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Concerned about the increasing popularity of Web applications, Marco Barulli of the Clipperz project has written one of the first detailed suggestions about how free and open source software (FOSS) should respond to the trend. Although neither Barulli nor Clipperz is well-known, his ideas are being listened to by such figures as Richard M. Stallman of the Free Software Foundation and Fabrizio Capobianco, the CEO of Funambol and a long-time advocate of FOSS in Web applications.

Installing Ubuntu-related software is simple, but choosing which software to install can still be a challenge. The more than 20,000 packages that Ubuntu offers up can be daunting. This is where sites like Gnomefiles.com can help. Here's how

For three health care centers, the challenge was clear: Find a way to improve internal communications by expanding e-mail accounts to all employees, including doctors, nurses, security staffers and dietary workers, without breaking their IT budgets. To do it, the hospitals needed to look at alternatives to traditional ways of creating and administering e-mail accounts. In the end, all three health centers chose an application that could do the work of Microsoft Corp.'s Exchange e-mail administration package while maintaining calendaring and other group features.

An open source software project, originally propped up by European Commission (EC) funds, has released an alpha version of its quality control program, Alitheia Core. Software Quality Observatory for Open Source Software (SQO-OSS – pronounced squash) is intended to develop tools based on identified metrics to define and check the quality of open source software. European businesses, academics and open source software projects developed the new application.

No piece of software is immune to defects, which is why it's important to use tools that help find and fix bugs. That's the idea with the new Linux 2.6.26 kernel, which is providing the Linux ecosystem with an integrated kernel debugger to help improve the open source operating system. The 2.6.26 kernel continues the relentless release cycle of Linux kernels adding new features and driver support that help expand the operating system's capabilities. "The most surprising change was the addition of KGDB after discussions on kernel debuggers had gone on for a while," Dr. Gerald Pfeifer, director of inbound product management at Novell, told InternetNews.com. "This will prove very useful in handling some hard support situations and nicely complements the KDB kernel debugger that Novell has been shipping for years."

With Canonical having pulled many new packages into Ubuntu 8.10 from Debian unstable and there being the Linux 2.6.26-rc8 kernel, a near-final version of X.Org 7.4 / Mesa 7.1, and GCC 4.3 among them, we've decided to run a few early benchmarks of Intrepid Ibex. In this article we have enclosed 32 benchmark results from the Phoronix Test Suite comparing Ubuntu 8.04.1 LTS to Ubuntu 8.10 Alpha 2.

Take one small town, one small group of dedicated Linux Geeks and what do you get? You get a town that is destined to run Linux on their computers. The first session of Lindependence 2008 set sail for the history books yesterday and there were some surprises for those who put on this event...and even more for some of those who attended.

Ampache is a LAMP application that gives you a Web interface to your music collection, allowing you to search, rate, and play your music over the network. It even offers transcoding support to allow clients to play back lossless-encoded FLAC files from the server and stream them to clients as MP3 audio files. Packages for Ampache are in the standard Ubuntu Hardy repository as well as a 1-Click install for openSUSE 11. No Ampache packages are in the Fedora repositories. For this article I'll build Ampache 3.4.1 from source on a 64-bit Fedora 8 machine.

Blender is the open source, cross platform suite of tools for 3D creation, capable of modeling, rendering, and animating 3D environments. Since Blender is completely free, everyone can download and use it immediately in commercial projects. It's not a shareware with limited tools, or time constraints; you can use it freely. In the past few years, the Blender user base has grown significantly. One of the positive aspects of Blender is its size -- it is only 10 MB and we can even run it directly from a portable drive. Another great aspect of Blender is that we can use various Operating Systems such as Linux, Windows, and Mac OS X, leaving us the choice of which one to use.

Open source companies are finally getting hip to the IT channel, The VAR Guy believes. In fact, companies like Digium, GroundWork Open Source, Openbravo and Untangle are following Red Hat and Novell into the IT channel, on a global basis. Here's a look at their progress.

