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The annual Mobile World Congress (MWC) is always a highlight of the year for the mobile sector but this year's show was also a big one for open source software. Traditionally in a market dominated by proprietary operating systems there has been a significant shift towards open source software by mobile phone makers over the past year.

Last month we published benchmarks of EXT4 comparing this file-system's performance when it was first marked stable in the mainline kernel and then where it is at now in the Linux kernel while testing every major release in between. This article was followed up by a Btrfs versus EXT4 comparison using the Linux 2.6.33 kernel to see how the two most talked about Linux file-systems are battling it out with the latest kernel. After those Linux file-system benchmarks were published, we received a request from Canonical to look at the EXT3 performance too. With that said, we have done just that and have published EXT3, EXT4, and Btrfs benchmarks from Ubuntu 9.10 and a Ubuntu 10.04 development snapshot from an Intel Atom netbook.

AutoMySQLBackup is a shell script that lets you take daily, weekly and monthly backups of your MySQL databases using mysqldump. It can back up multiple databases, compress the backups, back up remote databases, and email the logs. This tutorial explains how to install and use it on an Ubuntu 9.10 server.

A little more than 2 years ago, I made a switch away from Mac OS X to Ubuntu Linux. Today, I want to revisit the article I wrote 2 years ago about 10 things I missed when switching from OS X to Ubuntu.

As you may be aware by now Nokia and Intel have announced that they will merge their respective Maemo and Moblin software platforms to create a combined Linux-based operating system targeting a new broader range of fixed and mobile devices. But is MeeGo, just an Android me too?

For those still waiting for the year of the Linux "desktop," I regret to inform you that it has already come and gone. Through the efforts of the open-source community, in conjunction with independent hardware and software vendors, as well as Web developers, Linux is well beyond its toddler years and is almost past its rebellious teenage years. Did you notice?

Styles is one of OpenOffice.org's most powerful yet underused features. A style is a collection of formatting instructions that you set once and then apply as needed throughout a document. This articles provides a hands-on guide to using styles.

TestDrive is a project that makes it very easy to download and run the latest daily Ubuntu development snapshot in a virtual machine. Actually, it can be configured to download and run any URL-access ISO in a virtual machine. But the primary goal is to provide a very simple method for allowing non-technical Ubuntu users to test and provide feedback on the current Ubuntu release under development.

What do you get when you cross business logic and 80s arcade video games? An open source Space Invaders clone that's being used to illustrate the power of a business logic integration platform for game design.

Is Ubuntu actually good or merely popular? "It is either so bleeding edge it is a miracle the CD doesn't have stigmata, or it is really old packages that are never updated," blogger hairyfeet asserted. "Ubuntu has done more for Linux acceptance than any other distribution," countered blogger Martin Espinoza. "I'm a bit disenchanted with distros in general," said Slashdot blogger David Masover.

The open source software turned 18 last year, and its maturity is evident to hackers and corporate types alike.

[A slideshow with some debatable facts inside. - Scott]

One of the most common complaints I hear about Linux is that it’s just no good for gaming. Some complain about hardware support, others the lack of titles, others that it’s just too complicated. It’s true that Linux probably isn’t the first platform that comes to mind when I think about PC gaming, but some parts of that reputation are inaccurate or outdated. Sabayon Gaming DVD takes on that myth to see just what a Linux gaming system can do. It’s got a fast Gentoo base, built-in codecs and 3D driver support, Compiz, and many of the best games available for Linux. On top of the usual Gnome games, you get such titles as Neverball, Battle for Wesnoth, OpenArena, Tremulous, Warsow, Nexuiz, and Warzone 2100, all playable from the live DVD.

To get a sense of how the health of the Free/Open Source Software (FOSS) community is in general and to monitor the interest in FOSS and Linux in the region in particular and at the 36-hour mark before the expo starts, pre-registrations for SCALE 8X are running over 30 percent higher than at this time last year. Friday marks the start of SCALE, highlighted by the Women In Open Source (WIOS) and Open Source Software in Educaction (OSSIE) segments.

There has been a sea change in public opinion. Google is now seen as the evil empire. Microsoft, they’re the feisty little guys up in Washington state. The change has also been marked by a new attitude toward open source. Google’s delivery of open source code for Living Stories is treated as ho-hum. The donation of $2 million to Wikimedia is quickly followed by snark. Is that all they’re giving? Well, their search engine likes Wikipedia best.

The SIM cards in cellular telephones might be smaller than a postage stamp and less than a millimeter thick but that hasn't stopped South Korea's SK Telecom from cramming all the major components needed to run Google's Android OS inside one of them. The carrier's Android SIM, a prototype of which is on show at this week's Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, includes an ARM-based processor, companion memory and 1GB of flash memory to store the OS and other data.

Aava Mobile announced an "open" Aava smartphone reference design that employs Intel's "Moorestown" CPU, with current or planned support for Moblin Linux 2.1, Android, and MeeGo. Meanwhile, LG will port its Moorestown- and Moblin-based GW990 phone to MeeGo, says an industry report.

Remember this little guy, the orangish icon that appears in your upper GNOME panel in Debian Lenny when you have software updates? Ubuntu has a similar yet different icon. Or had it, I guess. Now that the Ubuntu Project decided to completely change the way users are notified of software updates, opening an update window either in the foreground or background at some point during the week the update is released, the cheery orange (or whatever color it used to be in Ubuntu) icon doesn't get much play.

From the "Maemo, to Moblin to LiPS' files: There have been multiple efforts from multiple vendor groups over the last 5 years to develop a successful mobile Linux operating system. Now we've got another one with MeeGo that my colleague Andy Patrizio reported on yesterday. The pairing of Nokia's Maemo with Intel's Moblin was a bit surprising to me initially, but in many ways it does make sense. To be blunt, Nokia's Maemo Linux platform was going nowhere fast.

The first free Unix-like operating system available on the IBM PC was 386BSD, of which Linus Torvalds said in 1993: "If 386BSD had been available when I started on Linux, Linux would probably never have happened..."

Alarm bells have started ringing inside the former Sun Microsystems' OpenSolaris community over the project's potential future with database giant Oracle. OpenSolaris developers have complained they've been "completely ignored" by Oracle despite reaching out, with their questions over the project's future going unanswered.