Organizers of the Southern California Linux Expo 9x have announced that the Call for Papers for SCALE 9x opens Wednesday, Sept. 1, with five speaker tracks. With the continued growth of Open Source software in business, SCALE will address the need for system management knowledge by adding a speaker track focused on system administration. Combined with the two specialized tracks — Beginners and Developers — and the two general interest tracks, SCALE 9x will have content for every attendee.

In the first installment of this article we looked at getting Google’s Scripting Layer for Android (SL4A) downloaded and installed on your Android phone. We examined the basics of writing scripts using Python and even included a short script to set a few of the profile settings. This time we’ll take a look at some of the sample scripts found on the SL4A website and talk about how you might write a script of your own.

As of Red Hat’s news last week, there are now four competing standards for building so-called open source clouds. It’s shaping up to be quite a battle of the titans. Contenders are: Amazon Web Services via Eucalyptus Systems; Rackspace and OpenStack, Cloud.com and Cloudstack; Red Hat’s DeltaCloud. Companies like Intel, Dell, Citrix, HP, IBM, Cisco are all lining up behind one or more. But some experts says that the ultimate standard may not even have shown itself yet.

A new survey by management consultants Accenture has shown that Open Source Software (OSS) has reached what the firm describes as a ‘turning point’ in the corporate sector.

Dell’s 17-inch Studio 1747 laptop is a beefy desktop replacement that ships with Windows 7. But how does it fare with Linux instead? A few days hands-on with the laptop shows that the machine is almost perfect, save for one fatal flaw.

Open-Xchange, a provider of business-class open source collaboration software, announced the availability of data migration tools for users of Microsoft Outlook to easily move e-mails, contacts, appointments and tasks to Open-Xchange Server.

The concept of activities is a new feature introduced with KDE 4. In the old desktop model of KDE 3, the desktop was a program called “kdesktop”, which gave users the ability to have a number of virtual desktops. Although other tools like Superkaramba could be used to add more features, the essential KDE desktop ended there. When activities were introduced into KDE 4, they did not make much sense in isolation. In addition to having virtual desktops, there were activities, which the user could create and configure to have different wallpapers and different widgets. Much of the virtual desktop functionality of KDE 3 was absent and not directly connected to Plasma activities.

Despite being one of the most tightly controlled technology companies on the market, Apple has a surprisingly complicated relationship with open source. Both of Apple’s flagship operating systems, OS X and iOS are based on Darwin, which is in turn based on FreeBSD. Apple has also contributed a large amount of code back to the open source community, most notably WebKit, which is used as the browsing engine in nearly every mobile platform. Considering the recent popularity of Apple’s systems, and since there was a big Apple event happening today, their involvement in open source is worth a look.

Microsoft just received confirmation of a patent that hands the company the intellectual property of shutting an operating system down. I can’t quite recall how often Microsoft ha stalked about a faster way to shut down its operating system. It is part of the pitch of virtually every new operating system and it has remained an annoyance that it can take quite some time until the software in fact closes running applications and the operating system itself.

[Linux does this already no? - Scott]

Those of you not familiar with Linux won’t be familiar with the way it lets you install new software. After 12 years with Linux, neither am I. And I think this highlights a serious problem with the way that open-source software has developed and how it can grow. The problem is choice – one of the most touted and noble reasons for using Linux in the first place. For general use, there’s too much of it. It’s often overwhelming, needlessly complicated and an easy excuse for change. Choice goes hand-in-hand with redundancy and duplicated effort.

Back in July we reported that Unigine Corp, the company behind the advanced Unigine gaming/3D engine, was working on its own strategy game. This game was supposed to be announced by the end of July, then in private we were told it got pushed back to the middle of August, but to start off September we finally have the announcement for this new game. Unigine OilRush is the game title and it will be available for Linux. Will this be the best Linux native game we see in 2010?

A couple weeks back I noticed the Wine-Doors project was down and on their front page they have a message “Very very broken and I don’t have time to fix it” So what should users who have been using Wine-Doors, or any of the other closed projects do in the future to configure and run their favorite Windows Applications and Games on Linux or Mac?

