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For quite some time I’ve been intrigued by Ubuntu’s Netbook Remix (UNR), but I’ve never given it a shot up until now. Being a KDE guy, I usually lean toward applications based on the Qt toolkit and I’ve never really liked GNOME much. For some reason though, the Ubuntu Netbook Remix has been lingering in my mind for a potential review, and now I’ve finally been able to give it a shot. I’ve actually been using UNR for a couple of months now. When I first started playing with it, I didn’t even own a Netbook, so instead I tried it out on a Dell Latitude E6400 laptop. About a month later, I was gifted a Dell Mini 10 netbook, which afforded me the opportunity to try UNR in it’s intended environment.

The Free Software Foundation is gearing up for a big event March 19th through 21st to be held in Cambridge, Mass. at Harvard's University Science Center. LibrePlanet 2010 is a three day event with workshops on using free software for everything from Web development to video editing and graphics. This year's LibrePlanet is going to feature a new "Women's Caucus," a day-long track on Sunday to boost participation by women in free software projects. There's no shortage of events focused on free and open source software. You can't swing a penguin without hitting a conference these days, so we interviewed FSF membership coordinator Deborah Nicholson to find out what makes LibrePlanet different from some of the other events going on this Spring.

The Elive team has released a long-awaited upgrade to its Debian-based, live CD-ready distro. The New Stable version of Elive 2.0, code-named Topaz, is equipped with the Enlightenment E17 desktop environment, but now offers an alternative Compaz desktop, plus new autolaunchers, system-recovery tools, and "configurators."

Google’s Android code will assume its rightful place in the Linux kernel — in good time, the company’s top open source guru says. The Android code was stripped out of the last kernel release, version 2.6.33, after Google reportedly failed to provide necessary changes and subsystem code required by kernel.org. This led some to claim Google had forked Linux, a charge that was debated in a long thread among developers. Google’s top open source program manager Chris DiBona said he doesn’t think the Android phone operating system code is any more a fork of Linux than Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

Bruce Byfield is already grumpy from the Olympics invasion of his hometown, and now KDE and GNOME are causing vexation. They both have many wonderful abilities, but some things leave users scratching their heads and wondering "why."

lsof is used to LiSt Open Files, hence the command’s name. It’s a handy tool normally used to list the open files on a system along with the associated processes or users, and can also be used to gather information on your system’s network connections. When run without options, lsof lists all open files along with all of the active processes that have them open. To get a full and accurate view of what files are open by what processes, make sure that you run the lsof command with root privileges.

I find it interesting that the idea of Linux on the desktop is responded to by either yawns or derision. I think it depends on whether you see Linux as a powerful operating system built by a million-man army, or one filled with bugs and missing the cool stuff like speech recognition.

I was posed with a challenge yesterday and fortunately, the challenge was cancelled. At my day job, my boss wanted me to convert a document produced in LaTeX to a Word document. I work with LaTeX in Kile and this isn't an option that seems available. The native output of my little set up is PDF but the PDF to Word doc options didn't look promising either.

Does closed source software make you more likely to succeed in the software market? Sure seems so.

The BBC has tried to draw a line under its decision to bar open source implementations of RTMP (real-time messaging protocol) streaming in the iPlayer, after The Register revealed the Corporation's quiet switcheroo last week. BBC online managing editor Ian Hunter claimed in a blog post today that the term "open source" had been "conflated" by users who had grumbled about third party RTMP plugins being locked out of the catch-up service.

Michael Young wrote xen-4.0.0-0.2.rc4.fc12.src.rpm for Xen-4-rc4 for Fedora 12 to install Hypervisor (changeset 20950). Schema bellow modifying content of mentioned src.rpm allows to build set of RPMS upgrading Xen Hypersor 4.0 matching current tip CS of http://xenbits.xensource.com/xen-unstable.hg,no matter of rc4 in fact, via hot upgrade without rebuilding development Xen System on top of F12 with recent PVOps kernel 2.6.32.9. Directory gemu-xen.git is only determined by value of QEMU_TAG in Config.mk file under xen-unstable tree clone.

A lot of the news I come across is contentious — of the Linux vs. Microsoft variety — and then there are the lawsuits, claims and counterclaims, and forum flame-throwing that go along with it. That’s why I was charmed by this little story by columnist Mike Cassidy from last week’s Southern California Linux Expo about three young girls who submitted proposals for their own presentations. Sisters Saskia and Malakai Wade (ages 8 and 12, respectively) and friend Mirano Cafiero (also age 12) talked about Gimp, TuxPaint, and OLPC XO computers. Malakai showed a stop-action Barbie video that she made with OpenShot.

PC-BSD 8.0 was released last week and while we have already delivered FreeBSD 8.0 benchmarks including against Debian GNU/kFreeBSD and Fedora / Debian / OpenBSD / OpenSolaris for which PC-BSD is based, we took this opportunity to deliver a fresh set of *BSD benchmarks. In this article we have benchmarks of PC-BSD 8.0 x64 against Kubuntu 9.10 x86_64.

The Open Source Initiative has condemned the International Intellectual Property Alliance (IIPA) for unjust attacks on open source. The IIPA is pushing for the US government to blacklist a number of countries for their open source policies.

Outsourcing allows you to create a solution to a specific problem quickly. Many of the solutions that you may want to deploy in your organization require skills that take years to develop. Outsourcing helps you leverage the time factor.

In an almost surreal tale of events, USA electronics retailer Newegg has discovered a reported 300 counterfeit Intel Core i7 920 CPU’s in its inventory, some of which were inadvertently shipped out to buyers!

This is the best book i’ve ever read in my life about architecture of Xen Hypervisor, concepts of paravirtualization, dom0,domU, performance advantages of PV guests. I would say that core theoretical background of Xen Hypervisor is written pretty clear. It brings comprehension of Xen to persons, which even wouldn’t be willing to work on this topic too much. The last is very important from my standpoint.

I've tried a few different Linux video editors including Kino, PiTiVi, and Cinelerra. Are these all the video editors FOSS have to offer? No they are not. Check out Openshot!

Google yesterday released a dev-only build of Chrome for Mac OS, Linux and Windows which comes loaded with rough-round-the-edges versions of the Geolocation API. The latest update comes a few days after Google pushed out a Windows-only beta of its open source Chrome browser to its users. Google Chrome wonk Karen Grunberg wrote on the company’s blog that geolocation was switched off by default in the 5.0.342.1 build.

Windows is all about walls. It's nothing but barriers. Want to do something? The answer is no. You know what the worst part of trying to troubleshoot and fix any Windows PC is? The endless waiting. Waiting for it to reboot. Waiting for hung processes to finish whatever they are doing. Waiting for apps to install or uninstall, and why is that always so dog-slow? For extra amusement, hook up a sniffer like Wireshark or tcpdump just to watch how many Windows apps phone home.

[I couldn't agree more Carla, my favorite are the programs that you can't remove once installed. Not in the list of installed programs, no un-installer, oh but you can delete the menu items..yeah that'll free up some space right? - Scott]