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LXer Feature: 24-Feb-2010

Looking for something cool to show your love for LXer that will make you the envy of geeks everywhere? Then check out the new LXer Swag Shop!

How much would it cost the European Union to cobble together the Linux kernel from scratch? The development costs would reach over a billion euros (or about £900m, or $1.4bn USD), according to researchers from the University of Oviendo, Spain. Jesús García-García and Mª Isabel Alonso de Magdaleno are set to present this open source thought experiment at the European Union's Conference on Corporate R&D next month.

A man who claims to be the head of the Aryan Nations says he wants to move their national headquarters into my little hometown in Eastern Oregon. This is alarming news, because we don't care to have organized crime, hatred, and intolerance invade our little community. He thinks we share his values and won't mind... But even though we are a rural area that has been especially hard-hit by the recession, we have some powerful tools that our predecessors did not have. Like Facebook.

Almost exactly one month ago we reported that Roderick Colenbrander was working on a new open-source project after his once-popular NVClock program has since largely faded away. Details were scarce on the project originally, but we knew it was to do with Linux gaming. Today we now know that this project is called "Kwaak3" and it's a port of Quake 3 to Google's Android platform.

Novell continues to push beyond the SUSE Linux market. Among the major moves: The company is beta testing Novell Cloud Security Service, which is scheduled for general availability in May or June 2010. Here are the implications.

We have tested a few interesting Intel Atom-powered nettop computers lately from the ASRock ION 330HT-BD that bears a Blu-ray drive and an Intel Atom 330 CPU with NVIDIA ION graphics to the ASUS Eee Top that packaged the entire system within a touch-screen monitor. In this article we are trying out the CompuLab Fit-PC2, which is definitely the smallest Atom-powered computer we have tested to date. The Fit-PC2 easily fits in the palm of your hand and it packs an Intel Atom Z530 processor with a Poulsbo graphics processor, a 160GB SATA HDD, and 1GB of system memory.

PCs running Ubuntu will be getting more social thanks to changes that will set the popular Linux distro's look and feel for the next five years. Lucid Lynx, due this April, will bring social applications like Twitter and Facebook directly into the software, Ubuntu founder Mark Shuttleworth has said in an interview here.

Configuration Management is a term that may not be familiar to many Linux users. But for system administrators the concept will be well known. In a nutshell, Configuration Management software enables administrators to automatically manage the entire configuration of one or multiple computers.

This document describes how to install a Proftpd server that uses virtual users from a MySQL database instead of real system users. This is much more performant and allows to have thousands of ftp users on a single machine. In addition to that I will show the use of quota with this setup.

For the past four years, the "brightest minds in Linux" have come together at the Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit to "tackle and solve the most pressing issues facing Linux today." The opportunity to solve is coming up quickly, and those who want in on the tackling had better move fast.

What was Jeff Bezos, Amazon's CEO, thinking? Amazon just signed a patent cross-licensing deal that pays Microsoft intellectual property fees for, among other things, patents that cover Amazon's Linux-based Kindle e-reader and its Linux servers. Too bad Microsoft has never, ever been able to show that its patents cover anything to do with Linux. Microsoft claims that Linux and other open-source programs violate its patent rights. They've been making those claims for years. What's always been missing is proof.

Distro-hopping is easy and fun. Linux users distro-hop to solve problems and to try new software. But is it necessary? Haven't most Linux distributions reached a state of polish that makes distro-hopping unnecessary? Brian Proffitt wonders.

Canonical developer Jamie Bennett announced in his blog post The New UI for ARM Based Ubuntu Devices how Enlightenment Foundation Libraries (EFL) enabled rich graphical user interfaces even on non-3D-accelerated ARM devices. Enlightenment Foundation Libraries were conceived and developed with performance in mind. Started in 2000, the current incarnation was designed based on previous experience with Imlib and Imlib2, libraries known to be quite fast. Over the past 10 years, the API changed a lot to be easier to use, but the performance impact of each and every change was carefully considered and benchmarked using the Expedite tool.

It's my pleasure to bring you the CTO of Devil Mountain Software, Craig Barth, in this exclusive interview, his first, after the much publicized outting of InfoWorld's Randall Kennedy. Barth, perhaps best known for his Windows performance expertise, is also a huge Linux fan. Here now, is my interview with Craig Barth in its entirety. Transcribed from an Audacity recording over Skype.

The LPI certification is a valuable certification for Linux system administrators. LPI has partnered with Novell and now the certification has become even more valuable as it's also a Novell certification by now which means you get 2 certifications at once. The LPIC 1 certification is also the base for the ubuntu certified professional certification. So if you like to become a linux all-round certified administrator. This is probably one of the best (and cheapest) choices. This is the first article in a series of tutorials, which will try to help you prepare for the LPI certification exam.

The Novell-sponsored OpenSUSE project released Milestone 2 of its OpenSUSE 11.3, featuring Linux 2.6.33, GNOME 2.3 beta, and a new network security stack. OpenSUSE 11.3 Milestone 2 also debuts the new KDE 4.4 desktop, which adds a netbook interface, plus new tabbing and social networking features.

File under what just happened there? Amazon has agreed to pay Microsoft an undisclosed sum of money so it can continue using Linux servers and the Kindle. Since when did Microsoft pwn the Linux world again?

The Open Source Automation Development Lab (OSADL) announced the release of the "Latest Stable" Linux mainline real-time kernel, based on Linux 2.6.31. The "PREEMPT RT"-based release will be demonstrated on Mar. 2-4 at Embedded World 2010 in Nuremberg, Germany, which offers a number of sessions on Linux and Android development.

Red Hat's community Linux has undergone a major development change, with the bleeding edge Rawhide splitting off to become its own branch. A look at what this means, and why it matters.

Cortus is pleased to announce uCLinux for the APS3 family of processors. This version of Linux is ideally suited to low power, high performance, embedded systems. The APS3 family of processors are modern, powerful processors, specifically designed for embedded systems, featuring a tiny silicon footprint.