Simple partition resizing operations, such as those described in Part 1 of this series, usually conclude successfully. Sometimes, though, you need to do something different or troubleshoot problems. This article covers some of these situations. The first topic is LVM configuration and how it interacts with partition resizing. The second topic is troubleshooting techniques. Although a complete description of all the problems that can occur when resizing partitions might fill a book, a few basic principles can help you work through many common problems. Finally, this article describes some alternatives to partition resizing, should the problems you encounter prove insurmountable.

Strange bedfellows VMware and Novell have officially released SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for VMware, a version of Novell’s open source OS that piggybacks on every copy of VMware’s vSphere hypervisor. In June, VMware and Novell told the world they had agreed to an OEM deal that would see VMware distribute SUSE Linux with vSphere, and the combined product is now available to all. If you purchase a vSphere license and subscription, you also receive a subscription for patches and updates to SUSE Linux Enterprise Server at no additional cost.

ArtistX is an Ubuntu GNU/Linux-based live DVD that includes a pretty big lineup of free multimedia applications. The most recent version, ArtistX 0.9 is based on Ubuntu 9.10 and features the 2.6.31 Linux kernel, GNOME 2.28, KDE 4.3.5, Compiz Fusion, Ubiquity Installer, and more.

Ubuntu’s use of sudo to simplify Linux administration is ingenious, but barely scratches the surface of what sudo can do. Follow along as Yvo Van Doorn of Likewise Software unlocks the powers of sudo.

We are all beginners at one point or another. The following is a list of tidbits and tips I have learned over my years working with Linux that will help you learn/maintain your Linux based operating system.

Red Hat is in talks to buy a JBoss cloud provisioning startup called Makara, according to a source familiar with the matter. Makara – a Red Hat JBoss partner – produces a portal enabling IT teams to set up, provision, and administer public Amazon and private Xen and VMware clouds. The two-year old company is believed to have met with virtualization giant VMware, who turned down the prospect of a deal.

Ksplice, the technology that allows Linux kernel updates without the need to reboot, is now free for Fedora. Ksplice was originally designed with Fedora in mind and the company behind the technology also announced that it would be integrated into future versions of Fedora. Currently, Ksplice is available in Enterprise flavors and free to Ubuntu Desktop.

Continued from : Is your company afraid of Linux? (Part 2 of 3) Fear #4 (Support!): This is where Linux shines. Because of the open nature of the Linux community it is considered to be the most widely supported platform and the most inexpensive. To get professional support for your Microsoft server platform, you have to either pay for a professional support plan from a Microsoft Partner or from Microsoft themselves. I’ve never run into an SMB that had purchased a professional support plan from Microsoft. To obtain one-time support for your Windows server operating system you would pay a per incident fee anywhere from $99 (next business day) to $260 (4 to 6 hour response). No support is included with the purchase of the Microsoft operating system itself. So these fees are on top of the licensing fees you pay for the right to install and use the Windows OS. Licensing for Windows Server 2008 ranges anywhere from $500 to $4000 which doesn’t include the client access licenses (CALs) which run around $40 per desktop or per user on your network.

Setting up a firewall for IPtables can be rather difficult, especially if its your first time. A firewall is something you need to have, whether you are just trying to keep hackers out, or trying to meet a requirement such as PCI compliance, or HIIPA compliance. Luckily the folks at rfxnetworks, created a CLI based configuration for IPtables.

Not many mainstream PC manufacturers have a Linux preinstalled version of their products. But some do have and the there are many other not-so-mainstream providers of Linux preinstalled laptops, netbooks and PC’s. Here are a few of them you should know.

All desktop environments support camera import, image management and editing applications. But the desktop defaults are really geared towards casual users. Don’t be fooled by that, though; open source can and does offer the tools to support professional photographers and high-end enthusiasts.

Open source users, developers, and members of the global apache community gather to share insight on “Servers, The Cloud, and Innovation”

Columbus, Ohio — September 1, 2010 — Registration for the 2010 Ohio LinuxFest has been extended through September 8th, and the registration contest has also been extended until the 1,000th registration has been reached.

