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Firefox has dropped version 3.7 from its roadmap and will roll out new features in the next few weeks together with 3.6.

Linux has long been popular in the datacenter, and various Tier 1 vendors have extensive server product lines mostly based on Red Hat Enterprise Linux, or SUSE Enterprise Linux. There are more OEM options than ever; here is roundup of 5 distinctly different OEM Linux servers.

Alot of people ask me the easiest way to record their experiences while using Ubuntu. You can do this several ways but using an application named recordMyDesktop seems to be the most popular method. This video tutorial will show you how to install recordMyDesktop, create a video in .ogv format, and convert it to an .avi.

ReactOS was meant as a free and open-source operating system. But after 11 years in development it never reached a satisfactory level of usability. Due to lack of developers, reimplementing the Win32 subsystem proved to be complex. Given the deficiencies in ReactOS developer Aleksey Bragin decided to rewrite it from scratch using Wine source code.

This tutorial shows how to combine four single storage servers (running Ubuntu 9.10) to a distributed replicated storage with GlusterFS. Nodes 1 and 2 (replication1) as well as 3 and 4 (replication2) will mirror each other, and replication1 and replication2 will be combined to one larger storage server (distribution). Basically, this is RAID10 over network. If you lose one server from replication1 and one from replication2, the distributed volume continues to work. The client system (Ubuntu 9.10 as well) will be able to access the storage as if it was a local filesystem. GlusterFS is a clustered file-system capable of scaling to several peta-bytes. It aggregates various storage bricks over Infiniband RDMA or TCP/IP interconnect into one large parallel network file system. Storage bricks can be made of any commodity hardware such as x86_64 servers with SATA-II RAID and Infiniband HBA.

Over the past week there has been a lot of talk about the EXT4 file-system following the announcement that Google is migrating their EXT2 file-systems to EXT4. Their reasons for this transition to EXT4 are attributed to the easy migration process and Google engineers are pleased with this file-system's performance. However, as we mentioned in that news post last week and in many other articles over the past weeks and months, EXT4 is not as great of a contender as it was in the past, well, for some tests at least. The performance of the EXT4 file-system commonly goes down with new kernel releases and not up, as kernel developers continue to introduce new safeguards to address potential data loss problems that initially plagued some EXT4 users. For our latest EXT4 benchmarks we have numbers that show this file-system's performance using a vanilla 2.6.28 kernel (when EXT4 was marked as stable) and then every major kernel release up through the latest Linux 2.6.33 release candidate.

Moonlight was written in three weeks in June of 2007 by a group of Mono developers working round the clock to fulfil a promise made by Miguel de Icaza. Despite such heroics Moonlight continues to face resistance from the wider developer community...

The newest, fast interface, USB 3.0, is finally out, but only one operating system has native support for it: Linux.

In a official post on the Ubuntu Forums, user Matthew (a official Canonical employee?) asks users to complete a survey with the applications they would like to see in the upcoming versions of Ubuntu.

How do you deal with an entrenched content industry that tries to pump its twisted values down your throat with ludicrously illogical emotional appeals? Well, one way is to fight fire with fire by making your own emotional appeals, and trust to the viral amplification of free culture distribution to get the message out. This is the essence of the “minute meme” idea from Question Copyright, and animator Nina Paley has fired the first volley with her one-minute animation “Copying Is Not Theft.” Read the full article at Free Software Magazine.

I compiled a VMware image of Chromium OS Zero for testing out in your virtual machine environment, this is a Chromium OS Zero image converted to VMware .vmdk file. Find also our first screenshots of Chromium OS Zero.

Linux’s main merit, as a kernel and an ecosystem, is its open source nature. That means the software that runs on it has little choice but to be open source. This doesn’t mean closed-source software is unavailable on Linux—just that it’s got the deck stacked strongly against it. Because of this, software companies who don’t primarily deal in open source have shunned Linux. It’s something of a chicken-and-egg argument to say who shunned whom first. And perhaps it’s academic: does it matter who took the first step away from the table? Still, here’s the key problem: There’ll always be a big gap between Linux advocacy and Linux reality as long as it remains biased toward the near-complete exclusion of binary-only / closed-source / proprietary software on Linux.

Does GNOME 3.0 necessarily need 3D acceleration? Do GNOME 2.0 apps run under 3.0? A website tries to provide answers to some unsettling questions.

The KDE Project is taking a smart approach to reworking the KDE Website. Lydia Pintscher put out the call Sunday for contributors to pitch in with content and screenshots for one or more KDE programs by January 23rd. KDE apps are broken down into three batches on the wiki. Contributors are asked to pick one (or more) apps and submit a screenshot, and basic information about a project such as its homepage, features, IRC channels, and so forth.

LXer Feature: 18-Jan-2010

According to Reuters, MySQL founder Michael "Monty" Widenius is now looking to China and Russia for help in his campaign objecting to the proposed acquisition of Sun Microsystems by Oracle. Previously, Widenius appealed to the European Commission (EC), which initially objected to the takeover, in order to prevent the deal from going through, however, Widenieus believes it now seems clear that the EC will approve the deal. He points to the petition on helpmysql.org, a campaign site set up by Widenius, which he says has over 30,000 "signatures" from MySQL users from around the world.

A highly anticipated release, KDE 4.4 has taken necessary steps to solidify the underlying Plasma technology of KDE 4 and add polish to the already shiny surface. This week, MakeTechEasier will take you on a preview of the upcoming KDE 4.4 release, scheduled for February 9. I recently installed Release Candidate 1 on my desktop computer and took it for a spin. I was not disappointed. The following is a preview, not a review. KDE 4.4 is still under development and should not be used on production systems, nor should stability be expected. Having said that, I am typing this article within KDE 4.4 and loving all of it, especially the tabbed windows.

Are you crazy about Google Talk. Do you want to be become a master of Google Talk? Then here is a source for you to know each and every secret of Google Talk. I think this is a complete list of tips, tricks, hacks, howto’s, keyboard shortcuts and few miscellaneous facts about Google Talk.

A couple of days ago we wrote that the German Federal Office for Security in Information Technology advised German citizens to switch from Internet Explorer (regardless of the version they use) to an alternative browser for security reasons. Now, the French government has issued a similar advisory.

A notoriously creepy Malthusian thinktank appears to have provided the inspiration for the design of Google's new web browser, Chrome. The icon for Chrome seems to be little more than a holistic logo of The Club of Rome. Both logos appear to have formed spontaneously at around the same time. The Club of Rome appears to have debuted the logo for its "New Path of World Development" programme in June 2008, while Chrome unveiled the browser with a comic in September 2008; an example of the Hive Mind, surely.