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I resisted upgrading from Ubuntu 8.04 LTS — the project's "stable," long-term-support release — to version 9.04 because everything worked pretty well, my hardware was fairly well-recognized, there were no showstopping bugs. But upgrade I did, and here's a rundown of Ubuntu 9.04 compared to 8.04 on my rig.

How to access Linux partitions from Windows. If you currently have Windows OS running and you need some files for your work which you have stored on the Linux installation, you no longer have to shut down Windows and boot Linux! Explore2fs is a GUI explorer tool for accessing ext2 and ext3 filesystems. It runs under all versions of Windows and can read almost any ext2 and ext3 filesystem.

Read an excerpt from the 4th Edition of the book Python Essential Reference by David Beazley. Chapter 6: Substantial programs are broken up into functions for better modularity and ease of maintenance. Python makes it easy to define functions but also incorporates a surprising number of features from functional programming languages. This chapter describes the basic mechanisms associated with Python functions including scoping rules, closures, decorators, generators, and coroutines.

In one of my earliest blog posts here I called Richard Stallman, a father of the open source movement and almost immediately got a personal nastygram. From Richard Stallman. I appreciated it and have sought to be more careful. Stallman believes in free software, which he calls Free Libre Open Source Software (FLOSS). (It’s also called Free Open Source Software (FOSS).)

Palm has announced that it will simplify its developer program for the Linux-based Web OS behind its new Palm Pre smartphone. The device maker is thereby responding to hefty criticism about its App Catalog.

The GNU Network Object Model Environment (GNOME) and the K Desktop Environment (KDE) have long been the Linux/UNIX options for fully graphical environments. Long ago, it seemed that these two were truly all we needed. You chose one. It would work well in nearly any situation. It was nimble enough to run on most hardware, and it was prettier than most other operating systems' graphical environments.

The introduction of KDE 4.0 was met with such an avalanche of outrage and criticism that Gnome developers can be forgiven for being a bit gun-shy. Gnome 2.28 appears to be almost a stealth introduction of Gnome 3.0; will anyone notice?

StreamMyGame Server enables PC games to be played remotely by converting the game’s video and audio into a Game Stream and sending it over a home network to a second computer where you can view and play the game with the free StreamMyGame Player. The second computer can be a PC, laptop, PS3 or Linux device.

While the GIMP offers a plethora of advanced and powerful photo editing tools, it also sports a few easy-to-use features that can help you to instantly improve your photos with a minimum of effort.

Comparisons are useful only to determine which device, if any, is good for you in particular. So, let me run you trough some of the facts that distinguish these devices to see why I think the N900 should be the right device for a lot of people.

A robotic submarine driven by Debian has won first place in the Association for Unmanned Vehicle Systems International (AUVSI) competition run at a U.S. Naval facility. The Debian project lauds the participating undergrads from Cornell University.

After over a decade of being in the shadow of the Free Software movement and 30 years of its inflexible dogmatic principles, disruptive new Open Source thought leadership is emerging that is truly able to compromise with the realistic needs of business and end-users without carrying the baggage of strict adherence to an ideology that is by definition a culture of exclusion.

[I think Jason Perlow doesn't like RMS - Tracy]

I'm surprised that I forgot how this works: When you install Debian without using a network mirror (either from the first CD of the full set or, my preferred method, with the DVD image), /etc/apt/sources.list is set up with a Debian mirror for security updates. However, there is no entry for the Debian software repositories, and if you want to add applications from a network mirror, you'll need to modify /etc/apt/sources.list accordingly.

iRedMail is a shell script that lets you quickly deploy a full-featured mail solution in less than 2 minutes. Since version 0.5, iRedMail supports Ubuntu 8.04, 9.04 (it supports both i386 and x86_64). Its object is to make a Linux mail server installation and configuration simple and easy to use. iRedMail supports both OpenLDAP and MySQL as backends for storing virtual domains and users. This tutorial shows how to use the OpenLDAP backend.

Just days after Gentoo resurrected itself with a new LiveDVD release in celebration of its 10th birthday, the developers behind the Yoper Linux distribution have come around with a new development release of its own. Yoper dates back to 2003, and one of their goals is to be the fastest out-of-the-box Linux distribution, but there has not been a new stable release in 28 months and it is not on a rolling release cycle like Gentoo or Arch. The new release for this distribution is Yoper 2009 Beta 1 "Dresden" and ships with all of the latest Linux packages and offers a new installer and various other improvements. Yoper also remains one of the few distributions shipping with a Zen-powered kernel, and on top of that, they even offer a kernel with the BFS scheduler.

Amarok 2.2 codenamed sunjammer is released. This all new release comes with a lot of improvements and bug fixes. Take a look at the new feature list and easy to do installation steps for Amarok 2.2 in Ubuntu.

The cron-apt package, combines the cron and apt utilities, and provides flexibility and a simpler interface as well as supporting e-mail alerts on errors or new information.

Today we are announcing the winners of the Social Desktop Contest. The Social Desktop Contest was launched in June with the goal to bring Web 2.0 ideas and our user and developer community closer to the desktop and foster community development and innovations around the OCS API.

Australian Software Firm Releases the “nuBuilder Package” a Web-Based Alternative to Microsoft Access® - under the Open Source GPL3 License.

The Jetty developers have released version 7 of their popular Java Servlet container. The source code for the new release is available from the Eclipse Foundation under the Eclipse Public Licence (EPL); Jetty 6 continues to be available from the Codehaus project under the Apache 2 license. Jetty 7 is the first major release of Jetty from the Eclipse Foundation since the project moved under the Eclipse umbrella.