Although I do most of my professional writing in Bluefish, I usually use OpenOffice.org at least once a day. Consequently, I keep a close eye on the OpenOffice.org Extensions page.

Three For O

October 26th, 2009 by Dave Phillips in

The O is for October, harvest time here in NW Ohio USA. A beat-slicer, a book review, and a milestone release compose this trio of reviews for the Fall season in Linux audio fashion.

Teaching with Tux

October 21st, 2009 by Mike Diehl in

As a homeschooling family, my wife and I are very involved in our children's education and since we're both a couple of nerds, much of our children's education is done on the computer.

I usually lock my screen when I leave my cubicle for a tea-break etc. With all the talk of saving energy these days I've disabled screen-savers on my system. Still, when I'd lock my screen I noticed that the LCD didn't turn off completely. Wanting to go as green as I could I wanted to switch off the LCD as well.

As I've mentioned before I'm an openSUSE user, and as long as they don't make the "U" lower case again, I'll probably stick with it. When it comes to package management, OpenSUSE and SUSE Linux Enterprice (and SuSE before them) are usually associated with YaST (and yes, I'm still waiting for them to upper case the "a"). YaST works well but it's a bit verbose for installing a single package, and of course that's just more fodder for the apt-getters with all their apt-get install this and their apt-get install thats. And you can't argue with them, but there are other options with openSUSE: yum and apt4rpm come to mind, but the preferred solution is zypper.

BitTorrent is one of the most contentious technologies available. At least, that is, to the Old Order, those lovely suit-clad corporate types bent on holding technology forever in the days of the — manual — typewriter. The technology, and the suits' dreams of a world free of it, are on trial in Australia, where Linux made an appearance today — at the defense table.

In the last release of Ubuntu (9.04) the Ctrl+Alt+Backspace key sequence normally used to kill the X server was disabled by default. Apparently many people like to kill their X server this way so a workaround "dontzap" package was used to enable it. With the latest Ubuntu release (9.10, aka Karmic) it's even simpler to enable it.

The rumor mill is alive and well in the Open Source world, as demonstrated by wildly spreading speculation about the possibility of an Open Source Linux client from the popular Skype VOIP service.

See video

Today is Ubuntu Release Day, so it's a perfect time to learn how to use zsync in order to save some bandwidth. It's a nifty tool, and really easy to use.

Download in .ogv format

For those of you who were with us back in 2002, you may remember a wall calendar we produced in celebration of issue 100 of Linux Journal. It was such a fun calendar that for years to come readers would ask me when we were going to print another. I always joked "ask me in another 100 issues".

I've never done a follow up post on a topic before, but I think this is a topic worth further discussion. Yesterday I posted a rather pointed article focused on Intel and what I consider to be a very poor business decision regarding the GMA500 GPU.

Sometimes when you're watching online videos on youtube or other sites, you want to save some of them for later offline playback. You've probably heard of Firefox extensions like DownloadHeloper that can do this, but sometimes you may only have a bare version of Firefox, or perhaps a different browser, one that doesn't have a plugin for doing this. Using the tip below, you can save videos no matter what browser you're using.

It is official! As of the 16th of October 2009, the United States Department of Defense recognizes Open Source software at Commodity, Off the Shelf (COTS) software, eligible for purchase, read implementation, under the purchasing rules of the Department.

Over the past few years, any Linux developer you ask would quickly recommend buying computer hardware with an Intel chipset. When it comes to Linux support, especially in the mobile realm, Intel had the best support hands down. In fact, even my first generation Asus EeePC with the tiny 7” screen supported Compiz acceleration out of the box!

"Is it here to stay?" has to be one of the most common questions enterprise users ask when considering Open Source options for their business needs. It's a legitimate concern with any product, Open Source or not — who wants to deploy a mission-critical service one day and be told it's no longer in development the next? In a time when the corporate side of Open Source is a bit up and down, spreading strategic support around is itself mission critical.

A Bit of Licence

October 26th, 2009 by Glyn Moody

One of the striking aspects of the free software community is its obsession with licences. It's as if within every hacker there's a lawyer struggling to get out. But maybe it's not so surprising; as Larry Lessig reminded us, “code is law”, and the reverse is also true in the sense that the licence adopted has a big impact on how the software is produced. That explains, in part, why recent discussions of Oracle's proposed acquisition of Sun – and hence MySQL – have once more put free software licences under the microscope.

Ubuntu Opening The Doors

October 26th, 2009 by Justin Ryan

Ubuntu fans will already know that there are three more days until the latest version of Ubuntu drops, and we'll be knee-deep in coverage when it does. Shortly after version 9.10, or Karmic Koala, lands on the metaphorical shelves, the next round of development will hit the ground running.

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December 2009, #188

If last month's Infrastrucuture issue was too "big" for you then try on this month's Embedded issue. Find out how to use Player for programming mobile robots, build a humidity controller for your root cellar, find out how to reduce the boot time of your embedded system, and if you're new to embedded systems find out the basics that go into one. You can also read about the Beagle Board, the Mesh Potato and a spate of other interestingly named items. And along with our regular columns don't miss our new monthly column: Economy Size Geek.







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