For the past three years we have hosted an annual Linux Graphics Survey in which we ask tens of thousands of users each time their video card preferences, driver information, and other questions about their view of the Linux graphics stack. This year we are hosting the survey once again to allow the development community to get a better understanding of the video hardware in use, what open-source and closed-source drivers are being used, and other relevant information that will help them and the Linux community.

I am currently employed with a large global company, working in a division that strictly focuses on embedded Linux development. Earlier this week, during our lunch hour, as one would expect with a predominantly Linux crowd, we had engaged in a conversation on the following question: What technology has Microsoft been the first to market? And of those technologies, which was developed by Microsoft?

Recent news and product releases could be cause for concern over the future of the open source Oracle/Sun Grid Engine. Things change. Indeed, high tech is often a sea of change. For some open source software is a lifeboat in the storms of change. While everything else can be bought, sold, or demolished, your investment in open software is still yours. No where is this more important than in HPC where change is a way of life. Prior to open source, the ability to use hardware often depended on support contracts from vendors. If these companies sank, so did the support and keeping with the ocean metaphor, your prized HPC system has now become an expensive boat anchor.

Allen’s lawsuits look like classic patent trolling. There are just four patents involved, all incredibly broad. This means that on the face of it, probably every company involved with Internet activities “infringes” on them. What is described, as the accompanying drawing makes clear, is essentially most Web pages, with information drawn from various sources being brought together. The trouble is, the filing date for this idea is 5 December 1996 and I - along with several million other early Internet explorers - was routinely using this stuff from 1994.

When most of us first saw the HTC Evo we thought “Wow, 4.3 inch screen? That’s huge!” Personally I had assumed this was as large as our mobile handhelds where going to be getting for awhile. I was wrong, twice over in fact.

Finally Google Voice and Video chat available for Linux through web browsers using Google talk plugin. Now you will need to chat directly using your web browsers by Voice with high quality voice, and video webcam chat available. Also you can pop out the chat window with video chat included, and view the video chat [...]

Is there some kind of secret brotherhood of lesser-known Microsoft and Apple founders? Steve Wozniak, the Apple co-founder better known as Woz, is voicing some surprisingly strong support for Paul Allen and the Microsoft co-founder’s patent litigation against Google, Apple, Facebook and other tech giants. Asked about the lawsuit during a video interview with Bloomberg News, Wozniak says he’s “not at all against the idea of patent trolls,” and he believes Allen’s suit represents the fact that inventors have rights under the U.S. patent system.

Today is Twitter’s OAuthpocalypse: Twitter is shutting down basic authentification so all clients not using OAuth will stop working and one of these Twitter clients is Ubuntu’s default microblogging client: Gwibber. That means that you need to upgrade if you want to continue using Gwibber.

Palm revealed the webOS 2.0 SDK beta today and with it, the company gave an outline of the new features expected in webOS 2.0. The Linux-based OS will support multi-tasking through a feature called Stacks, which organizes similar applications into tidy, um, stacks. webOS 2.0 will also support JavaScript node.js, which opens it up to a variety of existing modules, and improved HTML5 support was also highlighted.

Whether or not you care about the woefully unsung gThumb image editor, the state of IPTC metadata in Linux applications, or what journalists need in an image editor, you should care about the journey from discovering the problem through reporting a bug and finally getting a new package for my Fedora desktop. It’s enough to make you believe in the power of free, open-source software all over again.

Track projects and collaborate efficiently within an easy-to-use open source project management application called Collabtive. Resident collaboration expert, Dmitri Popov, shows you how to get started…

Firefox 4.0 is probably going to be one among the most important release Mozilla team has ever made. Competition is breathing down its neck like never before. Even IE, in its latest avatar(read IE9) is fast becoming a better piece of software. Mozilla’s answer to all this is the upcoming Firefox 4.0. Already a lot of improvements have been made. But the biggest change is going to be the the new JavaScript engine called “JaegerMonkey”.

Earlier this month there was the release of Nexenta Core Platform 3.0 as the last likely release of this OpenSolaris + Ubuntu Hardy mix to be based upon the original OpenSolaris Nevada code-base with Oracle killing the project so now they have the Illumos OpenSolaris fork to utilize. Today there’s another OpenSolaris community OS release, this time in the form of SchilliX, which is the OpenSolaris derivative created by two German developers.

