Admit it -- you put off your holiday shopping this year and now it's crunch time and you don't know what to get everyone on your list. Because we feel your pain, we've put together a last-minute shopping guide with ideas for some of your geekiest friends.
Sometimes when I run ls to get a directory listing, I am looking for a specific file, but I want to see the whole context where the file resides. While you can pipe the output of ls to grep, that doesn't show you the whole directory with the matched files highlighted in a different color. I create a small script to do just what I want.
Although China's Linux market as a whole doubled from 2003 to 2006 to $20 million per year, sales of Linux desktop software grew more slowly. In fact, the market share of Linux desktop software in China dropped from 16% to 12% in the same period. But according to CCID Consulting, sales of Linux desktop software increased 25.1% in the third quarter of this year, catching up with the quick growth of China's Linux industry as a whole. Several new developments have added fuel to the growth.
Nemo is the latest effort to provide a new paradigm for file managers. Its approach, at least in its first early development release, is to combine file management with calendar views. Questions remain, however, about whether the concept will scale, and whether it is an improvement on traditional file managers, or simply different.
Paldo Linux is a cross between a source-based and binary distribution. It installs as a binary system to provide a quick and easy desktop. Once it's running, users can either build packages from source as they would with Gentoo, or install binary packages, as is common with Debian, openSUSE, or Mandriva. Paldo's main features are an easy hard drive installer, GNOME desktop environment, and Upkg package management system. Stable version 1.12 was released last month. I found it to be one of the more interesting and promising distros to come along in a long time.
Mandriva is the only Linux maker that offers a version of its distribution packaged with and designed to run off a USB stick. True, you can install virtually any Linux distro onto an external USB device, but Mandriva Flash 2008 offers you a complete solution, including a USB stick with pre-installed version of Mandriva Linux and a CD containing a few useful tools. It's a worthwhile package, though not without room for improvement.
Wide-screen monitors are great for productivity, but they have a dark side, too: they tempt you into keeping dozens of Firefox tabs open at the same time. Before you know it, the page titles in a long row of tabs become indistinguishable. But the ChromaTabs extension has a novel solution to the problem: it renders each tab in a different color -- a unique color for each site that remains the same on every visit.
Lisa Hoover talks about highlights from the past week -- and a little about next week's stories, too, including a "sneak peek" at the Asus EeePC.
Arena Solutions produces and sells a hosted, subscription-based product lifecycle management (PLM) tool for manufacturing companies. Arena founder and CTO Eric Larkin uses open source tools to develop, secure, and maintain the software-as-a-service product. He believes that open source is the path to success for subscription software. "It's a more cost-effective way to build and scale a SAAS business," he says.
Whether you refer to online maps occasionally or on a daily basis, you can add several extensions to your Firefox browser to make Web-based mapping services even more useful.
High-end project management tools and low-end to-do utilities are a dime a dozen these days. But what if you need something less complicated than a full-blown project management application, but more flexible than a simple to-do list? In that case, give jWorkSheet (JWS) a try. This tiny Java-based tool offers basic project and task management features sprinkled with worksheet-like capabilities. The result is a simple yet functional tool for keeping track of your projects and tasks and the time you spend on them. It's especially useful if you bill per hour and a need a simple utility to track your time.
About three years ago we had a look at how Gambas speeds database development. Now that Gambas 2.0 is being prepared for release, it's time to see what the new version can do now. One cool feature is its ability to create a chart.
PacketProtector is an embedded Linux distribution based on OpenWRT, the first popular distribution designed to run on a number of wireless routers commonly found in SOHO settings. Like X-Wrt, which we reviewed earlier this year, PacketProtector extends OpenWrt by offering additional functionality to enhance network security right out of the box.
Thomas Howe is a telecommunications developer and consultant who is passionate about the role of open source software in the telephony industry. He calls open source the "next generation" of telecommunications, and works with large enterprise companies to help them design phone systems that fully integrate with their business flow. "Only open source can do that," Howe says.
With IT budgets getting tighter, managers need to trim costs. Service contracts are expensive for any technology; firewalls are no exception. Netfilter, the project that provides the packet filtering program iptables, is a free firewall alternative. While it lacks the service contract of commercial solutions and a pretty interfaces to make firewall modification easy, it has solid performance, performs effectively at firewalling, and allows for add-on functionality to enhance its reporting and response functions.
