The Forums are the first place you should go if you are having problems
with your choosen Linux Distribution.
One of the great things about using a Linux OS is the support provided
(free of charge no less) by millions of other Linux users.
Community support is THE BEST tech support there is, period.
Below are links to most of the major distributions' user forums.
Sabayon Linux
Forum
Puppy Linux
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openSuse
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Mandriva Linux
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MEPIS Linux
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Zenwalk Linux
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Kubuntu Linux
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Xubuntu Linux
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Debian Linux
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Linux Mint
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Gentoo Linux
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Ubuntu Studio
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PCLinuxOS
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Slackware Linux
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KNOPPIX Linux
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Vector Linux
Forum
Freespire Linux
Fourm
Ubuntu Linux
Forum
Arch Linux
Forum
Mythbuntu Linux
Forum
Fedora Linux
Forum
CentOS Linux
Forum
Dream Linux
Forum
Ultimate Linux
Forum
YellowDog Linux
Fourm
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Ahead of revelations surrounding the upcoming Windows Phone 7 Series operating system, new data from comScore shows the current-generation mobile OS slipping in the rankings.
Groklaw: "SCO's attorney Stuart Singer may have gotten carried away with his theatrical indignation. And when a party slips like this, what lawyers call opening the door, it can indeed have consequences. Novell was just waiting for a moment like this."
Groklaw: "So. Now I know. Now we all know.
Blake Stowell, then the PR guy for SCO, sent an email to Maureen O'Gara, saying "I need you to send a jab PJ's way," and then right afterwards she wrote that invasive so-called expose, in which she revealed, or at least intended to reveal, things like who I called on my phone."
Serverwatch: "Stating it believes server sales are being underestimated by Wall Street, Broadpoint AmTech's latest report predicts both Intel and AMD will post better-than-expected earnings in the first quarter."
And thus, our true colours reveal. Since Obama was the young newcomer, technically savvy, many of us were hoping that he might support patent and/or copyright reform. In case our story earlier on this subject didn't already tip you off, this certainly will: Obama has sided squarely with the RIAA/MPAA lobby, and backs ACTA. No copyright and/or patent reform for you, American citizens!
Datamation: "Social networking and voting site Digg is rewriting its underlying software infrastructure in an effort to improve performance and scalability. Part of that effort involves moving away from the MySQL database that has helped to power Digg since its creation."
The VAR Guy: "Elliott Associates, the hedge fund that's seeking to acquire Novell and SUSE Linux, is denying a report that it plans to break up Novell and sell off the pieces. Hmmm�"
Wine-Reviews: "Today I thought I would show everyone just how easy it is to install and use Microsoft Office 2007 on OpenSolaris 2009.06 and 2010.03 with Bordeaux for Solaris. I have installed Office 2007 on both OpenSolaris 2009.06 and 2010.03"
It's been quiet about the Google-China dispute for a while now, but today, the silence was broken by China's minister of Industry and Information Technology, Li Yizhong, who stated that Google must either obey Chinese law or "pay the consequences", leaving no room for a compromise. With more and more western countries building their own internet filters and internet monitoring schemes, it becomes ever harder to make a strong fist against China.
While we are all busy discussing Apple suing HTC for patent infringement, we're almost forgetting that Nokia and Apple are also embroiled in about ten million lawsuits going either way. The most recent move comes from Nokia, who seeks to dismiss Apple's antritrust claims using pretty much the same arguments Apple used to counter Psystar's antitrust claims.
José Antonio Calvo Fernández has announced the release of eBox Platform 1.4-1, an Ubuntu-based server distribution for small and medium-size businesses: "eBox 1.4-1 installer released. I just wanted to let you know that we've done a lot of bug fixing and small improvements since the release of th...
ReadWriteWeb: "However, recent tests have put Flash up against HTML5, the new web markup language that eliminates the need for the Adobe plugin. The results of these tests show that this is not a simple black-and-white issue. Is Flash really a CPU hog?"
LWN.net: "Those who worry about these things have expected that attacks might come from patent trolls, or from software companies with fading prospects. Apple's lawsuit against HTC shows that the real threat may come from a different direction."
Serverwatch: "Everyone has heard of Ubuntu Linux and how great it is on the desktop, but have you heard that there's a server version of that same uber-cool operating system? There is, and you should know about it."
Linux Magazine: "Bring the mightiness of Vim to Firefox! If you're ready for a fully keyboard-driven browser, the Vimperator add-on for Firefox can help you do away with mouse-based drudgery and add the awesomeness of vi-like keybindings to Firefox 3.5 and later."
Today, Apple's iPad went on sale, but before pulling out your credit card keep in mind that there are going to be dozens of cheaper, Linux-powered iPad-like devices on the market soon. read more...
