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There are many dialog programs out there, Zenity, Kdialog, xdialog, etc. I love programs like these. They make it so easy to spice up a shell script with a little GUI action. Today I'm going to go look at a dialog program called gxmessage.

No matter what you're pleasure, chances are there is an online community serving it. The open source community has many such places — Linux.com, for example — that cater to specific elements of the community. Red Hat believes there is room for a larger community for the larger community, however, and have seen to the task themselves with Monday's launch of opensource.com.

Hearing that the next Ubuntu release will use Yahoo! as the default search engine in Firefox leaves me with a twinge of uneasiness. My misgiving -- and it's a small one -- is not so much with the decision as with why it was made. In itself, the decision is trivial enough. If you dislike Yahoo!, you can easily change the default by going to the search engine field in the upper right corner and clicking on the icon and choosing Manage Search Engines from the drop-down menu.

We can safely say that the Apple iPad is received with mixed feelings by the IT-savvy community. The main problem is that the tablet is just not as revolutionary as many expected it would be. It keeps many of the limitations of the iPhone (no multitasking, tightly controlled app-store) and doesn’t provide impressive new features which could keep the balance. Let’s compare this tablet to one of the more promising Tegra 2 tablets on the way to the market: the Notion Ink Adam.

The House Democrat heading up the push for legislation that would set new online privacy safeguards that could dramatically reshape Internet marketing said he plans to introduce the bill shortly, with several Republicans likely signed on as co-sponsors.

KDE users love the look of all those pretty applications. The key is the toolkit KDE uses: Qt. You can learn to create beautiful applications yourself using Python-Qt. Akkana Peck shows the way.

Chalk up another win for open source. Opengear, which makes an open source server console, has won a $1 million business deal. Plus, Linode (a virtual private server specialist) is embracing Opengear. Here are quick details.

I ran my first Linux live CD in January 2007. I've been using free, open-source operating systems on my personal machines for much of my work for the past two years, more intensively in the last year. And right here, right now, with a collection of old and dying hardware, my main laptop being a 2002/03-era Toshiba Satellite 1100-S101, I've moved from OpenBSD 4.4 to Ubuntus 8.04-9.10 and now to Debian Lenny, and things are going better now than I ever thought they would.

Some hard drive cloning programs support a wide variety of filesystems. Some can create image files and store only the sectors that are actually in use. Some can clone over a network, and a few can multicast a drive or image file to multiple targets simultaneously. Clonezilla can do all of the above, with the added benefit of being free. It’s a live CD with partitioning software and simple cloning interface packed with useful features. In this guide, we’ll be using Clonezilla to run a disk-to-disk copy and checking out a few of the more interesting options.

"I love Linux. We're big supporters of Linux, [but] Solaris is an older and more capable operating system," Oracle CEO Larry Ellison said. While he expects to see Solaris primarily at the high end, it will go all the way down to the desktop for development. Nevertheless, he stressed that the high end is the home for Solaris, which could be a cloud of x86 or SUN SPARC machines. "We think it will be a long time before Linux ever catches up," Ellison said. "But again we will have Linux -- I'm a Linux fan and if you want Linux we have the best Linux in the world. If you want UNIX, we have the best UNIX in the world. And again, they are different and I don't think the high end is in trouble at all."

Cypress Semiconductor announced a touchscreen device driver for Android and Linux that supports Cypress' TrueTouch touchscreen controllers, complete with "all-points" multi-touch signaling support. Meanwhile, "Cyanogen" has hacked a multi-touch interface for Google's Nexus One phone, and Google is upgrading the Android-based phone's spotty 3G support, says eWEEK.

DE Software Compilation version 4.3.5 is released. This latest KDE (Linux Desktop environment) Software Compilation is a package of 15 packages with applications. This version is mainly a maintenance release.

This tutorial shows how to do data striping across four single storage servers (running Ubuntu 9.10) with GlusterFS. 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.

Some 95 percent of Malaysia's government agencies have adopted open source software (OSS), but the remaining 5 percent have not warmed to the concept--and is unlikely to anytime soon, according to a government official.

Looking to help the KDE community and living in Southern California? Then this is a great opportunity for you! The Southern California Linux Expo will be in town February 20-21, 2010, at the Westin Hotel near LAX. All you need to help out is to be willing and able to be there and be a user of KDE's applications, such as the Plasma Workspaces, Amarok and Koffice.

It doesn't often happen that I have to retract and apologize for a post, but here it is. I submit it to you with egg on my face.

Not all servers can--or should--be virtualized, says Novell cloud computing CTO, Moiz Kohari, who urges cloud service providers to focus on making their heterogenous setups work as one.

Is open source all that open anymore? That's probably an unfair question. By definition, open source products are available to everyone without discrimination...at least from the open source community's point of view. But what about the U.S. Government's?

The second issue of the International Free and Open Source Software Law Review has just been published online. It contains new articles from FOSS legal experts like Karen F. Copenhaver (Linux Foundation), Tiki Dare (Sun) and Harvey Anderson (Mozilla). The press release contains endorsements by William Patry, Senior Copyright Counsel, Google and Eben Moglen, Software Freedom Law Centre. This is the first legal publication to focus specifically on issues facing Free and Open Source Software. The first issue was launched in July 2009.

Gstyle is a new full Gnome theme manager with some really great features which I am sure you will love if you like to customize your Desktop look constantly. It can automatically download and install wallpapers, Xsplash, GTK themes, icon themes, full themes, mouse pointers and more from gnome-look, deviantart, customize.org and others, or directly from the software source. But not only that, Gstyle can show you how a theme (any kind of theme: icons, Emerald, Metacity, etc.) actually looks, not just a preview. You will see what I mean in the screenshots below.