What has happened in the year since Sun Microsystems released the source code for Java? While end users might be starting to wonder, those most involved in the building of the free Java community describe a thriving community that, after one year, is still working hard to reinvent itself. Free Java projects that existed prior to Sun's announcement on November 13, 2006, are either integrating into the OpenJDK community or continuing to provide alternatives -- but with greater resources in code. Meanwhile, within Sun, Java engineers are overhauling their processes as they learn to interact with a larger community. Problems exist -- specifically, the governance of OpenJDK and the need to replace encumbranced code -- but, although criticisms can be found online if you search, the mood of those involved in Java development seems optimistic.
Pardus developers describe the Linux distribution as advanced yet easy to install and use. Let's see how well it lives up to the hype.
Palamida, the San Francisco company that helps companies to audit their use of open source software, has released a list of what it calls "the top five most overlooked open source vulnerabilities." To this list, Palamida has added an additional five vulnerabilities exclusively for Linux.com.
I've been using and advocating free software for around six years. When studying and then working as a freelance writer, migrating an office seemed so simple -- draw up a list of comparable programs and, over a reasonable period, move your staff across. But over the past few weeks I've been trying to use Ubuntu Gutsy on my desktop PC in a Windows-based office, and whilst most things work just fine, it's far from the seamless integration I was hoping for.
IBM has released IBM Sharable Code, an online development platform for the Ruby on Rails Web framework, the company said on Wednesday.
Sharable Code and another new tool, Web Highlights, are free services for entry-level developers and users to utilize Web 2.0 resources, IBM said. Sharable Code is a mashup maker leveraging Ruby on Rails. Web Highlights, for highlighting content on the Web, was built with Sharable Code. Both Sharable Code and Web Highlights are available on IBM's alphaWorks site.
Geared toward Web application developers, Sharable Code offers scaffolding, or a skeleton framework, for building situational applications that can be quickly updated or changed, IBM said. These applications also can be downloaded onto a desktop or local database.
Situational applications such as one to manage calendars can be built, aggregating events from sources such as Facebook and RSS feeds. A news item aggregator also could be developed, with the gathered information presented on a single Web page.
With Sharable Code, a domain-specific language (DSL) is used to represent a mashup and its design. This DSL then is converted into a Ruby on Rails application. Sharable Code can be used with Ruby on Rails 1.4.5 or above, according to IBM. Ruby on Rails 2.0 was released last Friday.
Web Highlights, meanwhile, makes it easier to share relevant information. It simplifies the tasks of using Web 2.0 social tools, such as digg, IBM said. A user, for example, could post a news article to the Web Highlights Web page and highlight sections he wants everyone to read.
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Smack in the middle of a strike over digital intellectual property rights, one Hollywood studio is taking a two-footed approach to kicking striking writers in the crotch, as Paramount Pictures will debut Jackass 2.5 online, the first online premiere of a studio feature film, according to a report in today's New York Times.
Reality TV and the Web -- two ongoing sore points for scriptwriters these days, here, rolled up into one.
The famed LCD (least common denominator) franchise -- built in the main on filming the largely unthinkable -- will take its hour-long masochistic filth fest to the Web beginning Dec. 19 via Blockbuster's Movielink.
"There's more vomiting, nudity and defection," an anonymous executive told the Times, proving once again that standards-bearing quality content is fast finding its first home on the Web.
[For the record,the release date for Jackass 2.5, an unscripted, non-WGA film, was set prior to the writer's strike, according to a company representative.]
But the opportunity to watch Johnny Knoxville and Co. explore the boundaries of the body's ability to withstand creatively induced pain is only the first stage of this potential Web phenom rocket.
Not deaf to the clamor for community, MTV will launch jackassworld.com [Not an IDG affiliate. --Ed.], a site devoted to your idiocratic 2.0 needs, including blogs, archived content, and -- you guessed it -- user-generated video.
That's right, you will no longer have to troll through "in-the-nuts" YouTube meta tags to fulfill your at-work cringing fix.
