If you’re like most people, you probably named VMware or Xen first. Many of you probably know of one or more of the following: Parallels, QEMU, KVM, Virtuozzo and OpenVZ. However, few of you probably know about VirtualBox. And chances are if you know about VirtualBox 1.502, you’re already running it because it manages the trifecta of being good, free and, sort of, open source.

Sort of? Here’s how it works. InnoTek, a software company in Stuttgart, Germany, has released both a proprietary and a GPLv2 open-source version of the program. The VirtualBox OSE (open-source edition) has a subset of the features of the proprietary version.

VirtualBox OSE is not crippleware. It’s as full-powered a virtualization program as you’ll find today. What it’s missing are additional features, not basic functionality. You can also use the proprietary version, without charge for personal and educational use and to evaluate it for possible business purchase.

The free, but proprietary, edition gives you a built-in RDP (Remote Desktop Protocol) server and USB port support. It also offers, to the best of my knowledge, the unique ability to use RDP to access remote USB devices from a local VM (virtual machine) and use local USB devices on a remote VM. It also supports the use of iSCSI network drives for use as virtual hard drives.

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Among Firefox 3 pending improvements it a cool tab preview feature that shows actual thumbnails of the currently opened tabs. The feature is currently available as an experimental extension developed by Dão Gottwald, but could make its way to Firefox 3 final code.

First, the List all tabs button in the tab bar is replaced with a button that opens a black window with thumbnails and the active tab highlighted in a slightly bigger size. Tabs can be located by inspection or you can enter a few letters from the tab title you want and thumbnails are quickly filtered out.

Switching tabs with the Ctrl + Tab (Cmd + Tab on Mac) brings a black bar across the whole screen with thumbnails of the closest tabs with the site’s favicon overlayed for easier identification.

As you can notice from the screenshot below, the selected tab is shown slightly to the left (instead of the  obvious center) and may seem odd at first glance. However this position allows to see the most next tabs at a time.

To be honest, I didn’t see the benefit immediately. But after using it for a while I realize it’s really easier and quicker to reach the tab you are looking for when you can see how much apart it is. Filtering may be too much though.

Firefox 3 Beta 1 is expected within the next couple of weeks. Get Ctrl+Tab from Mozilla Bugzilla.

-mozillalinks

“This release is not just a revolution for us in Linux, but a revolution for the Skype world at large. No longer are we, the people of Linux, prevented from socialising in the same way as our peers.”

The time has come at last, one of the long awaited features – for video has arrived to Skype for Linux.

Apart from the bug fixes and improvements, following are the video features that comes with Skype 2.0.0.13 for Linux Beta:

• feature: Video.
• feature: Option to automatically answer incoming calls (under Options -> Privacy).
• feature: Use user’s desktop locale if a locale hasn’t been set in client.
• video feature: Video Devices options dialog.
• video feature: Video Accept/Decline dialog.
• video feature: Full-screen video.
• video feature: Double-clicking on video window toggles full-screen video.
• video feature: Double-clicking on video preview in Options dialog will reveal full-screen myself preview.

Just in case you face problem with latest beta build, here is a list of known issues:

• Using uvc webcam driver with new Logitech cameras can cause a split video effect which does not recover until you restart video.
• Using uvc webcam driver with ATi fglrx graphics card driver results in a memory leak and potential crash currently.
• gspca webcam driver can crash sometimes during webcam initialisation (which can also happen during the call).
• Using a display driver with only a single Xv port means you can only see video in one direction currently.
• Using a display driver with no Xv support will not work at all.
• ATi fglrx driver versions before 8.42.3 may crash your X server and lock up video during the call.
• ATi fglrx driver version 8.42.3 may crash your X server and lock up video at the beginning of the call.

Notice the last two issues listed, if you are an ATI video card user, as myself. I still have not updated my driver to 8.42 (using 8.40 and waiting for next 8.43). I easily installed the latest beta on my openSUSE 10.3 and it did enable video with one expection:

Being a beta release we understand that we will face problems and bugs. Skype 2 for Linux is very promising and hope it will hit final soon, with few more tweaks (including a way to adjust brightness/contrast/etc. in video options menu). Grab your copy of the latest beta from here.

