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An open memo from the U.S. DoD declares that open source software is no worse than traditional software, perhaps even useful.

The mobile phone market suffered a six percent drop in shipments year to year, but saw a 5.6 percent improvement over the previous quarter, says IDC. Meanwhile, Motorola, which showed a 6.4 percent yearly drop, according to IDC, posted 3Q earnings that beat analyst predictions.

In response to the news this week that the city of Los Angeles is going Googlefied with a $7.25 million, five-year deal to adopt Gmail, Google Calendar and other applications, Novell's blog has an interesting rebuttal. Of course, the reason for the city's switch to Google's corner of the cloud is to save money that it would otherwise spend on expensive software licenses, and it will save. Still, the Novell blog post is intriguing because it's a missive from an open source-focused company criticizing the Los Angeles decision with barbs frequently aimed at open source solutions. It claims that L.A. should have opted for Novell's fee-based Groupwise solution. Huh?

When running a modern Linux graphics driver stack in a composited environment there is a lot less tearing -- particularly with regard to video playback, but OpenGL applications too -- now than there was in the past, but there is still room for improvement. One of the ways to improve this is by properly controlling the display of buffers with how often the swaps occur and to sync them with the monitor's refresh rate or the rate at which the compositor is running.

If you're fetching several resultsets that contain a lot of common data, it can make sense to obtain a single resultset that has all the data that's required, store it in a temporary table, and then select from this temporary table as needed.

Open Source philosophy fosters environments where people readily exchange knowledge and willingly share innovations as a way to develop skills for the betterment of humankind.

The Linux-Kongress is traditionally where kernel developers exchange honors and advice about new features and enhancements. This year a number of speakers presented performance improvement data and discussed what aspects of Linux can be drawn out even more.

While recent Ubuntu releases have been more about careful enhancement and distribution maintenance, the current version 9.10 offers a new look as well as a whole range of new technical features – the developers have restructured the distribution's standard filesystem, boot system and hardware maintenance, and they have introduced new software. Not everything is completely new; many changes were introduced into Ubuntu as part of a gradual development process and have now reached the maturity required for general use.

Securing your Linux server is important to protect your data, intellectual property, and time, from the hands of crackers and hackers. The system administrator is responsible for security Linux box. In this first part of a Linux server security series, I will provide 20 hardening tips for default installation of Linux system.

Back in 2005, I wrote a story for InternetNews.com where I wrote that I expected PHP 6 to be out in 2006. Here we are three years later and guess what? No PHP 6. What happened? Is it ever going to come out?

ZaReason is taking a small but significant step to help strengthen the Ubuntu brand. To help celebrate the Ubuntu 9.10 launch, the PC maker is offering “a stick of Ubuntu aluminum case badges with each computer ordered” October 29 through November 5. Here’s why you should care.

So you've just installed Ubuntu 9.10, the cute and cuddly Karmic Koala, but now you're confronted with a most pertinent question, "What do i do now?" Ubuntu is a very complete and full-featured Linux distribution, but no operating system can come with everything you want. There's much more fun to be had in what comes after installing the OS!

AMD's Catalyst Linux driver has improved substantially over the past few years. Years ago the Catalyst Linux driver was in shambles with its performance being utterly poor, it lacked enthusiast-oriented features like CrossFire and OverDrive, and ATI customers had to wait months -- sometimes in excess of a year -- for any driver support in Linux. All of this though has changed with AMD now providing same-day Linux support, a near feature parity to the Windows Catalyst driver, and first-rate performance. Playing a critical role in improving the ATI Linux support has been Matthew Tippett, serving as the engineering manager for Linux Core Engineering since joining ATI Technologies in 2003. To put it in perspective, when Matthew started work at ATI, only the FireGL graphics cards were supported under Linux. However, today will be his last day serving ATI / Advanced Micro Devices.

Since Gnome 2.28 they decided that applications’ menus should be text only, without any icons. I actually like icons in Gnome and don’t think that they were abused in menus. Luckily there is a way to revert to the old behaviour by setting a gconf key.

Yesterday the new Ubuntu 9.10 (Karmic Koala) was released. This guide shows how you can upgrade your Ubuntu 9.04 desktop and server installations to Ubuntu 9.10.

This Ubuntu 9.10 Mini-Course will help you set up a secure an Ubuntu 9.10 Server using Postifx, Dovecot and Thunderbird with TLS and SMTP AUTH. The goal of this configuration is to create a secure mail server using encrypted communication to retrieve mail and to send mail through your mail server.

This document describes the installation of the automatic dialer GNUDialer, this is an alternative dialer to VICIDial, with more lightweight scripts and a far more easier GUI, it uses Asterisk and MySQL for its operation.

Wireshark is a very versatile utility to monitor all the neighborhood network activity, including disassembling packets and viewing data transmitted from anyone who is connected on your LAN (or Wireless LAN). I'm using Wireshark to monitor the activity of the network, and I explained the packets transmitted between the peers.

Canonical's Ubuntu project released the final Ubuntu 9.10 Desktop Edition, featuring faster boot times, improved audio and 3G connectivity, an enhanced Netbook Remix, and more robust cloud support, among other features. The release follows IBM's announcement that it is launching an Ubuntu-based cloud computing distribution for businesses.

Before I forget to mention it: Ubuntu 9.10, the Karmic Koala is out. Cheers, fanfare, and so on. Now some people don’t like it a bit because of Mono. For those, Debian developer (and maintainer of Mono on Debian) Joseph Michael Shields has two answers:

1. It’s stupid.
2. Get Chicken Little Remix 9.10 – Karmic Kraienköppe instead.