And whereas Netflix continues to pursue Web 2.0-minded approaches to increasing its online DVD rental lead, tapping crowdsourcing to improve its peer-based recommendation engine, Blockbuster is parrying here with an old-guard favorite: exclusive rights to air Jackass 2.5 online for a week, thanks to corporate-to-corporate dealings between it and Paramount.
And for those of you who don't get that Sun Microsystems Project Sun Spot Development Kit sensor and robotics kit off InfoWorld's "Must-have gadgets for the discerning geek" gift list, Jackass 2.5 will be available for download ownage on Dec. 26 via iTunes and Amazon.com, according to the Times.
We may have to wait impatiently for the continuations of Battlestar Galactica and The Office, but in the meantime, at least we know those Hollywood bigwigs have an eye on "[opening] up and [changing] the game about additional content studios can create," as Paramount Pictures Digital Entertainment President Thomas Lesinski told the Times.
And that, of course, is a potential cash cow for them, based on your interest in taking a server blade to the crotch.
What sort of IT-related jackassworld.com contributions do you anticipate seeing?
The growing prominence of Linux in China is resulting in an industry event to take place there in February, co-sponsored by the Linux Foundation and Chinese OSS Promotion Union, the foundation announced Monday.
The Linux Developer Symposium will be held in Beijing February 19-20. The event will address desktop, server and embedded Linux opportunities, the foundation said. Speakers include Andrew Morton, Linux kernel maintainer; Coly Li, Novell file system maintainer and Matt Mackall, embedded expert and kernel developer. Also scheduled to appear is Jim Zemlin, foundation executive director.
The event is intended to educate and promote collaboration among Linux kernel developers and local developers in the region. Attendees will include local developers and engineers from companies such as Google, IBM, Intel, Motorola, Novell, Oracle, Red Hat and Sun Microsystems.
The Chinese government is requiring use of China-produced software in government agencies, the foundation said. National government agencies using Linux include the National Ministry of Science, Ministry of Information Industry, Ministry of Education, Ministry of Statistics and the National Labor Unit, China Post, according to the foundation. The local government in Beijing also uses it on 2,000 Linux desktops, the foundation said.
Additionally, 140,000 Linux PCs are to be used in schools in the Jiangsu province, said the foundation.
BEA Systems on Thursday is announcing BEA SmartConnect 3.0, which connects the BEA AquaLogic Service Bus ESB to ERP and packaged applications.
Service-enablement is key to the product.
SmartConnect 3.0 lets these applications be plugged into the ESB without having to write code. "That last mile, when you get to that ERP or packaged application, normally requires custom integration," said Paul Patrick, BEA vice president and chief architect. "We've now taken that need for you to do custom integration away through these smart connections."
Users can start small SOA-based integration or ERP connectivity and move to an enterprise-wide, multi-domain project, BEA said.
SmartConnect links to ERP packages in native mode; "smart" adapters offered as part of SmartConnect can be plugged in as SOAP-based services. There currently is no support for REST (Representational state Transfer) Web services but BEA is looking into adding that capability to the ESB itself, Patrick said.
The Software Freedom Law Center (SFLC) said Monday it has settled a lawsuit filed against Xterasys pertaining to an alleged violation of the GNU General Public License.
The lawsuit was filed alleging that networking products maker Xterasys used BusyBox Unix utilities offered via the GPL but did not provide source code, as required under the GPL. SFLC filed the lawsuit on behalf of BusyBox developers Erik Andersen and Rob Landley.
Xterasys has agreed to cease all binary distribution of BusyBox until SFLC confirmation that complete corresponding source code has been s published, SFLC said. Once this is done, Xterasys's rights to distribute BusyBox under GPL will be reinstated.
Xterasys also has agreed to appoint an internal open source compliance officer to monitor GPL compliance and notify previous recipients of BusyBox from Xterasys of their rights to the software under the GPL, said SFLC. Xterasys also will pay an undisclosed amount of financial consideration to the plaintiffs, SFLC said.
A representative at Xterasys acknowledged Monday that the lawsuit had been settled. The lawsuit was filed in November.