This month marks the one-year anniversary of Linux.com in its newest form. A year ago, we built the site based on your rankings of features on IdeaForge. Today, we want to hear how you’re using Linux.com and what is most useful. And perhaps even more importantly – what isn’t useful. We als...
The Linux Foundation has announced sessions for its Collaboration Summit, scheduled for Apr. 14-16 at the Hotel Kabuki in San Francisco. This year's event features a full-day workgroup on MeeGo, as well as discussions of Linux topics including toolchain, cloud computing, printing, filesystems, ISV...
As most of you will know, Microsoft lost the patent lawsuit filed against the Redmond giant by i4i, while also losing the first appeal. Microsoft was forced to remove the infringing functionality from Word for US customers, but they also filed a second appeal. This appeal, too, has been lost.
New Zealand's internet filtering system went live last month - but the government forgot to mention this to its electorate until its hand was forced by online freedom campaign, Tech Liberty. Thomas Beagle, a spokesman for the group, said he was "very disappointed that the filter is now running" and that its launch had been conducted in such a "stealthy mode". He added: "It's a sad day for the New Zealand internet." It's sad indeed, that things like this are possible in modern democracies.
As Phyllis Diller would attest, a face lift isn't necessarily a bad thing. Most things — legalese included — can use a good going over from time to time, and that's just what the good people at Mozilla will be doing this year. more>>
Recently you might have read my article "Create flow charts with Dia," which introduced you to the world of the Dia diagramming tool. For those readers that are appose to the GIMP-like interface of Dia and are looking for an interface more closely resembling that of Microsoft Visio, you're in luck. Included with the KDE KOffice toolset is a flow chart/diagramming tool called Kivio that allows you to create impressive flow charts and has an interface that many users will find more user-friendly than that of Dia. But no matter your preference, both tools do an outstanding job of creating flow charts - they just approach the task a bit differently.
The Qt developers have announced a technical preview for Qt 4.7, the cross platform C++ framework for GUI applications, and introduced declarative UI design with QML, part of Qt Quick...
From version 4.1, Chrome will delete the ID token immediately after it is run for the first time – a symbolic step which takes the wind out of critics' sails...
Now that David Airlie's vga_switcheroo has went upstream in the Linux 2.6.34 kernel that provides hybrid graphics support and delayed GPU switching, David went on to look for something new to work on in his downtime when not busy with tasks at Red Hat. This new work is on GPU offloading / multi-GPU...
You may be playing around with virtualisation on the edges of your IT environment or be well down the road to making it part of the furniture. But what happens when something goes wrong and it’s not immediately obvious what...
Linux comes in all shapes and sizes...from the full-blown app-heavy distros like Fedora and Ubuntu, to the lean and mean distros such as Puppy and Damn Small Linux.
Whatever the size of the distribution, there are always going to be applications that you will want to download and install, depending on your needs. These can be essential apps, like Skype, Flash, or Thunderbird, or not-so-important-yet-fun apps like Google Earth, VirtualBox, and VLC.
Analyst at Broadpoint AmTech looks to the two chipmakers to turn in a healthy first quarter performance, thanks in part to an improved forecast for server sales.
At the IDC Directions conference in Silicon Valley, research firm's chief analyst argues that the cloud is here to stay, proclaiming it the dominant platform for the next two decades.
Common wisdom has it that Flash is a resource hog, and that HTML5 will prevent your processor from having to work really, really hard to show animations of videos. Well, a number of people have conducted benchmarks with the latest browsers and Flash betas, and common wisdom is starting to show serious signs of crackage.
Version 0.4.2 of the little-known microkernel-based multiserver operating system HelenOS has been released. See their official release notes to find out what other bleeding-edge features besides an experimental and highly modular networking stack this release brings.
Motorola will start loading Microsoft's search and map services onto its Android smartphones in China, bringing more non-Google services to the phones amid a row between Google and China.
"Khronos Group, the association behind OpenGL, has today announced the fourth generation of its cross-platform API spec, which takes up the mantle of offering a viable competitor to Microsoft's DirectX 11. The latest release includes two new shader stages for offloading geometry tessellation from the CPU to the GPU, as well as tighter integration with OpenCL to allow the graphics card to take up yet more duties off the typically overworked processor."
This year's Embedded Linux Conference, which will be held in San Francisco April 12-14, has announced that its program is now available. The keynote s...
Earlier this week, it was time for the Association for Computing Machinery, ACM, to announce the winner of the 2009 Turing Award, one of the more prestigious prices in the computing industry. The award was awarded to Charles P. Thacker; a name you might not recognise, but certainly one that has influenced the world of computing a great deal.
