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Consolidation for everyone is IBM's stated reason for releasing a Linux version of its System z mainframe. The new Enterprise Linux Server (ELS) is a stand-alone system specifically designed for Linux environments. According to IBM, the financial savings can be up to 80 per cent. Furthermore, a "save-as-you-grow" pricing model is intended to facilitate investment decisions by allowing customers to gradually purchase resources at considerably lower prices than that of a complete system.

LuckyBackup is an application that backs-up and/or synchronizes any directories with the power of rsync. Its main features are: backup, safety, synchronization, exclude/only include options, allows custom rsync options, remote connections, restore and dry-run operations, scheduling, profiles and command line mode.It is simple to use, fast (transfers over only changes made and not all data), safe (keeps your data safe by checking all declared directories before proceeding in any data manipulation ), reliable and fully customizable.

Good news for Google Chrome users: the latest version of the browser supports extensions, so you can extend its default functionality by installing extensions from the official extension repository.

We have published articles containing EXT4 benchmarks many times now going back to our original real world benchmarks of EXT4 to when Ubuntu 9.04 received EXT4 support and when we ran a variety of file-system benchmarks on an Intel X25-E SSD. We had also thrown in EXT4 numbers when benchmarking Btrfs (and again with Btrfs 0.19) along with NILFS2 benchmarks. Each time has been with a different kernel and the performance of the different Linux file-systems continue to change as each file-system matures and picks up different features. Though with the Linux 2.6.32 kernel the EXT4 performance had changed a great deal due to a change that provides better data integrity on writes but at a significant performance cost. To see how this changes the Linux file-system landscape, atop the latest Linux kernel we have a fresh set of benchmarks for EXT3, EXT4, XFS, ReiserFS, and Btrfs.

Dan Kegel announced the release of winetricks 20091213 here is the email he sent to the wine-devel mailing list. Austin and Andrew have been hard at work keeping winetricks working smoothly. In particular, the ie6 and gecko verbs should work again. Thanks guys!

With Fedora 12 and Ubuntu 9.10 now out the door, developers are already turning their attention to the spring releases. KDE3 has definitively gone the way of the dodo as far as openSUSE and Mandriva are concerned. Google is taking its first steps in the operating system market with Chrome OS.

Opera is still the only browser to offer mouse gestures, so you can navigate with dragging motions rather than having to click on small buttons. It also offers native support for BitTorrent downloads and ‘widgets’: mini-applications similar to Windows gadgets…

Most users that have used Linux as their desktop operating system for any length of time will tell you that Ubuntu is one of the most user-friendly Linux versions available. The people over at Linux Mint disagree, however, and make it their mission to customise each new release of Ubuntu with a layer of additional user-friendliness. To do this they re-build Ubuntu with a range of popular tools that are excluded by default from Ubuntu as well as including a couple of their own scripts to make managing the system easier.

Nessus is a proprietary comprehensive vulnerability scanning tool. It is free of charge for personal use in a non-enterprise environment. Its goal is to detect potential vulnerabilities on the tested systems. Tanable Network Security announced the release of Nessus 4.2.0 last month. Nessus is now using a web based interface to manage scans and their results. Scan results and policies are now stored on the server. Additionally you can now compare the current scan with „older“ scans.

LXer Feature: 14-Dec-2009

The rest of you may already be aware of this, but I just discovered something about Ubuntu I was not aware of.

How much of the market dominance of Windows over Linux is due to people who either cannot or do not want to use pliers, who are afraid that any attempt to alter their machine is doomed to failure?

I have used Window Maker for some time and have always made my own custom menus. However, the current maintainer of the Window Maker window manager gave us a small tutorial on how to add the Debian menu to a custom menu. The menu package must be installed prior to beginning this tutorial, check your software repositories. Thanks to John H. Robinson, IV (aka jaqque).

In a wide-ranging announcement, Novell has laid out plans to blur the boundary between on-premises and in-the-cloud computing. In a recent statement, Novell claims that their "approach to Intelligent Workload Management integrates identity and systems management capabilities into an application workload, thereby increasing the workload's security and portability across physical, virtual and cloud environments.

The rumored Google Phone would not only provide an open source phone powered by Android, it could actually free us from the control of the large network providers at the same time.

HTC is betting big on Android in 2010 and most other mobile makers are following suit. Forget Linux versus Mac OS X versus Windows 7. The real battle in 2010 is going to be on mobile phones. And most players, with HTC leading the pack, are betting on Android.

Behind closed doors, over Thursday and Friday, the European Commission has been holding a hearing on the proposed acquisition of Sun Microsystems by Oracle. The Wall Street Journal reports that several Oracle customers, including the Spanish bank BBVA, Vodafone UK, the National Health Service and the Oracle user group, spoke in support of the acquisition.

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.

Even if you build your own PC and carefully select hardware components of the highest quality, it is likely that at some point in time you will experience a hardware failure. It needn't be a hard disk failure that will cause data loss.

The reason I am writing this post is because I tried many howto's which didn't work and I eventually ended up combining some to get both rtorrent and wtorrent to install and run on my Debian 5 Lenny VPN. In case you don't know: wtorrent is a WebUI for rtorrent, a command line Bittorrent client. Be aware, there are quite a few steps on doing this, so you need a lot of patience and time. Let's get started!

The first picture of an alleged Google phone appeared on the internet. Of course these phones will run Android, Google's own Linux based Operating System for Smartphones. The phone will be called Nexus One and is made by smartphone maker HTC.