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A Systems Engineer’s job isn’t just designing systems, but to also be proactive and think about weaknesses in the system and prevent the next big outage. One day at the office recently, I started hearing reports of the internet connection running very slowly. Our firewall shows us overall stats, but doesn’t do a good job of showing “Top Talkers”. Actually, that feature is completely missing from it.

For those that may have forgot, at the start of December we launched the Phoronix Kernel Test Farm to begin benchmarking the Linux kernel on a daily basis using the automated tools that we provide via the Phoronix Test Suite and Phoromatic. Towards the middle of December we then unveiled the Phoromatic Tracker, which exposes these test results in real-time to the public. Well, it's now been a month of monitoring the kernel's performance and the entire Linux 2.6.33 kernel development cycle thus far, with many interesting findings.

I was checking out the forums of some recently added items to the On-Disk.com catalog when I found a really interesting post about recent updates to Enlightenment .17 (aka E17). I had been following development of E17 for several years, and it has replaced other desktop environments numerous times on my PC, but I always ended up going back to something else simply because there were just too many things missing. E17 has been in development for so long because it is written completely from the ground up. It has it's own libraries and does not depend upon QT or GTK toolkits, even if many of the applications we use do. E17 also provides an excellent looking desktop while at the same time having very low system requirements....meaning it's fast, light, and beautiful all at the same time.

As an emerging sci-fi novelist (see my books here), I've actually been taking a vested interest in Ebooks of late. Of course, I've also been taking interest in them from the perspective that they've become yet another battleground in the widening war of media freedom, an important theater in the much larger war of user freedom. And like any digital product, you need a device that can handle the format. Preferably one that is powered by an open source operating system. That's where the Astak 5" Easy Reader Pro ebook reader comes into play here. The Easy Reader pro is a nice little device that keeps things sleek and simple without sacrificing features, or going overboard.

Do you need a trusted online banking environment that you can be sure is free of malware? Or maybe you are just tired of buying Windows, antivirus software, and still having to pay someone to remove viruses? Have you ever thought about switching to Linux?

There were already two computers in our kitchen but that wasn’t enough for Fallon, age three, who needs his daily fix of YouTube Scooby-Doo clips. So for Christmas Fallon (who refers to himself as “the small boy”) got a Dell Vostro A90 netbook running Ubuntu Linux. That’s the business version of a Dell Mini9 with a black case and Bluetooth installed. Fallon would probably have preferred the more colorful Mini9 but he got the Vostro, instead, because I was able to buy a new one from Dell for $199 with free shipping. Heck of a deal.

When we released our pre-alpha version into the wild last week, we told you that a Unix release would follow later. Today, as a new year's present, we'd like to give you the chance to play with Opera 10.5 on Unix. We also have a little extra for those of you on Windows and Unix: this build includes support for the video element!

I finally found the time to copy Debian Squeeze from my main PC to my second PC, so now I have two Debian PCs that are configured exactly the same. I also tried to get NFS working between them. That turned out to be a lot of trouble. But I finally discovered that a tiny, non-NFS issue can prevent NFS from working correctly. You're not going to believe how long it took me to finally figure it out.

I love jQuery. It's not like there aren't other JavaScript libraries out there, but jQuery was the first I became involved with and so far, it's solved every web design problem I've encountered. Of course, I usually go searching for a jQuery solution on the web when I have such a problem. That's why I was looking forward to O'Reilly's jQuery Cookbook. I anticipated that, whenever I had a specific problem, I'd have a better than even chance of finding the solution between the book's covers rather than having to go "Googling". But is that really so?

Microsoft is looking for “Linux and Open Office Compete Lead” this could turn out for the good of everyone This one depends on just what they’re looking to do. If on the other decide to use the competition to create better more reliable and secure products, then this could turn out so much better for both the consumer and in fact open source as well.

Twitter’s popularity has spurred the development of countless high-quality apps that let you use Twitter from the web, desktop or even your mobile phone. Some of the Twitter clients mentioned here are based on Adobe AIR so you may use them on Linux and Mac as well.

Raymii.org's 2010 gift! An special USB installer that makes your USB bootable with Linux Mint, Slitaz, Tiny Core, Ultimate Boot CD, BCDL CD booter, Windows loaders and gPXE from boot.kernel.org! Easy windows NSIS version available, but also the source files so that you can do it yourself.

The first Unix (FreeBSD, Linux) pre-alpha build of Opera 10.5 web browser has been released. It features new JavaScript engine, Carakan, the first implementation of HTML5 video (based on open source Ogg codecs), and a Qt-dependency-free, redesigned interface.

Larry the Free Software Guy would never let 2010 pass without a several timely forecasts. While this year lacks last year's inspiration, it would never stop him from making predictions like "2010 will absolutely, positively, without a doubt be the year of the Linux deskt . . . oh, never mind," and nine more.

On the last day of the year part four of the gamers recommendations offer some adventure games, sports and action. Have fun!

Before jumping into this, let me say that's what popular isn't the same thing as what's important. So, I'm giving you a twofer list. The first is the most popular of my stories, and then there are the stories, which I think are the most important for Linux's future. OK? OK!

Things move pretty fast in the open source development world. A new kernel release comes out around every three months. Projects like GNOME, KDE, and PostgreSQL pop out releases every six months, as well as some major Linux distros. Open source development moves at a rapid and relentless pace. It's refreshing, then, to see an open source developer reminding people to have a little patience.

Welcome to The H's look back at 2009. We've categorised events by what The H thinks was full of win, who was getting on the failboat and what made us just say "Meh". From the corporate giants and how they handled open source and the community to the battle to be the best browser, and from the best new open source to the worst mis-steps in the community.

We recently asked readers for requests on new articles you’d like to see (and thanks for all the great ideas!). One such request was a beginner’s guide to Arch Linux. As a Linux distro addict, I’ve heard of Arch many times over the years but for some reason, I’d never actually given it a shot. In particular, one aspect that’s always interested me has been Arch’s homegrown package management system, pacman. Today we’ll be finding out what Arch is all about, how to use it, and what makes it special.

In 2009, mobile consumer devices including netbooks, e-readers, tablets, MIDs, PMPs, and mobile phones were increasingly dominated by embedded Linux or the Linux-based Android. LinuxDevices presents four updated showcases of story summaries for netbooks, phones, and other portable devices, recalls 2009 highlights ranging from the Kindle to the Droid, and looks in on new rumors about the Google Nexus One and Chrome OS netbook design.