Full-featured traffic analyzers for Linux systems such as ntop and vnstat are widely available, but sometimes you just want a simple program that gives you fast, basic information about the amount of traffic going in and out of the hosts on your network. Darkstat, a packet sniffer that runs as a background process, fills that role. It gathers statistics about network usage and displays them over HTTP.
If you need to type a diacritical mark such as an acute "e" (é) -- let alone a character not found in a Western European language -- the standard English keyboard layouts for GNU/Linux users are barely ahead of those of typewriters. However, adding support for both extended characters and multiple keyboards has become much easier in the last few years. These days, you can quickly add extended character support from both GNOME and KDE, and, should either desktop fail you for any reason, you can fall back on other methods to improve your input.
How are GNU/Linux users preparing for Linus Torvalds' plan of world domination? By playing free software computer games based on the classic world conquest board game Risk. You can perfect your strategy by playing the games XFrisk, TEG, or Ksirk.
The GNU/Linux desktop lacks a font manager for design work. Ideally, such a font manager should support currently used font formats, including TrueType, Type1, and OpenType, and allow sets of fonts to be activated on the fly, so that system memory is not choked with rarely used fonts. Until now, the closest to this ideal has been Fonty Python, but, when last seen, it fell short because of it supported only TrueType fonts and had a needlessly complicated interface. Now, however, newcomer Fontmatrix has proved itself a contender for the role. In fact, despite some weaknesses in its features, its basic functionality is already dependable.
Standing next to your laptop to control the slides during a presentation is not cool. Nowadays everyone uses a presentation device or their laptop's remote controller, but a presentation device can be expensive, few laptops come with a remote controller, and for those that do, Linux compatibility may be an issue. The Amora project turns your Symbian mobile phone into a Linux presentation device using Bluetooth.
Despite technical difficulties with the phone lines, Linux.com's live podcast with Jeff Waugh of the GNOME Foundation and Roy Schestowitz, cofounder of the Boycott Novell site, attracted a large audience eager to discuss GNOME's involvement with the efforts to make the Microsoft Office Open XML (OOXML) document format an ECMA standard. Hosted by Rod Amis on his Lightning Strikes show at BlogTalkRadio, and with questions from Linux.com's Editor in Chief Robin Miller and me, the discussion revealed that the two sides of the issue are closer than they have appeared in the past.
When I hear "mail merge," I usually think of personalizing letters and printing envelopes. However, many other projects can make use of mail merge. This year I tackled a new Christmas gift project by using mail merge in OpenOffice.org (OOo) to create a tear-off daily calendar, personalized with holidays and family events. Here's how.
Has the television writers' strike left you with hours of spare time and no way to fill it? Well, put down that book and put the running shoes back in the closet, because TED is here to help. TED is the torrent episode downloader, an open source, cross-platform tool that simplifies the tedious process of searching for torrent files.
The Mozilla-based, single-site "Web app" browser Webrunner, which we covered in July, was rebranded Mozilla Prism in October and moved to the Mozilla Labs site. Initially, Prism was only available for Windows, but Mac and Linux builds are now available.
For Navicron, a wireless technology company launched in Oulu, Finland, in 2004, open source development means it can move products to market quicker and cheaper. Navicron is just beginning to reach out to the United States in search of a larger market. The company, which creates hardware and software for cell phones, recently opened an office in Texas so company representatives could be closer to potential vendor partners and venture capital in the States.
Knowledge Tree is an open source document management system (DMS) that helps enterprise users categorize, store, index, and share documents. It offers features like metadata editing, versioning, and WebDAV access, which make it a better choice than a simple file server for sharing documents.
Ruby on Rails 2.0, an upgrade to the Web application framework, was released on Friday, said the developer of the framework, David Heinemeier Hansson.
Version 2.0 features an emphasis on REST (Representational State Transfer) Web services instead of SOAP Web services. Security enhancements also are featured. Ruby on Rails 2.0 is available for download here.
More information can be found here on InfoWorld.com
The Linux Foundation announced this week that Ted Ts'o, maintainer of the Linux kernel file system, is joining the organization as a Fellow and chief platform strategist.
Ts'o will contribute to technical efforts including the Linux Standard Base. The foundation said Ts'o was the first North American kernel developer and has been a pioneer in Linux systems and an original organizer of the Linux Standard Base.