Google and 33 other companies have announced an ambitious industry alliance that will maintain a completely open source mobile phone stack. The Open Handset Alliance (OHA) says phones based on its Linux-based “Android” stack will reach market in as soon as eight months.

The Android stack is based on “open Linux kernel,” the group says. It also includes a full set of mobile phone application software, in order to “significantly lower the cost of developing and distributing mobile devices and services,” OHA said.

The stack appears to have been created by Android, a mobile phone software house that Google acquired just over two years ago. The Android stack’s name is apparently a reflection of co-founder Andy Rubin’s fondness for robots. Rubin previously co-founded Danger, a software house that continues to provide software for the Sidekick “hiptop” marketed by T-Mobile.

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When it comes to file systems, Linux® is the Swiss Army knife of operating systems. Linux supports a large number of file systems, from journaling to clustering to cryptographic. Linux is a wonderful platform for using standard and more exotic file systems and also for developing file systems. This article explores the virtual file system (VFS)—sometimes called the virtual filesystem switch—in the Linux kernel and then reviews some of the major structures that tie file systems together.

The Linux file system architecture is an interesting example of abstracting complexity. Using a common set of API functions, a large variety of file systems can be supported on a large variety of storage devices. Take, for example, the read function call, which allows some number of bytes to be read from a given file descriptor. The read function is unaware of file system types, such as ext3 or NFS. It is also unaware of the particular storage medium upon which the file system is mounted, such as AT Attachment Packet Interface (ATAPI) disk, Serial-Attached SCSI (SAS) disk, or Serial Advanced Technology Attachment (SATA) disk. Yet, when the read function is called for an open file, the data is returned as expected. This article explores how this is done and investigates the major structures of the Linux file system layer.

More on this from IBM developerworks.

Related: Anatomy of the Linux Kernel

If you like to customize your desktop, easy mode can be pretty frustrating. On the other hand, everything is well designed to fit on the Eee PC’s 800 x 480 pixel monitor. (Well, almost everything. Every now and again a menu will pop up that you just can’t edit properly because it extends below the screen. But we’ll get to that in another post). And restricting access to some of the more advanced features is probably a good thing for many users who aren’t familiar with Linux.

It turns out there is a pretty simple way to enable a full KDE desktop, but if you want the best of both worlds, you can also add customizable start menu to your easy mode interface. Somewhat ironically, this might be harder than enabling the full desktop.

Following the tips at Notebook Review one can easily create a start menu by doing the following:

• Open a terminal by pressing Ctrl+Alt+T
• Type “sudo bash” to get root access
• Create a hidden folder by typing “mkdir /home/user/.icewm”
• Copy a config file to it by typing cp /etc/X11/icewm/preferences /home/user/.icewm/”
• Type “nano /home/user/.icewm/preferences” to open an editor
• Scroll down until you find “TaskBarShowStartMenu,” and change the 0 to 1
• Hit Ctrl+x to exit
• Next time you reboot or restart your X server by hitting Ctrl+Alt+Backspace you will have a shiny new start menu

There’s just one problem. It’s mostly empty. Fortunately the folks at EeeUser have some suggestions for populating it by editing the menu file.

First, you need to copy “menu” from /etc/X11/icewm/ to /home/user/.icewm/. You can either do this using the method above, or using the File Manager. But in order to see all the directories and files in file manager, you’ll have to select “Show Hidden Files” and “Show All File Systems” from the View tab.

Now go ahead and open menu using the nano command, or by clicking it in the file manager. Now you can edit the menu by adding programs you’ve installed and removing applications you don’t use or which aren’t actually available. In general, the format for a new entry is: prog “title” icon_name program_options (example: prog Audacity audacity)

And here is a nice video tutorial on howto install and manage third party/unsupported applications on your Eee PC (video by Brad L.):

For more tips, examples and on adding repositories and making advanced changes, check out the EeeUser forum and Wiki.