Even the most experienced Linux admin can sometimes feel frustrated trying to do a simple task in a new *nix environment like Solaris or BSD. This quick tutorial should ease the transition and clarify the most common terminologies in Solaris 10.

BeGeistert 019: Alphaville, was held on 10-12 October 2008 in Dusseldorf, Germany. I went along for the first time in four years and came away with a mini laptop running Haiku. BeGeistert is an event usually held in Germany for BeOS users. It's been quite some time since I last attended. Last one I was at was Begeistert012 way back in 2004.

The first "point release" of the AROS distribution VmwAROS has been published, and it's available on its website. This version introduces a lot of changes and many new features that make it visually different from regular AROS build. Ken Lester's double state icons, for instance, make VmwAROS look more Amiga-like, and former Amiga users can also continue using their applications thanks to AmiBridge, a poweful scripting system which allows launching AmigaOS programs straight from AROS. A big effort has been made to enhance VmwAROS useability and user-friendlyness.

InternetNews.com states: "Microsoft (or a really smart ISV) should build a full application manager for Windows, similar to what most Linux distributions do today." Most Windows applications come with their own distinctive updating mechanism (much like Mac OS X), instead of having a centralised updating location like most Linux distributions offer. While it certainly wouldn't be harmful for Windows to gain such a feature - the question remains: isn't it time we rethink program installation and management altogether?

I'm sure you're all still (sadly) familiar with the recent 'debate' I had with InfoWorld's Randall Kennedy, which detailed a lot of silly things. The seed of that discussion was planted with Kennedy's first article which, among other things, claimed that Windows 7 performed similarly to Windows Vista (meaning, slower than XP). Leaving the thread count discussion behind, Kennedy did include a benchmark which showed that Windows 7 performed similar to Windows Vista. There's a new benchmark out now, comparing a slightly more recent build of Windows 7 to Vista RTM/SP1 and XP SP3, and in these tests, Windows 7 blows all of those out of the water.

Though this technology isn't incredibly new (the video is dated June of 2006, and OSNews has covered it before), it's still not publicly available; however, it'll supposedly have a beta out for subscribers to test someday. Branded "BumpTop," this new interface builds off of the idea of organization done on traditional desktops-- I mean the wooden, metal, or glass ones. People naturally organize papers and other items into piles that make sense to their own ways of thinking. This kind of organization is limited on operating systems today, but BumpTop makes an old idea new by turning your virtual desktop a little more real.

After just 100 days, Google has lifted the veil of betaness off its web browser, Chrome, by releasing version 1.0. When Chrome made its first public appearance earlier this year, it was met with positive reveiws due to its JavaScript performance, as well as its robust multithreaded model. Now that the beta label has been ripped off Chrome, Google can't hide itself anymore: Chrome will now have to take Firefox and Internet Explorer head-on.

There has been some concern among enthusiasts that the emerging netbook market is nothing but a fad - it's fun and interesting now, but it will die out soon enough. Intel and AMD sure seem to be very careful about the netbook market, but according to figures from DisplaySearch, the market for small notebooks has exploded over the course of a year.

Did you know that Perl creator Larry Wall thinks the community 'paints a little picture in heaven'? In a lengthy interview about the history of Perl, Wall talks about the evolving nature of programming languages, especially Perl, and in the future a lot of people will be getting into programming as a profession, but not calling it programming. Wall's genius is expressed in his desire to not recognise Perl in 20 years, instead to design the ability to create things we will need in 20 or 100 years. And, yes, Wall picked the Camel mascot as it is 'an animal that is self-sufficient in a dry place'.

It's been exactly 40 years since a man, one of the greatest visionaries in the world of computing, showed a crowd things that they really, really didn't understand. The visionary showed things you could do with a computer that we can still barely do today. He was the first to show windows, a mouse, video conferencing, document collaboration, email, instant messaging, hypertext linking, and so much more. Yes, yesterday was the 40th anniversary of what would become known as The Mother Of All Demos. Please pay your respects.

Slackware, the grand daddy of Linux distributions, has released a new version: Slackware 12.2. This new version runs the 2.6.27.7 version of the Linux kernel. The other updates include Xfce 4.4.3, KDE 3.5.10, HAL support etc. You can get Slackware 12.2 from one of their mirrors.

A teacher in Austin, TX reprimanded a student for demonstrating Linux to his classmates and distributing free Linux CDs. She then goes on to contact Ken Starks of the HeliOS Project, who provided the CDs, and claim that "putting Linux on these machines is holding our kids back" and "No software is free and spreading that misconception is harmful". Although she claims to have used Linux herself in college, she feels that "putting on a carnival show for an operating system is not helping these children at all". On the HeliOS blog, Ken Starks hints that this may be more than just ignorance of the teacher's part.

Many sophisticated machine learning algorithms cannot process large amounts of data on a single node, but Parallel Machine Learning Toolbox (PML) can do so by distributing the computations. This distribution speeds up computations and expedites training by weeks, days, or even hours in an easy, reliable way. PML can run on a wide array of architectures including single-node, small clusters, grids, and BlueGene.

Google has released an early version of Native Client, a framework designed to run portable x86 binaries inside a web browser - in a sandbox. Native Client also includes technologies that allow for easier communication between JavaScript and Native Client executables, which makes it possible for web applications to leverage native code when it comes to processor intensive tasks. This sounds eerily similar to Microsoft's ActiveX - one of the biggest security failures of the Windows operating system. Google insists, however, that Native Client is much, much more secure.