Because WebUpd8 reader soee asked in a comment about making an application always open on a certain virtual desktop, I decided to make a full post and a screencast for this - especially since there’s an annoying bug when trying to make an app always open on a certain virtual desktop.

Could some upstart kids from NYU with an open source social networking platform give Facebook a run for its considerable money? You never know.

Drupal announced the adoption of a new code of conduct, admittedly borrowed from Ubuntu’s own code of conduct. The main difference being Drupal’s lack of a conflict resolution section in its code of conduct.

Five days after the announcement of Voice and Video Chat service in Gmail for Debian-based Linux distributions, Google unveiled a Gmail phone call service for Windows, Mac, and Linux. Rather than having both parties tied to their computers and logged into their Gmail accounts, one user can now call anyone in the US and Canada with telephone service. Google states that rates will remain free for the rest of the year and very low for international calls.

I wreck servers on a regular basis. Yep, I build and wreck multiple servers every day. As a Linux trainer I am always demonstrating how to build Linux servers in class and then blowing them away. Did it today, built an Ubuntu 10.04 server with Postfix and added the UFW firewall settings, mutt, changed the DNS to get mail going and even, made an image of that server and blew it all away. But today was different, today I used the RackSpace Cloud. Yep, I created an account for $.03 per hour built and destroyed Linux servers.

Starting with the Next version of Opera, as of the next snapshot release (due sometime later today), we are discontinuing the PowerPC architecture on Mac and Linux.

Today, KDE updated the Applications, Platform and Plasma Workspaces to 4.5.1, a new releases bringing a number of important bugfixes on top of 4.5.0. 4.5.0 was released only three weeks ago and receives monthly service updates. 4.5.1 is the first in this series of bugfix and translation updates. Those releases improve stability and the user experience further, while not bringing major new features or bigger changes to the user interface.

Wind River has launched a new community site for Wind River Linux customers, engineers, and embedded Linux community experts. The Wind River Developer Community for Linux is designed as a collaborative site where Wind River Linux users can ask and answer questions using a point rewards system, the company says.

While the “free for web use” claims for H.264 by MPEG-LA sound great and have deceived many commentators, they are nothing new and contain no good news for open source software.

In past articles our Android sample application GUIs have consisted of a simple button or two and the corresponding click-handler code. What if some of those buttons are only supposed to be available under specific device conditions? Examples include providing a button only when a connection to a remote Bluetooth peripheral has been established or some other specific device condition.

…..LT Autocare is going use the space we currently inhabit within their shop to put in an alignment rack. That being the case, we need to get our stuff together and prepare to move to another facility.
The first part of that procedure is to take care of our substantial amount of E-waste we have collected.
We have a bunch of it.

The ViewPad 7 is an all-new capacitive multi-touch 7? tablet featuring 3G, Wi-Fi, Blutooth and front and rear facing cameras. From what we’ve seen so far ViewSonic’s latest device takes Dell’s lead with the Streak, but increases product size to bring it closer in line with the Apple iPad.

A little more than four years since Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) acquired graphics and chipset specialist ATI Technologies, AMD (NYSE: AMD) has confirmed that it will no longer use the ATI name.

In these days all the new netbooks and most laptops have built-in webcam, or at least add one external costs very little, apart from the traditional use in video calls you can use our Linux box to create a monitoring device, it can be used to monitor your child while you are at another PC, or your pet while you are at work, or have a home-made video surveillance system for your properties. To accomplish this we will use the software Motion, the software is present in many distributions, I will give commands using my Ubuntu 10.04. Feature that made me choose this software is the ability to remain “asleep” until it detects a noise or movement, and then activates and records, plus the ability to define custom actions when it start (send an email, an sms , Etc.).

If you haven’t used Linux before, are new to Ubuntu, or would like a quick update on the latest in open source advancements for the desktop, then The Official Ubuntu Book is a great place to start. Authored by a group of some of the most experienced open source administrators and developers, this 400-page user guide details everything you need to know about how to make the most of your Ubuntu, Kubuntu (Ubuntu with KDE), and Xubuntu (Ubuntu with Xfce) computer.