Back in 2007 we reported on Valve looking for a senior software engineer to port their Windows-base games to Linux, then in 2008 we said the Source Engine would be coming to Linux based upon our sources (something that we still believe in), later that year we also found a few Linux libraries with t...
For a few years I have been trying to create a "distributed cluster storage
system" (see below) on standard Linux hardware.
I have been unsuccessful. I have looked into buying one and they do exist,
but are so expensive I can't afford one.
They also are designed for much larger enterprises and have tons of features I don't want or need.
I am hoping the Linux community can help me create this low cost
"distributed cluster storage system" which I think other small businesses could use.
Please help me solve this so we can publish the solution to the open source
community. more>>
Over at CNET, Stephen Shankland has a fairly lengthy interview with Canonical's new CEO Jane Silber. "But is there more urgency about profit now? Silber: There is a sense of great opportunity right now. When we started U...
If you thought the growing criticism directed at the United States Patent and Trademark Office would force them to rethink their strategies in granting patents, you're most likely wrong. After a re-examination that took more than four years, the USPTO has reconfirmed Amazon's ominous one-click patent.
"The CodePlex Foundation has announced the arrival of several new board members, including Jim Jagielski, the Chief Open Source Officer of SpringSource. Jagielski, who was one of the original cofounders of the Apache Software Foundation, brings a lot of credibility and leadership experience to the CodePlex Foundation."
Brown University has developed an IDE for Java called Code Bubbles that takes a pretty radical departure from current IDEs. While most IDEs, such as Eclipse are file-based, Code Bubbles is based on fragments. The system appears to support reading and editing code with fragments, multi-tasking, annotating and sharing, and debugging with bubbles. There's a website with video too.
All Mozilla projects (the major ones at least, I didn't check them all up) are licensed under the Mozilla Public License, version 1.1. It's already over a decade old, and the Mozilla Foundation believes it is time to overhaul the license, with a focus on modernising what they believe to be outdated wording.
One of the things I love about software, particularly open source software, is innovation can come from anywhere. Sometimes it appears out of large tech companies such as Red Hat, IBM or Sun and other times it can come from one person writing code on a second hand computer in their college dorm. Software is really the expression of ideas and concepts, which can come from anyone. So I really enjoy seeing small open source projects try new things. Some will succeed and be adopted and some will fade away, but the amazing thing is to see people put their idea out there and present it to the world. Which is why I was thrilled when a few people directed me to Paldo and suggested it was worth a look. Read more on this exclusive OSNews article...
Ahh, poor Palm. Sure, they have their fancy new WebOS toys -- but it wasn't that long ago they were banking on the Foleo changing the mobile world as we knew it. Sadly, they were just a little too early, and a little too lame. Here's the good news, Palm: We're ready now. Let me give you a bit of a vision, and you run with it... more>>
This article is an excerpt from the new 2nd Ed. of Mark Sobell's book,
A Practical Guide to Linux Commands, Editors, and Shell Programming,
published Nov. 2009 by Prentice Hall Professional, ISBN 0131367366,
Copyright 2010 Mark G. Sobell. For additional sample content from a
selection of chapters, please visit the publisher site:
www.informit.com/title/0131367366 more>>
From Thursday, March 4, 2010 Washington DC Express print edition:
Megan Fox Thinks She's Linux...Or Something Megan Fox has slept with only two men...."My body parts are all I have left now that are only mine -- the world owns everything else." more>>
We're collecting this data to run in an upcoming issue of Linux Journal. We encourage you to leave comments here letting us know why you use the Linux distribution you do. Let your voice be heard! Heads up: we may print your comment in the magazine (if you don't want your comment printed, please let us know that within the comment itself).
From the Share Our Pain dept.:
A lawyer for Microsoft confirmed that the software giant told the US Department of Justice and the European Commission how Googleâs business practices may be harming publishers, advertisers and competition in search and online advertising.
Dave Heiner, vice president and deputy general counsel at Microsoft, wrote in a blog post on 26 Feb. that in meeting with government agencies to discuss its recently approved search deal with Yahoo, Microsoft officials explained how Google has tilted the mechanics of the search advertising business in its favor.
âAs you might expect, the competition officials asked us a lot of questions about competition with Googleâsince that is the focus of the partnership,â Heiner wrote. âWe told them what we know about how Google is doing business. A lot of that entails explaining the search advertising business, which is complex. Some of that inevitably gets into Google practices that may be harming publishers, advertisers and competition in search and online advertising.â
From the One Ping Only dept.:
Computer scientists say they've discovered a "severe vulnerability" in the world's most widely used software encryption package that allows them to retrieve a machine's secret cryptographic key.
