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Open Source has won. We've moved into Gandhicon 4. Now what? That's the question that occurred to me yesterday, while sitting in the audience of a tech session at Public Media 2008 in Los Angeles — the big annual conference for what most of us still call public broadcasting. I sat there hearing panelists tell story after story about what stations can do with piles of open code, tools and standards. In cases where the nature or provenance of recommended code was in doubt, questions from the audience went, "Is the source code for that available?" or "Is that open code, or just an open service?"

Webcams are everywhere these days: they're standard on a lot of laptops, LCD monitors are starting to incorporate them, and decent standalone USB webcams can be had for less than $40. In this two-part series we'll set up a Webcam on Linux, and then use it to perform a number of amazing and fun tasks.

REDMOND, Wash. — Feb. 21, 2008 — Microsoft Corp. today announced a set of broad-reaching changes to its technology and business practices to increase the openness of its products and drive greater interoperability, opportunity and choice for developers, partners, customers and competitors. Specifically, Microsoft is implementing four new interoperability principles and corresponding actions across its high-volume business products: (1) ensuring open connections; (2) promoting data portability; (3) enhancing support for industry standards; and (4) fostering more open engagement with customers and the industry, including open source communities.

[ In short: Microsoft closedness is backfiring, causing them troubles and they admit it. They are finally going to specify which patents come along with which of their protocols, and going to grant cheap commercial / gratis for non commercial use RAND licenses for those patents. I think this announcement could have a very big impact on Linux & free / open source software, that's why I'm posting this Microsoft news. If you believe it it's up to you; last time I posted a MS press release about their 'openness' it turned out to be all lies (called OOXML), so be aware, you are warned! - hkwint ]

If you need to set up a secure, easily configurable Web server in as short a time as possible, then Abyss Web Server might just be the product for you. In development since 2002, its current version (2.5) runs on Linux, BSD, Windows, and Mac OS X. Its simple installation and setup (no obscure text configuration files) allows you to code your site with PHP, Perl, Python, Ruby, and even ASP.Net, if you're using the Windows version.

The polls are closed and the results are in for the 2007 LinuxQuestions.org Members Choice Awards. Among the winners are Ubuntu, Firefox, MySQL, KDE, Compiz, Nagios and OpenOffice.org. The Members Choice Awards allow members of the Linux community to choose their favorite products in a variety of categories including Server Distribution of the Year, Desktop Distribution of the Year, Office Suite of the Year and Web Browser of the Year. The total number of categories this year was 27.
The complete list of the winners is as follows (percentage of votes received in parentheses):

Desktop Distribution of the Year - Ubuntu (30.83%)
Server Distribution of the Year - Debian (30.30%)
Live Distribution of the Year - KNOPPIX (22.88%)
Database of the Year - MySQL (54.36%)
Office Suite of the Year - OpenOffice.org (89.50%)
Browser of the Year - Firefox (74.03%)
Desktop Environment of the Year - KDE (52.08%)
Window Manager of the Year - Compiz (33.65%)
Messaging App of the Year - Pidgin (53.90%)
Mail Client of the Year - Thunderbird (53.72%)
Virtualization Product of the Year - VirtualBox (41.58%)
Audio Media Player Application of the Year - Amarok (57.37%)
Audio Authoring Application of the Year - Audacity (68.24%)
Video Media Player Application of the Year - mplayer (41.78%)
Video Authoring Application of the Year - mencoder (24.21%)
Multimedia Utility of the Year - K3b (63.34%)
Graphics Application of the Year - GIMP (69.15%)
Network Security Application of the Year - nmap (24.95%)
Host Security Application of the Year - SELinux (30.69%)
Monitoring Application of the Year - Nagios (38.58%)
Windows on Linux App of the Year - Wine (84.76%)
IDE/Web Development Editor of the Year - Eclipse (22.29%)
Shell of the Year - bash (87.33%)
Text Editor of the Year - vi/vim (36.37%)
File Manager of the Year - Konqueror (38.00%)
Open Source Game of the Year - Battle for Wesnoth (21.74%)
Programming Language of the Year - Python (21.78%)

A full list of nominees along with detailed results can be found at LinuxQuestions.org. A record number of votes were cast in what was the seventh annual LinuxQuestions.org Members Choice Awards. Past winners include Red Hat, PostgreSQL and Mozilla.

University computer science departments are rapidly becoming Microsoft-free zones, as Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP (LAMP) combine with Java to become the de-facto standard environment for students of programming. Microsoft knows from history that this will be fatal in the long term, hence its decision to extend free availability of core development tools to students. Most of my generation of computer science students quite literally never touched any IBM kit, even though - back then - it had a bigger share of the IT market than today is enjoyed by Microsoft, Dell and Hewlett-Packard put together.