What do you get when you cross a Red Hat with a Green Beret? I don’t know, but the commercial Linux and Java application server markets are about to find out. Retired General Henry Hugh Shelton — a native Tarheel born in Tarboro, North Carolina, and a former commander of the 82nd Airborne Division based in Fort Bragg — was named chairman of the board of directors at Red Hat on Monday.

LinuxCertified Inc, a leading provider of Linux training and services, today announced its next Linux Device Driver Development Course class to be held in South Bay, CA from September 20th - 22nd, 2010.

If you’ve ever been gridlocked in a group decision-making process, you know how quickly things can go from frustrating to downright unwieldy. Even with a common goal in mind, it’s easy to get bogged down in data and competing opinions. Analysis of Competing Hypothesis (ACH) is an open source application that’s been helping the CIA with its research methodologies for years and it’s freely available to the public to help groups look at — and solve — problems objectively.

Key to any operating system buying decision is its lifespan for support and maintenance updates. As it turns out, most of the major operating system vendors offer support lengths that, on the surface, don’t differ radically from each other — though there are exceptions to the rule that IT managers need to keep in mind if they’re going to get the most support for their dollar.

Japanese reseller Redstar has begun taking pre-orders for an ARM11-based 10.1-inch tablet computer from RealEase that runs the new Shogo Linux distro. The Shogo Tablet runs on a 533MHz Freescale i.MX37 system-on-chip (SoC) with 256MB RAM and 4GB flash, and offers a 1024 × 600 capacitive display, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, plus 3G and Zigbee options, says RealEase.

Operating system not pay $ 400 The operating system is the set of programs responsible for the management and control of basic computer operations. A computer to function, it needs an operating system (there are several: Windows, Linux, Mac, etc. ..). If you take away the operating system, the computer serves only as an ornament. The most common is Windows and we have two options: buy or illegally copied (pirated). Windows Vista Prices range from $ 299 to $ 599, depending on version (Microsoft Official List).

ver 20 sessions from LinuxCon 2010, held Aug. 10-12 in Boston, are now available for free online viewing courtesy of the Linux Foundation.

You will notice that a “printer queue” refers to the number of persons waiting before their print jobs have finished and if it doesn’t that’s because the device in question is either out of paper or simply jammed beyond repair. So wouldn’t it be nice if you could simply put all these documents on your Ben Nanonote and carry them along? Sure it would.

Google developers have announced that Chromium, the open source browser on which the company builds the Chrome browser, is getting a GPU graphics overhaul. The development has been driven by the work on developing WebGL and 3D CSS transform support. It involves incorporating a new GPU process into the browser’s many-process model which processes rendering requests from other Chromium processes through OpenGL or Direct3D using ANGLE (Almost Native Graphics Layer Engine)$.

Think you all knew this already, the c-korn/vlc ppa has been removed by the author himself. You can’t live without PPAs in Ubuntu especially for most downloaded apps like VLC. Guys at LFFL have made a dedicated PPA for VLC. I just gave it a try and it worked awesome.

Last week we reported that a native ZFS implementation for Linux is soon being released that is based upon the work by Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory to bring Sun’s ZFS file-system to Linux as a CDDL-licensed kernel module. As said though in that article, there is already a ZFS module for FUSE (File-system in User-space) that is already available and with it not living in the GPL-land of the Linux kernel, it is legally allowed, but it does not come without some performance overhead. Over the weekend though there’s been some discussions in the related forum thread and elsewhere about the dependability of ZFS-FUSE and what the level of impact on using FUSE really amounts to in real-world usage. We have tested the ZFS-FUSE — both the latest stable and Git snapshots — and have compared this alternate ZFS Linux implementation to that of the native EXT4 and Btrfs.

The Software Freedom Law Center plans to create a new branch in New Dehli India to further expand their coverage of FLOSS and legal defense of free software. Mishi Choudhary will oversee the SFLC’s New Dehli office.

