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As editor for LinuxInsider for more than a year now, I figured the time was right to start walking the walk with my personal machine. So I took my Dell Inspiron 1150 to this year's LinuxWorld Conference & Expo with the intention of switching my operating system to one of the many Linux distros.

Mozilla has announced the launch of a new feature for its Firefox Web browser designed to make it perform faster. Called "TraceMonkey," the feature is an evolution of Firefox's SpiderMonkey JavaScript engine and will be built into Firefox 3.1, according to the company. To increase JavaScript speeds ...

Red Hat issued a security advisory Friday notifying customers that some of its servers were compromised last week due to a network attack. The company called the advisory critical and said it sent out the alert primarily for those who may obtain Red Hat binary packages via channels other than those ...

A lot of effort in recent months has been expended toward something people are calling "data portability." Just about everywhere you look; you'll bump into people pontificating about it. In case you've been out of the loop -- perhaps hiking in the Himalayas -- you can run the term through your favor...

Microsoft is bumping up its monetary investment in its controversial partnership with Novell. Styling the deal as a so-called incremental investment increase, Microsoft will buy up to $100 million in Suse Linux Enterprise Server support certificates. The certificates are sold and exchanged for IT su...

Proponents of open source software are trying to make a case for using the collaborative approach to conquer the world's most vexing medical problems. However, established practices of avoiding the spotlight and protecting vested interests in breakthrough results still hamper the collaborative proce...

Google is finally seeing the light at the end of the tunnel with its long-awaited and much-hyped Android phone platform. This week has seen two significant developments: the first Android-powered device officially being approved by the FCC, and the beta version of the Android software development ki...

Canonical, the commercial sponsor of the Ubuntu Linux distribution, is now a member of the Linux Foundation. The foundation, a nonprofit organization supporting the accelerated growth of Linux, announced Canonical's membership on Tuesday. Ubuntu community members have been active participants in a v...

T-Mobile may be partnering with cell phone handset manufacturer HTC to deliver the first smartphone running Google's Android platform, according to reports. Unnamed sources briefed on T-Mobile's plans have said the carrier could announce the phone as early as September -- and would almost certainly ...

Open source developers now have newly clarified protection, thanks to an appeals court ruling over the validity of their licenses. A judge with U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit ruled Wednesday that programmers who "engage in open source licensing" and copyright their work do "have the r...

In his keynote speech at LinuxWorld Expo in San Francisco, Simon Crosby, Chief Technology Officer for Citrix Systems, announced the company's plan to open source Project Kensho, a set of tools that will help migrate virtual machines between different hypervisors and virtualization platforms. I sat d...

When Jeffrey Spencer prepared for his college exams, he would tape his notes to the handlebars of his bike and ride to school, studying all the while. To him, it made perfect sense. "I am a kinetic learner, which means I learn and mentally perform best when I am moving," he says. To visual or audito...

The latest release of Barry Kauler's Puppy Linux version 4.0has a lot to bark about. Installed directly on a hard drive, it lacks some of the bells and whistles found in more popular Linux desktop versions. But run it from a USB drive in RAM, and Puppy growls impressively. The ability to carry an en...

Bob Weiss knows a thing or two about dreams. "I grew up with the promise that if one wanted to go to space, they would get the chance," said Weiss, president of the X Prize Foundation. The trouble was that nobody kept the promise. "It became obvious that the only people that were going to space were...

IBM fired the opening salvo at this year's LinuxWorld Conference and Expo, and to the surprise of no one, it was aimed squarely at Microsoft. Sure, it was the low-hanging fruit -- Microsoft's an easy target. It's kind of like taking pot shots at John McCain at an Obama fund-raiser. But here, the amm...