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Laptops are often disconnected from networks, which makes running automated network backups a bit challenging. But in Linux there is always a way, and Juliet Kemp shows how to set up hands-off worry-free automatic laptop backups.

Trends in computers come in waves. Developers are like surfers on the shore spying out the horizon looking out for the next big one. Today I write about a wave that is just now starting to take shape, looks almost innocuous, but that has the potential to be a great ride as well – Nokia’s Maemo operating system.

Google has prepared its Chromium OS, alias Chromium, for download. Anyone hesitant to intall if from source code will find a functioning VMware image from Linux Magazine Online.

A single global communications network, composed of Internet, mobile, SMS, cable and satellite technology, is rapidly tying the world's people together as never before. The core premise of this paper is that the emergence of this network is one of the seminal events of the early 21st century. Increasingly, the world's commerce, finance, communications, media and information are flowing through this network. Half of the world's 6 billion people are now connected to this network, many through powerful and inexpensive mobile phones. Each year more of the world's people become connected to the network, its bandwidth increases, and its use becomes more integrated into all that we do.

On a regular basis, we at OStatic round up our ongoing collections of open source resources, tutorials, reviews and project tours. These educational toolkits are a big part of the learning mission we try to preserve at the site. We regularly collect the best Firefox extensions, free online books on open source topics, free tools for developers, resources for working with and enjoying online video and audio, Linux tutorials, and much more. In this post, you'll find an updated set of more than 45 collections and resources. Hopefully, you'll find something to learn from here, and the good news is that everything found in this post is free.

The first update to PHP 5.3 is now available providing 5 security fixes in addition a long list of bug fixes to the popular open source dynamic language. PHP 5.3 was released at the end of June, so the 5.3.1 point update has been in the works for five months at this point.

Intel's Linux graphics driver stack is often at the forefront of X.Org / Mesa innovations, from Intel being the first driver having in-kernel video memory management to being the first driver with mainline kernel mode-setting support to even being the driver that often first receives support for new OpenGL extensions in Mesa. The Intel Linux driver stack can be attributed with many firsts, but continually pushing this driver while putting out quarterly timed releases has led to some pains. Earlier this year in fact the driver stack was rather buggy -- especially in Ubuntu 9.04 -- that impaired many users with stability issues, performance problems, and other headaches. Most of the regressions from overhauling the Linux driver stack have been resolved, but where is the driver stack at now? The Intel stack in Ubuntu 9.10 is performing rather well, but where it's more important is its status within Fedora as more of the bleeding-edge graphics packages are pulled into this release that often don't make it into other distributions until months later when they roll out their next releases. To see where the Intel Linux graphics are at in Fedora 12, we ran the same set of benchmarks in the Fedora 10, 11, and 12 releases with an Intel G43 IGP.

With the purchase of SUSE by Novell many feared that the brand would be subsumed into the corporate borg and contaminated with proprietary add-ons. But openSUSE goes its own way, and the result is a sleek, reliable distribution with all the bells and whistles. Paul Ferrill takes it for a spin and reports.

Chip designer ARM is excited about the prospect of Google Chrome OS, according to the company's EVP of Marketing Ian Drew. Speaking to TechRadar after being name-checked by Google at the unveiling of Chrome OS, Drew admitted that he couldn't predict whether the revolutionary principles behind the new operating system would be successful, but that he wouldn't bet against a company with such a good track record.

If you’re running Linux, there’s a good chance your distro of choice uses Grub as the default bootloader. Grub has served well for many years, but it’s beginning to show its age. As with all software, it doesn’t take long before the latest-and-greatest becomes old-and-haggard. Features have been piling up in Grub without much thought going into revamping the core program. Eventually, this lead to a messy patchwork that no one really wanted to maintain. At this point, Grub2 was born. It’s a complete rewrite from the ground up using a completely redesigned structure. This new Grub gives us powerful features like conditional statements (if/then, etc), intelligent upgrades, and some greatly improved graphics.

Back in July, your editor stumbled across Google's Courgette announcement and promptly added it to the LWN topic slush pile. He then promptly let it sit for three months or so. The news that this software is now the subject of a patent suit brought Courgette back to the foreground; here we'll look at what Courgette is for, how it works, and how it relates to the patent being asserted.

Korean electronics giant Samsung is helping the Linux-David Enlightenment with development ressources. It's possible that the lightweight and robust window manager might be the basis for Samsung's upcoming Bada mobile phone platform.

...First, I must compliment the openSUSE developers. I've had great correspondence from Joe "Zonker" Brockmeier and Will Thompson, a developer in the KDE team in Nuremberg, which were truly first rate. These are Linux professionals who clearly are much more interested in solving problems and putting out a quality product than anything else. I'll be filing bug reports by tomorrow to try and help them resolve the issues that I found. While I'm very positive about the openSUSE team I must say that I am a lot less sanguine about some in their community. Some fans (or really fanatics) came out in force ready to attack the reviewer...

Oooh, spooky! Microsoft has once again denied rumours that it built a backdoor into Windows 7.

The list of top 500 supercomputer for the month of November 2009 is available, in the list appears

In this article we develop and implement the basic parts of a web application like login registration, user authorization, navigation, internationalization (18n), and polling in conjunction with Trinidad, Facelets, and Seam and deploy using Seam-gen.

Left 4 Dead 2 was one of the most anticipated games of 2009. Even before its full release the good people over at Codeweavers where hard at work making sure their CXGames software would be ready to allow Linux and Mac gamers everywhere to fully enjoy this latest edition to Valve's source games. Less than twenty four hours after L4D2 hit shelves CXGames 8.1 was released.

Ubuntu’s commercial sponsor Canonical revealed late yesterday that it has been working with Google on its Chrome OS platform since before Mountain View announced its game-changing plans in July this year. The firm’s OEM veep Chris Kenyon said in a blog post on Thursday that “Canonical is contributing engineering to Google under contract”. His comments came following Google’s announcement that it would open source the Chrome OS.

Although counterintuitive, laptops without screens could be more useful to some people than laptops with screens. I explain why in this blog posting.

Google, as expected, has taken its Chrome OS effort and offered it up as an open source project called Chromium OS. As you may recall Chrome OS will target netbooks and other thin mobile devices — core markets that Canonical is pursuing with Ubuntu. Should Canonical be worried?