The Linux Mint team has released the final version of Linux Mint 9 (”Isadora”), based on Ubuntu 10.04. Linux Mint 9 features a new software manager with 30,000 packages, a new backup tool, and menu and interface improvements, says the team.

For years, decades, the big companies didn’t tend to wage patent wars on each other. The reason is simple. Major patent holders don’t tend to target other major patent holders because of MAD (mutually assured destruction). Or, in other words, if you sue me, I sue you, and we can both burn potentially hundreds of millions per year in legal costs just to conduct a business fight. Well that was the case until Oracle went after Google and now Allen is suing the world.

“Your mother was right, it’s better to share”, that’s the tagline of one of those awesome RedHat commercials that we featured some time ago. The idea of sharing is infectious and is fast spreading. Take Apertus for example, a project aimed at building an Cinema Camera based on the idea of sharing and mutual respect(read Open Source).

So, do you hate software patents yet, now that you’ve read about Paul Allen’s patent infringement lawsuit against the world and his dog? I think it ought to inspire you, reading Allen’s complaint, that it might get you to the tipping point, or at least help you to understand why most engineers do hate software patents, because they are a drain on the economy and a hindrance to innovation. So we did Allen’s complaint as text, sort of as Exhibit A, shall we say, illustrating the point. But if you can figure out precisely what this litigation is about from this complaint, what the defendants are alleged to have done wrong, you are doing better than I am. It’s unbelievably vague.

In around 15 minutes, the time it takes to install Ubuntu Server Edition, you can have a LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP) server up and ready to go. This feature, exclusive to Ubuntu Server Edition, is available at the time of installation.The LAMP option means you don’t have to install and integrate each of the four separate LAMP components.

Lens distortion is a fact of life. You can mitigate this problem, but you can’t avoid it completely (unless you are willing to invest in seriously expensive professional-grade lenses, that is). Fortunately, digiKam provides a set of tools that can help you to fix lens distortion with relative ease.

At home, you use Linux. At work, you use Windows. How do you share files between them? If you said, “USB drives” or “CDs” or “DVDs” there is a better way: Dropbox. Dropbox provides you with the ability to sync files between computers via a daemon. Additionally, they’re available on the web for those times when you don’t have physical proximity to one of your computers but you still need access to your files.

I haven’t run the AbiWord word processor in an age. I barely ever run OpenOffice, or MS Office, or any office software outside of Google Docs. I decided to fire it up, and while I was looking for the word-wrap settings (still don’t know if these exist …) instead learned that AbiWord now offers SMART QUOTES. Now if you read entries from this blog in 2007, you could glean that I was somewhat obsessed with smart quotes in word-processing documents.

If you recall, Novell’s former best friend for SUSE Linux was Microsoft. Microsoft and Novell have a partnership where the two parties had certificates that indemnified SUSE users from any intellectual property liability. In addition, Microsoft officially recommended SUSE Linux Enterprise for hybrid Windows/Linux shops. Microsoft also distributed coupons for maintenance and support for Novell’s SUSE Linux Enterprise Server. The Microsoft-Novell partnership dates back to 2006.

Ubuntu Tweak 0.5.6 released, this new version comes with a major feature called - Desktop recovery, “Desktop Recovery is the tool integrated into Ubuntu Tweak to help people safely tweak with desktop settings, and never worry about how to go back. It has three basic actions: Backup: backup the current settings, keep as many as backups you want; Recover: recover to the backup; Reset: even you don’t have any backup, you can also reset to the default settings.

I whipped up a couple of t-shirt designs on the topic of Oracle’s commitment to releasing Java. If you’re attending JavaOne or OpenWorld, I’d appreciate it if you’d wear one, just to let Larry know that you care. Or if you just happen to be wandering the neighborhood (I know that there are lots of Java hackers who work within just a few blocks of Moscone). Or if you will be spending quality time with an Oracle salesperson. Or in any other situation where the spirit moves you. It’s a gentle but clear way to express your feelings (well…. the last design on the page isn’t all that gentle - but it’s more fun).

