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In which the shadowy Alexandria Project finally shows its hand - and delivers an ultimatum.

This tutorial shows how to do data striping (segmentation of logically sequential data, such as a single file, so that segments can be assigned to multiple physical devices in a round-robin fashion and thus written concurrently) across four single storage servers (running Fedora 12) with GlusterFS. 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.

Some Linux users insist that anything you can do on Windows, you can do better on Linux. While there's some truth to that, many of us have Windows applications that make completely leaving Windows close to impossible. That's where CodeWeavers' latest version of CrossOver Linux comes in. CrossOver Linux 9 (code-named Snow Mallard) and its Mac brother, CrossOver Mac 9, let you run many popular Windows applications on Linux or Mac OS X. Supported Windows applications include Microsoft Office (from Office 97 to Office 2007), Internet Explorer 6 and 7, Outlook 2002 to 2007, all current versions of Quicken up to 2010 and QuickBooks up to 2004, and some versions of Photoshop and Photoshop CS.

XML co-inventor and languages expert Tim Bray has taken a job at Google just a month after he left Oracle. "As of this morning I work for Google. The title is 'Developer Advocate'. The focus is Android. Fun is expected," he wrote in a blog post titled "Now A No-Evil Zone". Bray, who is among a growing list of Sun veterans to have jumped ship since Oracle bought the company earlier this year, didn't mince his words about his new anti-iPhone job with the Mountain View Chocolate Factory.

Will a mass produced Linux pad ever exist to compete with the iPad? One reader says that there is one but you get a different story when you click "Order."

LXer Feature: 15-Mar-2010

This past week on LXer we had Jonathan Schwartz reminiscing in "Good Artists Copy, Great Artists Steal", a newbies guide to hacking the Linux kernel, Phoronix reviews power and memory usage in the various desktop environments, Former Sun chief open source officer Simon Phipps joins the OSI board, Jack Deslippe explains why he no longer uses Apple products and last but not least my editorial on why Windows users have no Choice. Enjoy!

Zarafa, the Dutch mobile messaging and collaboration specialist gets a foothold in France. Today, Zarafa announces that it has signed contracts with the French open source systems integrator Smile and with French distributor ETC. With these contracts and her presence at Solutions Linux, Europe’s largest commercial open source exhibition, Zarafa aims to strengthen its international market position.

In a case, dripping with irony, record label EMI was forced to stop selling digital singles from Pink Floyd albums after the courts in the UK ruled it violated a 1999 contract between the band and the record label. That a record label, which fought digital music for so long would be forced by the courts to stop selling digital songs because it violated a band's rights is just too funny.

Too bad it's only for professional use the HGZ Linux based coffee machine. I'd love to have on of these. A Dream come true. The Linux coffee maker. Embedded Linux on a coffee machine, touch screen. Build on Qt framework. Have Linux brew your coffee, finally a stable cup of coffee. Demo-ed at the Embedded World in Nurmberg Germany by Qt:

The Humanity Icon Theme got a really nice update in Ubuntu Lucid today which brings integration with the new branding (purple that is) [...]

Wolvix is a desktop oriented GNU/Linux distribution based on Slackware. It features the Xfce desktop environment and a comprehensive selection of development, graphics, multimedia, network and office applications. Using Wolvix does not require more than basic computer skills, but installing and administering the system might require more knowledge than some of the other GNU/Linux distributions. Much like Slackware, Wolvix sometimes requires you to roll up your sleves and get your hands dirty. So if the thought of using the command line and reading documentation scares you, you might be better off using another distribution.

The HP Deskjet D2680 is very easy to install in Linux. First I installed hplip and then I installed hplip-gui. After that it was as simple as plugging the printer in and then opening the HP device manager.

When you have Mark Shuttleworth as your backer, as commercial Linux distributor Canonical does, it is a bit like having money in the bank when the bank also believes fervently in your cause. It is a rare combination, and one that has allowed the Ubuntu project to reach out from its Linux desktop beginnings into commercial servers - and with the latest releases, cloudy infrastructure - without having the profit pressure that most startups have to deal with as they try to grow.

The release of Ubuntu 10.04 LTS "Lucid Lynx" is quickly approaching next month and it will arrive with a whole set of new features and improvements including a faster boot process, a long-awaited new theme, the Nouveau driver to replace the crippled xf86-video-nv driver, the unveiling of the Ubuntu One Music Store, integration of Plymouth, Ubuntu ARM advancements, and many other advancements for this Linux distribution. While it may not be as exciting as looking at these new end-user features, in this article we are testing out the available kernels for Ubuntu 10.04. Besides the standard Linux 2.6.32 kernel used in the Lucid release, there is also a specialized server kernel as well as a new -preempt kernel is now available. We are looking at how these different kernels perform and how they compare to the mainline Linux kernels with the 2.6.32, 2.6.33, and 2.6.34-rc1 releases.

This document describes how to install a Postfix mail server that is based on virtual users and domains, i.e. users and domains that are in a MySQL database. I'll also demonstrate the installation and configuration of Courier (Courier-POP3, Courier-IMAP), so that Courier can authenticate against the same MySQL database Postfix uses. The resulting Postfix server is capable of SMTP-AUTH and TLS and quota. Passwords are stored in encrypted form in the database. In addition to that, this tutorial covers the installation of Amavisd, SpamAssassin and ClamAV so that emails will be scanned for spam and viruses. I will also show how to install SquirrelMail as a webmail interface so that users can read and send emails and change their passwords.

Often, even if we do catch a virus, it's not so difficult to eradicate it using installed anti-virus—but if your system has been crippled, try using Linux to scan the drive for viruses instead. As any Linux veteran knows, one of Linux's greatest uses is fixing unbootable drives—recovering files, deleting files, and even killing viruses. For those of you that aren't quite as well-versed in Linux, technology blog gHacks has a tutorial for doing just that, though we recommend a few tweaks to their process.

The trial between the SCO Group and Novell over the question of whether or not the copyrights to Unix were sold together with the Unix distribution rights has taken another turn. As many SCO witnesses gave hearsay evidence during the oral hearing at the Court of Appeals, Novell filed a petition with the Tenth Circuit Supreme Court. Novell has asked the Supreme Court to clarify whether a copyright is inherently included in a transfer of software distribution rights or whether a distribution contract leaves it up to the buyer to determine which of the copyrights that aren't explicitly mentioned are transferred.

"With Ubuntu 10.04 (Lucid Lynx) so far our first impressions aren't good. 10.04 booted to the "Install" prompt from a LiveCD in 4 minutes and 23 seconds, compared to a solid 40 seconds on Debian Squeeze ("testing" repository)"

Do you want to remove bloat from your Linux installation? Are you looking to enable extra features that aren't provided by your distro? Fancy trying some of the cutting-edge patches doing the rounds? You'll need to recompile your kernel, and while it might look like black magic if you've never done it before, it's actually pretty straightforward. Read on for everything you need to know...

There's a large selection of free and open source (FOSS) operating systems available these days, and choosing the right one for any given circumstance can be quite a challenge. This article is intended to help you pick the best operating system for your needs and experience level. Although this article is geared primarily toward those who have little to no experience with FOSS operating systems, we've included some pointers for more savvy open source users – say, those who use a FOSS operating system at home and would like to deploy one on the job.