Ts'o has been a senior technical staff member at IBM since 2001, where he worked on an enterprise real-time Linux solution. After two years at the foundation, he will return to IBM.
Ts'o currently serves on the board of USENIX and is the founder and chair of the annual Linux Kernel Developers' Summit. He also has been a project leader for the Kerberos network authentication system used by Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Suse Linux and Windows.
No matter what Linux distribution you are using, chances are you'll find more than one graphical FTP client in its repositories, but if you are looking for a powerful command-line FTP tool, your best bet is lftp. Of course, you can always use the good old ftp command, but lftp takes the task of managing files and directories using the FTP protocol to a new level. To see what I mean, let's use lftp to write a script that creates a local backup copy of a Web site.
The Lightweight X11 Desktop Environment (LXDE) resembles a classic Unix project -- it's partly constructed out of pre-existing programs, its emphasis is on speed, and its configuration requires taking time in a text editor. Even the relatively low quality of fonts on the desktop makes it feel like a vintage program. The result is a desktop environment that is short on innovation, but performs well on low-end machines, and blazingly fast on recent ones.
Recently, Gmail added IMAP support, giving the powerhouse email host the ability to interact better with third-party clients. And Google, being the friendly neighborhood do-gooder that it is, provided instructions on how to use IMAP with a variety of third-party clients. However, it forgot one popular client: KMail, the email portion of the KDE Kontact personal information management suite. Google also neglected to mention that several of its other services, such as Google Calendar and Google Reader, can work well with Kontact. Here's how you can integrate them.
Nokia recently announced its Linux-based N810 tablet, and although the device is not yet widely available, the accompanying software is. The new operating system, designated Internet Tablet OS2008, is available as a free download for owners of the previous N800 model. In that rarest of all outcomes, the new release actually improves the older tablet -- it is faster, improves battery life, and should make it easier for developers to port applications over from desktop Linux.
A Google official stressed Monday that Google is progressing with mashup technology, using it for more professional purposes than what has been the norm.
"I'm kind of anti-mashup, I don’t like the name, I don’t like what it stands for," said Mark Lucovsky, Google technical director of engineering, at the Web Builder 2.0 conference in Las Vegas.
Lucovsky said a lot of people when they hear the term, mashup, think of applications such as budget applications. But demonstrating how the New York Times uses Google technology to add news to its site, Lukovsky said this was a more professional use of mashup technology, even if the Times was indeed mashing multiple sources of data. Google AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML) APIs were used in the Times application.
"So they're mashing up but it's not the kiddy kind of mashup that I think was associated with v1 mashups like housing maps," Lucovsky said.
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Two recently released text-to-speech extensions can transform Firefox into a talking Web browser suitable for users with visual impairments -- and anyone else who can use a speech interface to the Web. Fire Vox is designed to be a full-fledged "screen reader in a browser," usable for daily browsing even for unsighted users. CLiCk, Speak provides point-and-click screen reading, which can be helpful for partially-sighted users or sighted users who have written language difficulties (such as dyslexia).
Linux.com ran an article headlined GNOME Foundation defends OOXML involvement on November 23. Jeff Waugh, the press officer on the GNOME Foundation Board, was prominently mentioned in that article and in several others to which it links. So was Roy Schestowitz, who wrote a post titled Anti-symbiosis: ODF, OOXML, Mono, GNOME, and OpenOffice.org on the Boycott Novell site, where he is a regular contributor. We thought getting them together might be illuminating.
When your computer needs to run programs that are bigger than your available physical memory, most modern operating systems use a technique called swapping, in which chunks of memory are temporarily stored on the hard disk while other data is moved into physical memory space. Here are some techniques that may help you better manage swapping on Linux systems and get the best performance from the Linux swapping subsystem.
A handful of Red Hat engineers are excited about a new tool they've developed called Func, short for Fedora Unified Network Controller. They're pretty sure that once the rest of the community catches on to just how useful Func is, they'll be singing its praises too. Red Hat Community Development Manager Greg DeKoenigsberg says, "This is the kind of idea where everyone kind of nods and says, 'I meant to write that.'"