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For a brief time in 2008, the Linux desktop actually owned a segment of the desktop industry: netbooks. When netbooks first showed up, they ran Linux and nothing but Linux. Microsoft panicked and brought XP back from the dead, offering it for next to nothing to netbook vendors and thus successfully fighting off the Linux challenge.

T-Mobile and Microsoft/Danger have told Sidekick users who have been suffering for a data outage this week that their data is gone for good. So far, tech punditry's read on this massive, high-profile data loss is that it's a black eye for "the cloud." For once, the consensus is spot-on.

There is more to "green" computing than turning things off when you're not using them-- Juliet Kemp exposes the total energy cost of computing, from manufacturing to disposal.

The official KDE Project currently consists of 4.2 million lines of code. Cornelius Schumacher has applied the lines to individual projects and published the stats.

Mixing Open Source communities and corporate boardrooms is a lot like mixing nitroglycerin — done properly, it produces unmeasurable good, but make a wrong move and the results won't be pretty. Some companies, like Red Hat, are adept at successfully marrying the two, while other companies seem to spend more time than they should diving for the nearest bunker. We here at the news-desk are fans of the near-omnipresent search giant that is Google, and we don't mind saying so. However, though we don't play much poker, we know a spade when we see one, and we're not afraid to call it when we do. One such spade comes in the form of events that played out over the past few weeks with regard to the company's Open Source darling, Android.

LXer Feature: 12-Oct-2009

This is a guide on installing Apache and ColdFusion 9 on a clean install of Ubuntu 9.04. This starts with a clean install on Ubuntu 9.04 with no additional options selected during the install. If you are planning on running PHP side by side with ColdFusion my recommendation is to set up PHP first then ColdFusion.

When an open source project wants to make major changes in its core code, such as revamping a user interface library, it faces the two elephant problem. The first elephant in the room is the existing community and its familiarity with what had already been implemented. The second elephant, which the developers want to bring into the room, is all the changes that they want to incorporate into the project. The difficulty is moving the second elephant into the room without disturbing the first or just filling the room completely with elephant.

At the Maemo Summit Conference in Amsterdam, Nokia gave out over 300 N900 phones running Maemo 5. The N900 is the successor to the N810, over a hundred of which were handed out at Akademy a year ago. Read on for some opinions about the N900 and the results of 3 days of hacking.

This report covers FreeBSD related projects between April and September 2009. During that time a lot of work has been done on wide variety of projects, including the Google Summer of Code projects. The BSDCan conference was held in Ottawa, CA, in May. The EuroBSDCon conference was held in Cambridge, UK, in September. Both events were very successful. A new major version of FreeBSD, 8.0 is to be released soon. If you are wondering what's new in this long-awaited release, read Ivan Voras' excellent summary. Thanks to all the reporters for the excellent work! We hope you enjoy the reading.

It was exactly one year ago today that I published my original "The 10 Best Linux Distributions" and it's time to put forth a new list for this year's best. Without looking at the old list, I've decided to compile this one from scratch. This 2009 list takes several factors into account for placement in the list: Community support, commercial support, software variety, update engine and distribution frequency. Even for old Linux salts, there are a few surprises on this list. For starters, Ubuntu is not number one.

PhotoRec is file data recovery software designed to recover lost files including video, documents and archives from Hard Disks and CDRom and lost pictures

Zenmap is the official graphical user interface (GUI) for the Nmap Security Scanner. It is a multi-platform, free and open-source application designed to make Nmap easy for beginners to use while providing advanced features for experienced Nmap users. The purpose of Zenmap is not to replace Nmap. You still can use the good old command-line, but you will be able to use some advanced features like the “Topology” tab. This is an interactive view of the connections between hosts in a network. The following article will explain how to install Zenmap 5.0 on an Ubuntu system and how to use the main features.

Ubuntu 9.10 is the upcoming version of the Ubuntu operating system. The common name given to this release from the time of its early development was “Karmic Koala”. Here is how you can update your machine to this new version. Note: This is a beta release. Do not install it on production machines. The final stable version will be released on October 29th, 2009

Oracle will out-invest Sun Microsystems on Sparc and Solaris and provide more open source contributions, Larry Ellison and Scott McNealy told OpenWorld Sunday night. Oracle's chief executive and Sun's chairman, joined by executive vice president of systems John Fowler, also made the pitch that Oracle customers should run more of their applications and middleware on Sparc and Solaris. Java father James Gosling, meanwhile, stepped in to reassure the Java community Oracle has a vested interest in maintaining and developing Java. Just one thing threw out their OpenWorld opening pitch - MySQL. Specifically, the European Union's investigation of Oracle's proposed purchase of Sun, given Oracle's ownership of nearly fifty per cent of the RDBMS market, and concerns among the open-source community over MySQL's future under the closed-source giant.

Applications created for Nokia's N900 smartphone will be easier to port to future versions of the company's Maemo Linux operating system as well as to Symbian and Windows Mobile, after Nokia officially ported its Qt graphical toolkit to Maemo 5. The N900, which will be released this month in the UK, runs on Maemo 5 rather than Nokia's usual Symbian operating system. Maemo 5 uses the GTK+ graphical toolkit for its application-development framework, but Nokia said in July that future versions of Maemo would use Qt instead.

The last development release, Release Candidate 2, of Mandriva Linux 2010 is now available. Mandriva Linux 2010 adopts Plymouth and brings other new features like Moblin packaging, Tomoyo security framework integration, improved boot performance, and more...

Are you tired of being hunted down by marketers following your digital crumb-trail? If the answer to that question is yes, you might want to take an interest in a panel called Getting Personal With Data: How Users Get Control — And What They Do With It. It's happening Tuesday morning at 9:30am (U.S. Eastern time) at Harvard Law School. I'll be moderating it, and the panelists are four very cool people, each working (one way or another) in the fields of self-tracking and personal informatics.

In just about any class or set of tutorials involving beginning programming, there's usually a problem or set of problems having to do with converting temperatures. Just about everyone has had to write a wee bit of code to convert Fahrenheit to Celsius or vice versa. That's not much of a chore. However, there are eight major temperature scales available (though some are around now only for their historical value), according to wikipedia. What if you had to write a program that let a user convert a temperature from any of these scales to any of these scales?

This week there were several new software releases including the Linux 2.6.32-rc3 kernel, KDE 4.3.2, Alien Arena 7.31, OpenChrome 0.2.904, Wine 1.1.31, and xf86-video-radeonhd 1.3.0. Worth noting with the new Wine release are continued Direct3D 10 advancements and the start of Microsoft ActiveX support within JavaScript. The Alien Arena release is also interesting for the graphics improvements, new game mode, and other new content for this first-person shooter. Also made available this week were new preview releases of Mutter and the GNOME Shell.