This Bruce Byfield piece from Linux Magazine looks like it’s going to go negative but instead offers a reasoned argument for why Debian GNU/Linux remains relevant and useful in the Ubuntu era.

LXer Feature: 29-Aug-2010

The big stories this week include still more fallout from the Oracle-Google lawsuit, 10 differences between Linux and BSD, the joys of determining Linux market share, Microsoft says they love Open Source..again, and last but not least Paul Allen decides to sue just about everybody for patent infringement. Enjoy!

I’ve had a serial terminal connected to my Linux box for as long as I can remember. Unfortunately, my old Wyse 25 is slowly giving up. Then I got my Ben Nanonote. The Ben features an Ethernet-over-USB gadget, which I could use to connect it to my OpenSuSE machine. So, my Ben Nanonote became a console. If my Wyse 25 finally goes to that big computer center in the sky, the only thing I have to do is to order another Ben Nanonote and hook it up.

What if you want one user to run a command as an another system user without exchanging passwords. For example, you may want an user john to run a find command or custom bash shell script as an user greg or even as a user root ( superuser ) without password exchange. In this case a sudo utility with its /etc/sudoers configuration file will be your friend. The sudo utility is very widely used but at the same time very little understood by Linux users of all levels. This short article describes some basic of sudo usage and explains a format of /etc/sudoers configuration file.

This tutorial will hopefully help inspire you to create your own custom wallpapers and produce a great results in the GIMP.

Usually when we talk about programs for editing images we think to graphic programs such as The Gimp or photoshop, but they are not the only alternative. ImageMagick is a suite of programs that you can use from command line to change and transform images, may seem more uncomfortable but it is actually a very powerful option to process many images in a short time or include image processing programs in web or bash scripts.

Earlier this month we delivered benchmarks comparing the ZFS, EXT4, and Btrfs file-systems from both solid-state drives and hard drives. The EXT4 file-system was the clear winner in terms of the overall disk performance while Btrfs came in second followed by Sun’s ZFS in FreeBSD 8.2. It was a surprise that in our most recent testing the EXT4 file-system turned around and did better than the next-generation Btrfs file-system, but it turns out that Btrfs regressed hard in Linux 2.6.35 as to be found in Ubuntu 10.10 and other soon-to-be-released distributions. However, regardless of where Btrfs is performing, its speed can be boosted by enabling its transparent zlib compression support.

Former Microsoft executive and billionaire Paul Allen sued several major Internet companies and three large retailers for patent infringement today, asserting that four patents originating at Interval Research, Allen’s dot-com era think tank, cover basic web browsing and e-commerce technologies. A Wired magazine profile of Interval Research suggests that by 1999, the institute was struggling, with Allen having spent upwards of $100 million on research and not much to show for it. “Interval always had a special buzz and a collection of talent that, even in the annals of technological genius, stands out.”

Just shy of a month ago was when NVIDIA last released a proprietary Linux driver, at which point they also released a second driver that was their OpenGL 4.1 preview driver. This Saturday though NVIDIA has provided a new driver release, which is tagged as the 256.52 pre-release. This new Linux driver release isn’t overly exciting, but it does carry some prominent fixes that will please some NVIDIA customers.

Many electrons have been expended in the discussion of Oracle’s recently-filed lawsuit against Google alleging patent and copyright infringements in the Android platform. Your editor is somewhat reluctant to contribute to the flood; at this point, the amount of real information which is available is minimal while the amount of speculation is high. This will be an important case, though; the world will be watching to see how it turns out. So here are a few thoughts to add to the pile.

The Linux Mint team has released the final version of Linux Mint 9 (”Isadora”), based on Ubuntu 10.04. Linux Mint 9 features a new software manager with 30,000 packages, a new backup tool, and menu and interface improvements, says the team.

VLC 1.1.4 is released, this is the fourth bugfix release of the VLC 1.1.x branch. This release comes especially to fix important security issue that was discovered in most windows application, Linux in general is not affected by this security bug.

In the second episode of the new Behind KDE series of interviews with KDE sysadmins, we meet KDE's “identity expert”, Ben Cooksley - the guy behind the new identity.kde.org, which will be launched next week. Ben is one of the leaders involved in setting up key parts of the new git infrastructure. Normally he's quiet and avoids publicity - another reason to put him in the spotlight. This interview even contains one of the rare pictures that are available of Ben.

