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If you're an e-book reader, chances are you already use the wonderful Calibre software. If not, see Dan Sawyer's article in the April 2011 issue. Like many avid readers, however, I still find something soothing about a book made from dead trees. Unfortunately, it's easy to lose track of all the books I own. If you're the type of person who lends books out, it can become even more complicated. Enter Alexandria.

Android represented a whopping 46.4 percent of global smartphone shipments in Q2 2011, with 34 percent of Android's total coming from Samsung, putting it a close second behind Apple, says ABI Research. The research firm also released a teardown analysis of the HTC Sensation and its highly integrated smartphone processor -- the dual-core Qualcomm Snapdragon MSM8260.

Last year, there was a lot of handwringing about Firefox's continuing loss of market share. This was only by relatively small amounts, but people wondered whether Firefox had peaked and was in trouble. As I pointed out at the time, the reason Firefox's share was more or less static was that Google Chrome was experiencing a rapid uptake, and Microsoft's latest incarnation of Internet Explorer had improved in terms of open standards compliance, and so more people were using it.

The Open Cloud Initiative made its debut at OSCON this week. The organization is set up to provide a common set of standards cloud providers can adhere to in order to let clients know their clouds are easy to migrate into and out of. Open cloud systems must represent all user data and metadata in open standard formats and expose all functionality through open standard interfaces.

It’s really not that hard to give Linux a try on a desktop or notebook. But, I get it. Not everyone is comfortable with burning operating system ISOs to a CD and then booting a computer from it. If that’s you, or a friend of yours, then consider just buying a PC or laptop that has Linux on it that’s ready to go.

Most people, who like Linux, love Ubuntu. Oh they may object to Ubuntu’s new Unity desktop, but at day’s end, they still use Ubuntu. Technology businesses though have a more jaundiced view of Canonical, Ubuntu’s parent company. Canonical, though, is now taking steps now to make its potential hardware and software partners happier.

Microsoft is more open — at least on the surface — and that’s all that matters in the cloud era, one company exec maintains. At Oscon 2011, Gianugo Rabellino, Senior Director for Open Source Communities at Microsoft, said as long as the APIs, protocols and standards for the cloud are open, that is, open surface, customers don’t care about the underlying platform. So, it does not matter that the cloud is built primarily on open source technologies, notably Linux?

man woman, No manual entry for woman. Oooh, I just know I'm going to hear it in the comments for that one. But you know what? Just how many of you have tried something similar with other words? You know you have at least once or twice. Go ahead, try one or two..you might be surprised. So why an article on man pages? Well, it's not just man pages, it's more like how to get information from Linux.

Artila Electronics announced a Linux 2.6.38-ready 3.5-inch ARM9 industrial single board computer (SBC), notable for its support for up to 1280 x 860-pixel touchscreens. The M-505 is equipped with a 400MHz Atmel AT91SAM9G45 processor, 128MB of DDR2 SDRAM, 128MB NAND flash, plus Ethernet, USB, and serial I/O.

Eqonomize's approach to its GUI makes it more than a mere checking and savings account ledger. The drop-down menus, tool bar and action panel make a click-and-view style natural and efficient. Despite a few missing features, Equonomize takes the sweat and toil out of personal bookkeeping and banking tasks.

Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst is speaking this year at LinuxCon on opening day about the challenges that still lie ahead as we embark on another 20 years of Linux. We wanted to know more about Whitehurst's perspective as we prepare for the big event and the formal celebration of the 20th anniversary of Linux. Here's what he told us.

Dell has announced its Dell OpenStack Cloud Solution at OSCON and open sourced Crowbar, its "cloud unboxer", as part of the announcement. Dell has been an OpenStack community member since it launched, and has been working with OpenStack's Infrastructure-as-a-service architecture to gain experience of the open source platform and understand customer needs.

David Airlie has called upon Linus Torvalds to pull in his DRM Git tree that offers the key Direct Rendering Manager graphics driver improvements for the Linux 3.1 kernel. Previously I talked about some of the DRM changes for Linux 3.1. What is found in David's tree for the Linux 3.1 merge window is nearly the same. The open-source graphics driver changes queued up for the Linux 3.1 kernel aren't nearly as exciting as what has been merged during some of the past kernel development cycles. There isn't any major new hardware support, no ground-breaking features, or other really fundamental changes, but just some modest updates.

Mozilla has announced a new experimental project called Boot to Gecko (B2G) with the aim of developing an operating system that emphasizes standards-based Web technologies. The initial focus will be on delivering a software environment for handheld devices such as smartphones.

LXer Feature: 24-Jul-2011

In the Roundup this week we have RMS telling to resist the temptations of the cloud, good bye Kubuntu, numeric relativity with the Einstein Toolkit and Microsoft is in the top 5 contributors to the Linux kernel? Methinks not.. Enjoy!

Can't make it to OSCON this year? You can still catch keynotes, interviews and news via live streaming video. Check back right here during the conference July 25-29, 2011 to enjoy some great content virtually.

Oracle's latest acquisition is that of Ksplice Inc, the company behind the software to apply updates to the Linux kernel in real-time without requiring a system reboot or other downtime. "Never Reboot Linux For Security Updates," as Ksplice says.

Oracle released VirtualBox 4.1 on July 19 with a slew of improvements ranging from usability improvements to rasing the ceiling for RAM to 1TB for 64-bit hosts. With 4.1, we decided to take VirtualBox out for a spin and see how it handles.

I’ve been a die-hard Debian fan for about 10 years, and I’ve written several articles on the subject. That said, most of our Linux-savvy readers are Ubuntu users, so that’s been my main desktop OS for as long as I’ve been a MakeTechEasier writer. Ubuntu has always been fine, and generally got the job done without hassle, however this past release (11.04, Natty Narwhal) has been the cause of a rift among many Ubuntu users. This release pushed Unity, their homegrown desktop environment, front and center. Like many others, I’ve never managed to get a feel for Unity. After weighing my options, I decided to jump ship and try out Fedora 15. It’s the first Fedora I’ve tried since Core 1, and things certainly have changed.

A standard for contributor agreements was the promise of Project Harmony, but now the project's agreements have been released, they appear to have hit all the wrong notes with many in the community. We look at why Harmony is off-key.