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After releasing Phoronix Test Suite 2.4 earlier this month and delivering the subsequent 2.4.1 update, we have now released PTS Desktop Live 2010.1 "Anzhofen" to the public. PTS Desktop Live 2010.1 makes it extremely easy to benchmark your computer on a completely standardized software stack from a Live DVD/USB environment.

pril 2005 was a bit of a tense time in the kernel development community. The BitKeeper tool which had done so much to improve the development process had suddenly become unavailable, and it wasn't clear what would replace it. Then Linus appeared with a new system called git; the current epoch of kernel development can arguably be dated from then.

This tutorial shows how to set up a standalone storage server on Fedora 12. Instead of NFS, I will use GlusterFS here. The client system 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.

SCALE attracts largest crowd in its history, 30 percent increase in registration bodes well for show, FOSS in general. Observers looking to take the pulse of the Free/Open Source Software movement looked to the Southern California Linux Expo SCALE 8x, the first-of-the-year Linux event in the U.S., and found that this year, and the immediate future, may be at its brightest.

Userful Corporation, the world leader in multiseat Linux desktop virtualization, today announced that 30,000 schools worldwide have chosen Userful virtual desktops to reduce computing costs and improve computer-to-student ratios. Microsoft recently announced it's own multi-seat solution, Microsoft Windows MultiPoint Server 2010, seven years after Userful pioneered the technology on Linux back in 2002. Another classic case of Linux vs Windows, only this time Linux has the upper hand with Userful having already sold 750,000 seats.

After describing the nature and importance of source code for business-oriented readers, the case is made for learning programming with Python. A plethora of free on-line resources for getting started programming in Python are provided.

We're used to being able to recycle old, underpowered Windows PCs by installing GNU/Linux on them. Imagine if you could do the same with old Windows Mobile phones. Now you can - demonstrating once again how open source changes every market that it enters.

Microsoft has managed to do what a roomful of secretive, three-letter government agencies have wanted to do for years: get the whistleblowing, government-document sharing site Cryptome shut down. Microsoft dropped a DMCA notice alleging copyright infringement on Cryptome’s proprietor John Young on Tuesday after he posted a Microsoft surveillance compliance document that the company gives to law enforcement agents seeking information on Microsoft users. Young filed a counterclaim on Wednesday — arguing he had a fair use to publishing the document, a full day before the Thursday deadline set by his hosting provider, Network Solutions.

Update: It looks like Microsoft has reconsidered their position. - Scott

The International Free and Open Source Software Law Review is seeking submissions for publication in 2010 and beyond.

In December we wrote that Ubuntu 10.04 already shortened the boot time, which has been a great focus amongst Canonical and Ubuntu developers as they strive for a ten second boot. A lot has changed since that article was published last year, including the introduction of Plymouth and many kernel mode-setting improvements along with the introduction of Nouveau for NVIDIA KMS support. We've ran a new boot performance comparison on two laptops and a netbook as we see how the boot times are looking with Ubuntu 10.04 LTS when compared to Ubuntu 9.10. We have also looked at how the power consumption has changed in the Lucid Lynx for these mobile devices.

OpenSSO Express has been removed for download from Oracle's website, leaving users of the community version of what was Sun's single sign-on platform to either, build their own version from source code, or to go to a third party. Norwegian company ForgeRock has stepped in and released OpenAM, based on OpenSSO source code. The ForgeRock builds are available to download. ForgeRock CEO, Lasse Andresen called Oracle's move "surprising", but said ForgeRock would be the new home for OpenSSO, now called OpenAM due to Oracle IP issues.

There's a fantastic little story in the Guardian today that says a US lobby group is trying to get the US government to consider open source as the equivalent to piracy. The International Intellectual Property Alliance (IIPA), an umbrella group for American publishing, software, film, television and music associations, has asked with the US Trade Representative (USTR) to consider countries like Indonesia, Brazil and India for its "Special 301 watchlist" because they encourage the use of open source software. A Special 301, according to Guardian's Bobbie Johnson is: "a report that examines the 'adequacy and effectiveness of intellectual property rights' around the planet - effectively the list of countries that the US government considers enemies of capitalism. It often gets wheeled out as a form of trading pressure - often around pharmaceuticals and counterfeited goods - to try and force governments to change their behaviours."

Amazon.com has signed a patent agreement with Microsoft over the use of Linux in its Kindle e-readers. In other open source legal news, the Jacobsen v. Katzer model railroad software case was settled, providing precedent for open source developers to seek monetary damages for copyright infringement, says BetaNews.

Every year was going to be ‘the year of Linux on the desktop’, until many began to wonder when the FOSS (free and open source software) breakthrough would come. As we watched for signs of hope in netbook sales, Drupal sites and partly-FOSS Android phones, a revolution was taking place all around, in the physical world but not entirely away from the internet. Enter, the Arduino: a low-cost, open source, tiny hardware board for connecting the real world to your computer, and/or to the whole internet. What can be done with it? Everything. The limit is the imagination, and as you’ll see from a few of the example creations we review here, imaginative use is the norm.

Looking for a desktop-centric version of BSD? Check out the latest from PC-BSD, released on Monday. New in this release are improvements in ZFS, KDE 4.3.5 with a new theme, the ability to run 32-bit packages on 64-bit systems, and improvements to the software manager for PC-BSD.

If you use Linux in any depth, you’re eventually have to install a program from source code. Normally the process is pretty quick and painless, but it still has some drawbacks, especially when it comes to upgrading or uninstalling that program. To help resolve this, we’ve got checkinstall, a useful tool that adds some cleverness to the process by keeping track of file changes and generating binary packages from your tarballs. With checkinstall, you can generate a RPM, deb, or Slackware package that can be ported between systems for easy install and removal.

I have a HTC Hero since it was launched, and I have been satisfied with it, and think it can fill most people's needs. However, this phone also has a lot of faults, especially hardware-wise. But the android operating system makes this phone a great one, and the sense UI from HTC makes it even better! For those interested, the technical specifications are here. From there, you can see that it isn't even near the performance of current generation smartphones. However, it offers great functionality and covers the needs of most people. It can be used to listen to music, update status on sotial networks, browse the web, update you on the weather and make a phone call, all at the same time! (try doing that on a factory iPhone!! xD), although you'll get some lag, especially on the browser (the browser is great and deals with page rendering and javascript magnificiently! But I can't blame it if it lags on pages full of ads, JavaScript and images, although I don't experience any lag on mostly text pages).

Chat, instant messaging and video communication: the KDE Real Time Communication and Collaboration (RTCC) project wants to improve the integration of real time communication into the desktop environment.

The GNU Project has provided dozens of useful utilities that you can find on almost every major Linux system, but many new Linux users have no idea where to start to learn these handy utilities. In this tutorial, I'll cover a few of the utilities that you can use to measure file system usage, verify the size of files, and take a peek into larger text files like Apache logs. Virtually ever major Linux distro comes with these utilities installed. Some distros designed for resource constrained systems might make use of BusyBox, which includes replacements for most of the GNU utilities. In that case, you should have the same utilities, but they may lack features found in the GNU utils or have slightly different options, etc. However, if you're using the mainstream distros like Fedora, Debian, Ubuntu, openSUSE, Mandriva, Slackware, etc., you should have the standard utils from the start.

GNU Midnight Commander (MC), Vifm and Last File Manager (Lfm) are 3 visual file manager applications for the Linux console. All of these 3 applications will remind you of Norton Commander - with the main interface consisting of two panels which display the file system -, but each has something special. Read about these 3 great console file managers for Linux and let us know your favourite in the comments!