If you ever went to a cyber cafe, you probably noticed that any changes you make to their system: create or delete files, settings and so on, are reseted when you restart the computer. That’s what the Deep Freeze program does. Ofris is a Deep Freeze like application for Linux that is very easy to use - once you install it, you can “deep freeze” your Linux computer in a matter of seconds.

If you ever went to a cyber cafe, you probably noticed that any changes you make to their system: create or delete files, settings and so on, are reseted when you restart the computer. That’s what the Deep Freeze program does. Ofris is a Deep Freeze like application for Linux that is very easy to use - once you install it, you can “deep freeze” your Linux computer in a matter of seconds.

Ubuntu Software Center is something we all overlooked for long. Even while writing tutorials about installing different applications in this blog, I prefer to provide command line instructions only. But a lot of Ubuntu users are new comers and Software Center means a lot to them. Ubuntu is gradually waking up to this fact and have finally started focusing on bringing a lot of polish and usability to Software Center.

Ubuntu Software Center is something we all overlooked for long. Even while writing tutorials about installing different applications in this blog, I prefer to provide command line instructions only. But a lot of Ubuntu users are new comers and Software Center means a lot to them. Ubuntu is gradually waking up to this fact and have finally started focusing on bringing a lot of polish and usability to Software Center.

You may think that the last thing on earth that could happen to your company would be that your business might be sued because it used a particular software program. You’d be wrong. In the aftermath of the Bilski Supreme Court decision, the Supreme Court did nothing to stop software or business method patents. As a result, not only software development companies but all businesses are now in more danger from patent lawsuits than ever before.

I’ve been using (and abusing) my Ben Nanonote daily now for several weeks, simply to find out whether this little machine is just a little gadget or really a useful device. There is no word processing package available for the Nanonote. Just a few editors. However, while looking for a “curses” based word processor I stumbled upon “txt2tags”, a formatting program written in Python - which is supported by the Nanonote.

If you have not yet noticed, I am a nerd. Not just your garden variety, everyday, commonplace nerd, but a big nerd. With that cleared up, I could not help but purchase an ARTiGO. Over the past month (maybe longer), I have been testing different operating systems on it, and I think I can confidently declare a winner for best fit, and another for best performance. I did not have the Wifi Kit or the SD card reader installed for the tests. I am using 2GB of Crucial DDR2 800mHz RAM, and a 500GB 7200 RPM 2.5″ SATA for the HDD.

Even before the first Oracle-driven JavaOne conference has seen the light of day, an alternative Java conference is being planned for those not thrilled with Oracle. Media company Software & Support Media (S&S) plans to offer a U.S.-based version of its JAX (Java Apache XML) conference, which the company has been conducting in Germany for several years. “A lot of the Java community has been a little upset about how the JavaOne conference is being [run] by Oracle,” said a source familiar with S&S plans.

Like many of you, every year we look forward to the workshops, conferences and events related to open source software. In our view, these are among the best ways we can engage the community, by sharing our experiences and learning from yours. So we’re sad to announce that we won’t be able to present at JavaOne this year. We wish that we could, but Oracle’s recent lawsuit against Google and open source has made it impossible for us to freely share our thoughts about the future of Java and open source generally. This is a painful realization for us, as we’ve participated in every JavaOne since 2004, and I personally have spoken at all but the first in 1996.

Mozilla announced today via its blog that Fenec, the mobile version of Firefox is now available for Android 2.0-powered smartphones and the Nokia N900. Unlike other mobile browsers, Fenec supports add-ons as well as tabbed browsing, and now ships with Firefox Sync baked into code. Sync allows users to synchronize their tabs, passwords, bookmarks, and other pertinent material from their desktop Firefox session.

After browsing through LinApp website for sometime, I was awed by the sheer number of commercial applications available for Linux. Never in my wildest of imaginations did I thought that, this many number of commercial applications ever existed for Linux. And I think thats exactly the point. Thats why LinApp is here.