I get a lot of questions about where can I go to get more information on linux before I start the install? Well folks I have found a site for you. It’s called Really Linux and yes it has articles from some knowledgeable folks on many different distros on everything from how to install to how to fine tune and tweak your system. This one is one that I have to say is a must visit for the beginners, and tell them Baldy sent you, they have no idea who I am but it can’t hurt.

In this cursory overview, Mark Rais, provides some of the common reasons why people brand new to Linux have installation failures. The brief article covers issues with Fedora, Gentoo, Mepis, PCLinuxOS, and Ubuntu.

Let me begin by declaring that this is a basic summary for beginners. I do not try to clarify solutions where complex issues such as bad disks and the need for fsck exist. However, in the past few months as I’ve tried to help more people totally new to Linux switch over, it became obvious that there is a common theme of installation failures that need to be addressed.

I’ve tried to give examples for specific flavours. But you will quickly find that problems occurring with one flavour also exist with another. I consider the ease of installation of Linux to be vital to its uptake, especially on the desktops, and hope this article helps at least one person avoid a potential installation pain and start using Linux productively.

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Desktop software maker Parallels on Feb. 27 launched the final, stable version of its virtualization software for Intel-powered Apple Macs. “Desktop for Mac” aims to enable users to easily install and seamlessly run Linux, Windows, and other operating systems alongside Mac OS X on their Mac desktops — without re-booting.

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Availability

Parallels Desktop for Mac is immediately available, priced at about $80. The company offers a free 15-day trial on its website, here.

You can view some screenshots of the desktop in action here.

Source: Desktop Linux

Learn how PHP5 has vastly improved how you work with XML in PHP

Level: Intermediate

This first article of a three-part series introduces PHP5′s XML implementation and help those relatively new to using XML with PHP to read, parse, and manipulate, and write a short and uncomplicated XML file using the DOM and SimpleXML in a PHP environment.

Introduction

It’s hard to miss the importance of XML in today’s application development environment. If you’ve never before worked with XML in PHP or have not yet made the jump to PHP5, this starter guide to working with new functionality available in PHP5 for XML might persuade you just how easy to work with XML can be. This first article in a three-part series, focusing on quick start API’s, demonstrates how SimpleXML, in combination where necessary with the DOM, is the ideal choice for developers working with straightforward, predictable, and relatively small XML documents. These documents are exactly the sort passed by Ajax applications containing, for example, the contents of a form submission or perhaps the response of a Web service application programming interface (API) like weather.com.

Source: www-128.ibm.com

Scenario: You want to install XP on your machine alongside your existing Linux installation, on the same drive. You have installed Ubuntu already. (If you have already have XP installed, keep an eye out for our upcoming tutorial on how to dual-boot Linux with XP, with XP installed first.)

Source: apcmag.com

This is a quick howto on a not-so-well-known feature of beryl – drag and drop using the scale plugin. Under a normal window manager, you can drag and drop files/text between applications no problem at all. If the target window is hidden behind others, usually you drag the file/text up to the taskbar, wait for the relevant window to focus, and drop the file. So what does beryl add to the drag and drop picture? Well, for a start, if you’ve got a lot of windows open, it’s easier to find the target if you can see all the windows at once. Also, if you want to drop a file/text on an application on another desktop, you can do this much more easily.

Source: Liquid Weather

t is a distant second to Intel Corp., but Silicon Valley’s Advanced Micro Devices Inc. promised to build a “processing powerhouse” when it bought Canada’s largest computer chip player last year.

Wednesday, AMD unveiled the first product from its acquisition of graphics chip designer ATI Technologies Inc., saying it represents the initial step toward fulfilling the goal of the $5.4-billion (U.S.) deal.

Source: Globe and Mail

If you listen to music on CD much, you’ll notice that some CDs sound much louder than others, and I’m not talking about Ministry’s The Mind is a Terrible Thing to Taste versus Sarah McLachlan’s Touch. Two CDs of the same genre, when played on the same CD player, at the same volume, can have drastically different playback volume. This difference carries over when you rip the CD to MP3, and can be really annoying when you’re going from song to song on your MP3 playlists on your computer or portable music player. One way to iron out the differences is to use MP3Gain to adjust your MP3s to have the the same volume.

Source: linux.com

One of the risks of trying to find a niche to build a startup is that the big guys can land on your face at any time. That’s why all of these startups are going to be in serious trouble when Adobe releases a free, ad supported online version of Photoshop in six months.

This announcement comes at a time when developers are lavishing attention on Adobe’s Flex platform, particularly in the video editing and sharing space. I think it’s reasonable for startups to question if Adobe will plan on competing with them in areas beyond photo editing. If that’s the case, these startups may not want to spend their time and venture dollars testing out various products, only to have Adobe jump in the middle after all the dirty work is done.

Adobe is both a platform company and an application company. Conflicts are not avoidable.

 

Technorati tags: News, Software

 Source: Adobe Photoshop: Online Edition

Gmail offers a few clever features that make it more than just an email service. You can use your Gmail account as a document viewer, a file storage, and even as a full-blown Getting Things Done solution. You can also turn Gmail into a nifty backup solution for your OpenOffice.org documents using a simple OOoBasic macro and Gmail’s own tools.

Source: OooBasic crash course: One-click email backup of OpenOffice.org documents