync devices, including Windows Mobile, iPhone, Sony Ericsson and Nokia mobile devices. With Z-push any groupware can be connected and synced with these devices. This install of Z-Push is on a The Perfect Server - Debian Lenny (Debian 5.0) [ISPConfig 3] setup.