...The scientists, from the University of Michigan's electrical engineering and computer science departments, said the bug is easily fixed by applying cryptographic "salt" to an underlying error-checking algorithm. The additional randomization would make the attack unfeasible.
An OpenSSL official, who asked that his name not be published, said engineers are in the process of pushing out a patch and stressed the attack is difficult to carry out in real-world settings.
From the UI dept.:
The new style of Ubuntu is driven by the theme "Light". We've developed a comprehensive set of visual guidelines and treatments that reflect that style, and are updating key assets like the logo accordingly. The new theme takes effect in 10.04 LTS and will define our look and feel for several years.
...We're drawn to Light because it denotes both warmth and clarity, and intrigued by the idea that "light" is a good value in software. Good software is "light" in the sense that it uses your resources efficiently, runs quickly, and can easily be reshaped as needed. Ubuntu represents a break with the bloatware of proprietary operating systems and an opportunity to delight to those who use computers for work and play. More and more of our communications are powered by light, and in future, our processing power will depend on our ability to work with light, too.
From the Competition dept.:
Mozilla, faced with new competitive pressures, has begun work on three separate, significant changes to Firefox.
First is a new JavaScript engine that--with a transfusion from the project behind Apple's Safari--should run Web-based programs at least 30 percent faster. Second is a new graphics engine for Windows that will take advantage of hardware acceleration for graphics and text. And third is a programming tool to help bring to fruition a new system for Firefox add-ons.
From the Vroom VROOM! dept.:
Mozilla's high-performance TraceMonkey JavaScript engine, which was first introduced in 2008, has lost a lot of its luster as competing browser vendors have stepped up their game to deliver superior performance. Firefox now lags behind Safari, Chrome, and Opera in common JavaScript benchmarks. In an effort to bring Firefox back to the front of the pack, Mozilla is building a new JavaScript engine called JägerMonkey.
The secret sauce that will drive Mozilla's new JavaScript engine engine into the fast lane is some code borrowed from Apple's WebKit project. Mozilla intends to bring together the powerful optimization techniques of TraceMonkey and the extremely efficient native code generator of Apple's JSCore engine. The mashup will likely deliver a significant boost in Firefox's JavaScript execution speed, making Mozilla's browser a formidable contender in the ongoing JavaScript speed race.
From the Yeah, More Committees! dept.:
The US governmentâs policy of leaving the Internet alone is over, according to Obamaâs top official at the Department of Commerce.
Instead, an âInternet Policy 3.0â approach will see policy discussions between government agencies, foreign governments, and key Internet constituencies, according to Assistant Secretary Larry Strickling, with those discussions covering issues such as privacy, child protection, cybersecurity, copyright protection, and Internet governance.
From the Enemy of Crap Software dept.:
... the International Intellectual Property Alliance, an umbrella group for organisations including the MPAA and RIAA, has requested with the US Trade Representative to consider countries like Indonesia, Brazil and India for its "Special 301 watchlist" because they use open source software.
What's Special 301? It's a report that examines the "adequacy and effectiveness of intellectual property rights" around the planet - effectively the list of countries that the US government considers enemies of capitalism. It often gets wheeled out as a form of trading pressure - often around pharmaceuticals and counterfeited goods - to try and force governments to change their behaviours.
From the Copy n Paste dept.:
Xerox Corp has sued Google Inc and Yahoo Inc, accusing them of infringing the document management company's patents related to Internet search.
In a lawsuit filed last Friday in the U.S. District Court in Delaware, Xerox said Google's Web-based services such as Google Maps, YouTube and AdSense advertising software, as well as Web tools including Yahoo Shopping, infringe patents granted as far back as 2001.
Xerox seeks compensation for past infringement and asked the court to halt the companies from further using the technology.
From the Fractions dept.:
The Linux kernel would cost more than one billion EUR (about 1.4 billion USD) to develop in European Union. This is the estimate made by researchers from University of Oviedo (Spain), whereby the value annually added to this product was about 100 million EUR between 2005 and 2007 and 225 million EUR in 2008. Estimated 2008 result is comparable to 4% and 12% of Microsoft's and Google's R&D expenses on whole company products.
From the Disgrace dept.:
The inability to deflect even a simulated cyber attack or mitigate its effects shown in the exercise that took place some six days ago at Washington's Mandarin Oriental Hotel doesn't bode well for the US.
Mike McConnell, the former Director of National Intelligence, said to the US Senate Commerce, Science, and Transportation Committee yesterday that if the US got involved in a cyber war at this moment, they would surely lose. "We're the most vulnerable. We're the most connected. We have the most to lose," he stated.
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