OSSPACK

Government competition agencies are increasingly focused on Google’s growing power in search and online advertising. The U.S. Federal Trade Commission, the U.S. Department of Justice and the European Commission have all determined that Google is dominant in certain markets, including search advertising. In late 2008 the DOJ was prepared to go to court to block Google’s attempt to partner with its largest search rival, Yahoo!. Last year the DOJ told a federal court that Google’s book search plan is anticompetitive in several respects. (One big problem is that Google would help itself to essentially exclusive rights to tens of millions of books—effectively locking out everyone else.) Last week the DOJ reiterated that view in court, even after Google had an opportunity to address the DOJ’s concerns. This week came news that the European Commission is investigating various aspects of Google’s conduct, including claims of retaliation, exclusivity and manipulation of search results to disadvantage rivals. The European Commission is likely to treat these cases quite seriously, given that Google’s share of search and search advertising is north of 95% in many European countries.

Tiny Core Linux is a very small (10 MB) minimal Linux GUI Desktop. It is based on Linux 2.6 kernel, Busybox, Tiny X, and Fltk. The core runs entirely in ram and boots very quickly . Also offered is Micro Core a 6 MB image that is the console based engine of Tiny Core. CLI versions of Tiny Core's program allows the same functionality of Tiny Core's extensions only starting with a console based system.

LXer Feature: 28-Feb-2010

In this week's LXWR we have a Ubuntu fanboy comes clean, A Windows metrics source lies about his identity, is Linux Distro-hopping a Thing of the Past?, SCALE 8x: Review Of My Road Trip To L.A. and a whole lot more.

A confirmed GNOME superfan takes a new look at KDE 4.4 and likes it.

This is a collection of Chrome extensions for week9, maybe for some of these extensions you diden`t hear about before.

Archbang, like Crunchbang Linux - but Arch and Openbox, is now available for the first time with an installer.

In this article I will describe how you can monitor your Debian Lenny server with munin and monit. munin produces nifty little graphics about nearly every aspect of your server (load average, memory usage, CPU usage, MySQL throughput, eth0 traffic, etc.) without much configuration, whereas monit checks the availability of services like Apache, MySQL, Postfix and takes the appropriate action such as a restart if it finds a service is not behaving as expected. The combination of the two gives you full monitoring: graphics that lets you recognize current or upcoming problems (like "We need a bigger server soon, our load average is increasing rapidly."), and a watchdog that ensures the availability of the monitored services.

A look at the first ever Gnome Shell themes and how to install (or even create your own) a Gnome Shell theme.

I wouldn't put Microsoft software on any of our computers now, even with a gun to my head...but that's not the point. Are we, as charitable and community service-driven organizations, subject to their whim and multi-month grant requests for their software? It would appear so. If Free Software were to be "discouraged" by the US Government (not likely but possible) then we would either have to come to these companies with out hands out, pirate the software or purchase it.

LinuxLinks: "To provide an insight into the quality of software that is available, we have compiled a list of 5 high quality Linux data recovery tools. These tools may well be a life-saver in the event that you need to retrieve data from corrupted media. We would strongly recommend that you become familiar with how they work just in case you are ever put in the position of needing to recover data."