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While I'm very positive about the openSUSE team I must say that I am a lot less sanguine about some in their community. Some fans (or really fanatics) came out in force ready to attack the reviewer (me), to question my skills and even my sanity, to attack Ladislav Bodnar for posting the review, to blame the hardware, anything at all but the distro code which is, according to some, "the best release ever".

We're launching the beta of O'Reilly Answers, and I'm inviting you to be part of it. In brief, O'Reilly Answers is a community site for sharing knowledge, asking questions, and providing answers that brings together our customers, authors, editors, conference speakers, and Foo (Friends of O'Reilly). O'Reilly is at the center of an amazing exchange of knowledge sharing and idea generation, and we want you to join us in changing the world by spreading the knowledge of innovators.

Back in February I wrote about how Linux had gone mainstream as netbooks became ubiquitous. When my Sylvania netbook died last month and the manufacturer took their sweet time responding to me I was offered a refund by the dealer. Suddenly I was surveying the market again for a good buy on a netbook preloaded with Linux. I found a wide variety of systems with Linux available from mainstream outlets and factory direct, at least here in the United States where I live. While I don't have updated market share figures it's clear, despite claims by Microsoft and their supporters, that Linux remains entrenched in the netbook market and is spreading out from there.

On that Friday, with no warning, the little netbook failed to boot up. I couldn't even get to the BIOS. For the third time a Sylvania netbook I owned had suffered a premature hardware failure.

I'm interested in hearing about good open-source training materials for GNU/Linux use and administration.

The whole time the dispute between the CentOS developers was in the news development moved forward and patches were released. CentOS was never a one man show. It was perhaps in danger of forking or a name change but it never really was anywhere near point of death.

Will Unbreakable Linux be pushed to the sidelines by another open source operating system?

Our local Linux groups are getting ready for OSCON and have put together a flyer for the Bay Area LUGs. Regions include the North and South Bay, Sacramento, San Francisco, Peninsula, Santa Cruz, and more. Now is your chance to support your local Linux group by going to a meeting.

Ubuntu has enjoyed fantastic success over the past few years, becoming one of the dominant Linux distributions, and the distribution of choice for netbooks. Jono Bacon's job is to make sure that that success continues, by keeping the huge Ubuntu developer community happy and productive. We caught up with Jono in advance of his appearance at OSCON, the O'Reilly Open Source Convention, and he was more than happy to talk about the efforts underway to not only improve the Ubuntu community, but also bring together other communities, such as Gnome and KDE, to help them work better together. Jono officially works for Canonical, a company founded by South African entrepreneur Mark Shuttleworth for the promotion of Ubuntu and other free software projects.

It almost goes without saying that you won't find anything that runs Windows at anywhere near these prices. Oh, and no, that doesn't mean that Linux is somehow inferior as Windows fans would want you to believe. It is, however, free of charge.

The past couple of weeks saw a flurry or articles debating the future of Linux on netbooks. A report in the Taipei Times on May 9th was picked up by LinuxToday but largely ignored by the tech press and the blogosphere. Stephen Lim, the General Manager of Taiwan based Linpus Technologies, made the surprising prediction that Linux will regain 50% market share from Windows on netbooks by next year.

The data chef discusses translation of data from SPSS format, for those who don't have a licensed copy at hand.

In just over two months of use so far I have been very impressed with the Sylvania g Netbook Meso. None of the issues, hardware or software, that I encountered with the original g Netbook, are seen in the somewhat newer model. The Meso has proven to be an upgrade in performance, in reliability, and most definitely in the area of software.

I almost invariably get a comment to the effect that all Linux distros are essentially the same: running the same kernel, the same libraries, the same filesystems. Performance should be essentially the same, right? The answer is a resounding no. The performance results of different distributions, even ones running the same kernel version, the same core libraries, and the same filesystem can be very, very different.

PekWM offers an additional solution: window grouping. It allows a variety of different applications to be grouped together in a single window. Most everyone is familiar with tabbed browsing by now. Window grouping takes this one step further. When window grouping is used in PekWM the title bar in the window manager is segmented with each section effectively acting like a tab.

Our artist at O'Reilly was spell-checking the text in a drawing and got a strange recommendation. Perhaps Adobe is little behind the times, not recognizing Linux as a word, but where did the recommendation for Windows come from?

If you are a network engineer, you might want to pay attention to the continuing case of Terry Childs in San Francisco. In this 15-minute interview, Paul Venezia discusses the inconsistencies in the case, and why every technologist should be paying attention to the outcome of the Childs case.

This evening's SCALE blog covers Bradley Kuhn's keynote on Software as a Service, Jono Bacon on security, Red Hat's counsel on patents, and much more (with ample indulgence for my own opinions).

VL-Hot is an automounter which provides an alternative to the HAL daemon that provides some but not all of the functionality of HAL without continuously polling hardware.

Application support for proxies is inconsistent. Nathaniel McCallum and his colleagues have done a pretty exhaustive study of application support for proxies. This is a classic problem crying out for standardization, and libproxy tries to fill that gap. Existing applications would have to be rewritten, but for an interface that provides only three calls, how much trouble can that be?