Opera Software's CEO Jon S. von Tetzchner explains why they will not release the Opera browser as open source, arguing that open standards are more important than open source: "I'm not convinced that it would help us as a company to go open source. We have not seen any way that would allow us to do that and at the same time continue to increase investment."

This guide describes the installation and configuration of a mail system on Centos 5.1 with SELinux enabled for enhanced security. This system will be able to service HTTP, HTTPS, SMTP, TLS, SMTP-AUTH, IMAP, POP3 clients and is virtual enabled allowing more than one domain to be served from the system.

The Viewglob command-line utility lets you see the files available for your shell command completions in a separate window, leaving your regular terminal window uncluttered. Viewglob packages are available for various versions of SUSE as well as Ubuntu Gutsy Gibbon. The main Viewglob download page also lists RPM packages for Fedora and Debian.

Who are the world ’s top Ubuntu Linux partners? A new survey from TheVARguy.com and AllAboutUbuntu.com may provide the answers. Here's how Ubuntu partners, technology consultants, VARs, resellers, integrators and other channel partners can participate in the survey. It's free and it should help customers to more easily find the world's top Ubuntu partners.

Remembering all login IDs and passwords for all the Internet forums and communities that you are part of, is indeed an onerous task. We have all tried to get around this problem by jotting down passwords on pieces of paper or sticking notes to our terminal – all potentially dangerous practices that defeat the very purpose of keeping a digital identity secure. This article shows a solution called OpenID, which is free, non-proprietary, open standards based, extensible, community-driven framework with Open Source libraries and helpful tutorials to get you on board.

Veteran tech entrepreneur Bob Bickel has let out a whisper of his new venture, Ringside Networks, which will aim to make social networking applications work outside the network.

The KDE e.V. welcomes a new Supporting Member, OSN Online Social Network GmbH, a company based in Düsseldorf in Germany. Supporting Members help the community with financial support, their contribution is used for example for sponsoring developer meetings you often read about on the Dot.

Canonical chief executive, Mark Shuttleworth, today announced plans for the October release of Ubuntu Linux. The release, due out in October this year, is to be called Intrepid Ibex and will focus heavily on mobile computing. Ubuntu 8.10, or Intrepid Ibex, will be the ninth releas of Ubuntu since 4.10 released in October 2004.

Metropolitan Bank Group is a large conglomerate in Illinois, comprising 10 banks and $3 billion in assets. As Metropolitan acquired more banking interests, IT Director Tom Johnson needed to find a way to reduce costs and increase efficiency in the face of the company's rapid growth. The solution was a migration from Windows to Linux.

I've been shuttling CDs in and out of my Gateway Solo 1450 laptop, just seeing what works and how well. I've also been fiddling around with the BIOS settings, trying to get the CPU fan under control in both Linux and the various BSDs. A select few Linux kernels do this automatically ... most don't. I can control the fan with a cron job, but I've never, ever been able to do this with any version of BSD. Until today. For some reason, I ran DesktopBSD 1.6 as a live CD, and the fan fell silent, turning on at various intervals, then off.

Canonical chief Mark Shuttleworth has revealed the name of the next Ubuntu release - Meeky Meerkat. Er, well, it's really called Intrepid Ibex and will likely arrive in Oct. as Ubuntu 8.10. It sounds as if Intrepid Ibex will center on laptop features such a tool to switch automatically between Wi-Fi and dial-in services.

Seven years ago, Strathcona Baptist Girls Grammar School, which is situated in a suburb of Melbourne, took a step that made it stand out from other educational institutions. The school decided to adopt Linux on the desktop on a fairly large scale, with about 350 workstations being installed with the free operating system. The Linux era ended in December 2007. Today all the Linux machines are back to running Windows.

Adobe AIR is a cross-operating system runtime for delivering rich Internet applications on the desktop. Developers using Flex, Flash, HTML, JavaScript, and Ajax can easily build applications for the desktop using Adobe AIR. As of today there have only been releases of Adobe AIR for Windows and Mac but Adobe is committed to also delivering a version for Linux. The Adobe AIR team is now in the phase of development where they need a handful of additional testers to begin testing initial builds of AIR on Linux.

Combining multiple photographs taken at different exposures lets you create a single image with good highlight and shadow detail. Tone-mapping applications like Qtpfsgui are the traditional way to do this, but tone-mapping is slow, difficult to use, and can produce strange visual artifacts. A new tool on the scene is easier, faster, and produces nicer results: Enfuse.