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ActiveState, the dynamic languages experts, today launched ActiveState Business Edition, commercial-grade language distributions for Perl, Python and Tcl providing organizations open source compliance, commercial support, and cross-platform access. A slide presentation around ActiveState Business Edition is available on Slideshare.net: http://bit.ly/ayd49J

With all of this iPad buzz stirring up the tech world over the past couple of weeks, Chrome OS has almost been forgotten. That may have something to do with the fact that Google has yet to officially release the netbook-centric operating system to the public, but still, you'd expect a company like Google to keep the details flowing about a forthcoming operating system. Today it seems we're getting exactly what you'd expect, in response to all the recent tablet fanfare.

Apple turned up the heat in the mobile market last week when it unveiled its new iPad mobile computing device. Jim Zemlin, the executive director of the Linux Foundation, has responded to Apple's product launch with a candid appraisal of Linux's strengths and weaknesses in the mobile market relative to Apple's mobile operating system. Zemlin, one of the Linux community's most vocal advocates, speculated last year that Linux could eventually become the dominant operating system for consumer electronics products. His argument was based largely on the assertion that Linux's lack of licensing costs will make it the most practical and affordable option for hardware vendors.

For the first time, we get to see what happens when a company that has built up an immense global business empire on the basis of its proprietary software takes over some of the most important open source projects around. Does it destroy them through mutual incomprehension? Or is it *changed* by them, moving towards their approaches? That's what we're going to find out over the next few years in the Great Oracle Experiment.

Now that the Sun acquisition is a done deal, Oracle has begun picking and choosing the products that will live on and which will fade out. While CEO Larry Ellison was adamant that there would be no wholesale slaughter of products or staffing cuts, the reality is that not everything can survive or receive full Oracle investment. Most of these discussions are available online from a collection of videos made during Oracle's (NASDAQ: ORCL) Product Strategy day earlier this week.

During the last two months Marcel and I ported all tree views in digiKam from Qt3 to Qt4 and its model view concept. These changes are now included in the svn trunk. The new code still needs some serious testing and we would appreciate your help on this.

Over the years at Phoronix there have been reviews on many Tyan motherboards for desktops, servers, and workstations. The build quality of these motherboards have always been very good; after all, Tyan has been around for two decades and their workstation/server products must be very dependable if they wish to maintain their premiere position within the industry. The Linux compatibility with the motherboards has also been generally quite good due to its dominant use on their operating systems. As our first Tyan review for 2010 we are looking at the S2915 n6650W and S2927 n3600B motherboards. Both motherboards are designed for AMD's Opteron 2000 series processors and have a similar feature set, but there are a few key differences between these two high-end workstation motherboards.

Use gnuplot to dynamically generate Web pages from your system using raw data to provide graphic images. This raw data typically contains MIS-related information, on system performance, storage, or database growth.

Social media has taken over the Web in a very big way. It has even been argued that social media is the new Web or “new media”. From social networking sites like Facebook to video sharing sites like YouTube, social media services occupy all of the top 20 most popular sites on Alexa.com, excluding search engines. Two of those popular social media sites are Blogger and Wordpress, two sites that host free blogs for their users. Although most blog services and blogging content management systems allow users to post directly on their websites, there are many advantages to using client software on a local computer, such as the ability to work offline. In past years, KDE had no full-featured blogging client.

Stali is a new Linux distribution from Suckless.org that is based on a "hand selected collection of the best tools for each task, and each tool being statically linked (including some X clients such as xterm, surf, dwm, dmenu, mplayer)." Suckless has often delivered outstanding software, and I am eagerly awaiting an official release. So, what else is in store?

re bugs, and bug reports, are good. No really, at least that's what Karl Fogel says in trying to squash the idea that bugs are "technical debt that developers must repay. Fogel, who works for Canonical on the Launchpad platform, says that it's a fallacy that growths in bug reports is bad. On the contrary, more bug reports mean good news because it means more users are using the project. If you've participated in a growing project, it's not unusual to see alarm at the growing number of bug reports and the inability to address them all. Soon, developers start talking about focusing on bugs and not features.

Last Friday, after four years of deliberation, representatives of all parties in the Danish parliament (Folketing) reached an agreement to adopt the OpenDocument Format (ODF) as their official format for saving documents from April 2011. Initially, the decision will not affect any regional or communal authorities; a decision in this respect is to follow at a later stage. An official approval of the agreement by the Danish parliament is planned for next Tuesday, although this will apparently only be a formality.

I don't usually write book reviews, but this one is special. My friend and colleague Daniel James has written an introduction to the world of media production with Linux, or as the subtitle describes it, "A manual for creative media on a modest budget". I'll put the spoiler right up front: This book is wonderful and is an essential read for all artistically-inclined Linux users. Read on to find out why I think so.

The NEW PCLinuxOS Magazine staff is pleased to announce the release of the February 2010 issue of the PCLinuxOS Magazine.

The third installment ur story so far: Security expert Frank Adversego has been passed over to lead a major project at the Library of Congress, but discovers that the Library has been hacked by a mysterious cracker with motives unknown; now, Frank learns that he may be coming under suspicion.

Recently I just started to use the Citrix Netscalers again ( Load Balancers ). Being the person that I am, I wanted a way to grab the information using the SOAP API. Now Citrix has a ton of documentation for Perl/C/C# and Java ( None for Python ). SOAP client support has not been the best for Python, in my opinion. I know you have soappy/ZSI, which I have had issues with consuming Broken WSDL files ( Having to fix the Broken WSDL file manually, SUCKS!). Just 2 weeks ago, I encountered SUDS. This module is by far, the best SOAP client for Python.

You got some really awesome themes for ubuntu via bisigi repo, and now its time to get some cool wallpapers for ubuntu via kwwii repo. This is how you do it in Ubuntu Karmic.

Even as devices like the Kindle, iPad and other electronic book-reading devices likely become more pervasive in the coming years, I still believe there will be a market for paper books.

Josh Berkus is well known as a PostgreSQL hacker, but, as it happens, he also picked up some valuable experience during his stint at "The Laboratory for the Destruction of Communities," otherwise known as Sun Microsystems. That experience has been distilled into a "patented ten-step method" on how to free a project of unwelcome community involvement. Josh's energetic linux.conf.au presentation on this topic was the first talk in the "business of open source" miniconf; it was well received by an enthusiastic crowd.

Enlightenment, also known simply as E, is a stacking window manager for the X Window System which can be used alone or in conjunction with a desktop environment such as GNOME or KDE. Enlightenment is also a whole suite of libraries to help you create beautiful user interfaces with much less work than doing it the old fashioned way and fighting with traditional toolkits, not to mention a traditional window manager.