Here are two powerful tools for your MediaWiki installation. One helps you populate your wiki quickly from data in a spreadsheet. The other creates PDF ebooks, complete with tables of contents and page numbers, with a single click from your wiki. MediaWiki, the open source software behind sites such as Wikipedia.com, is not just a wiki, but a complete content management system for Web sites and intranets. But if you have installed MediaWiki, you are probably familiar with the challenge of importing content from non-MediaWiki sources. A GPL-licensed Perl script called csv2wiki can help you convert or upload massive amounts of content into your wiki.

Following bellow is step by step procedure of SNV93 PV DomU install at SNV93 Dom0. Actually, all work to be done was performed at SolatisPV Serial Console, ending up with Sun Xvnc setup to provide graphical interface to SNV93 PV DomU. ZFS file system has been used as root image, installation source was set to a local path to SNV93 DVD ISO image.

More new signs of Microsoft poisoning Free software using sponsorships, acquisitions, and Mono

OpenOffice.org 3.0, the next major release of the open source office suite, is scheduled to be released in September. Which means that it is pretty much guaranteed to be included in the next release of Ubuntu 8.10, Mandriva 2009 and Fedora 10, all of which are due out in October. Until then it is easy enough to test out the beta releases of OpenOffice 3.0 without removing your existing 2x OpenOffice installation. Installing OpenOffice 3.0 beta also means you can test out Sun’s PDF import extension which is also still in development.

Mozilla Corporation has claimed that the transition to Firefox 3.1 won’t be “a major pain-in-the-ass” and pledged developers will not be hit by “surprises along the way”, after royally hacking off users with the 3.0 launch. The company's platform evangelist Mark Finkle said on his blog that extension developers, who suffered their fair share of headaches attempting to update add-ons when Firefox 3 landed last month, will not experience similar problems with the next version of the open source web browser.

Sometimes it's the little things that can cause you to rethink how you look at a company. For much of this decade Microsoft has been the"evil empire" with Apple, Linux and Google on the side of the Force. With Microsoft doing some positive things, Apple's decision to raise iPhone prices, Google's attack on single parents and Richard Stallman's attack on Bill Gates' philanthropy, these entities' images may be changing.

[Be warned, Rob Enderle wrote this. - Scott]

Sun Microsystems lost the first Rich Internet Application (RIA) war when Macromedia (now part of Adobe) ate its applets for lunch following a schoolyard brawl. Now Sun has a second chance. But, to succeed in such an unforgiving market, Sun needs something special. A mature, powerful platform, a buzzing community, some seriously talented people with an eye for visual design, and some butt-kicking WYSIWYG tools so that non-programmers are invited to the party as well.

Part of my "economic stimulus check" went to a 500GB SATA drive. My original intention was to buy two of them, so I could claim, "over a terabyte of disk space!". Alas, I got a little ahead of myself; my system had only one open hard drive bay. With a slightly bruised ego, I returned the unopened second hard drive and began to ponder how to exploit my super-roomy disk space. I quickly settled on one goal: find the fastest journaling filesystem (FS) for my SLAMD64 dual-core computer, with 2G of memory. My testing focused on three main areas: filesystem, disk I/O scheduler, and CPU speed. Frankly, the final results stunned me.

DjbDNS is a collection of Domain Name System tools. It includes software for all the fundamental DNS operations. This tutorial shows how to set it up on an Ubuntu 8.04 AMD64 server.

Normally all applications should be installed using your distro's package manager in order to set up dependencies correctly (like libraries). Once in a while you may encounter a problem with either a broken package database or synchronization problem due to hardware faults or naughty user behavior (like deletion of an application's files manually). The solution to a broken package problem is to first let the package manager try to fix it. But there are limits to what kind of a mess they can fix and sometimes you have to tread into the risky world of tool abuse to get the job done.