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Okay, I'm not seriously suggesting Microsoft is paying off Netcraft to produce positive survey results (although this is certainly a standard operating procedure for Microsoft). But something is odd, if not rotten, in the state of Netcraft. I have often cited Netcraft web server surveys as evidence that open source beats closed source. The Netcraft surveys almost always showed Apache leading Microsoft IIS by a wide margin, and showed Apache growing as Microsoft IIS market share was shrinking. Lately, however, Netcraft began to claim that Apache market share has been shrinking rapidly while Microsoft IIS has been gaining the market share lost by Apache.

If you use Google or any other search engine, you already are a user of full text searching: the capability to search for a word or group of words within many texts for the best matches for your query. Sphinx is a full text search engine for database content, which you can integrate with other applications. (You can test it or use it with a command-line tool, but Sphinx is most useful as part of a Web site, not as a standalone utility.)

Sure, it’s probably too early to dance on the grave of DRM, but we can certainly continue pounding nails in its coffin after Wal-Mart drove a stake through its heart this week. And that’s not counting all the garlic, silver bullets, and hemlock showered on DRM recently by Apple, EMI, Amazon, and Universal. It’s still twitching and gasping, and we may have some zombification ahead of us, but the tipping point is nigh. You can smell it.

I have pointed this out time and again. Like it or not, the patent war is already here. Luckily, if it hits full throttle, Google will be a part of it on the side of Linux vendors. Google uses Linux and is ready to battle alongside the rest of Open Invention Network, utilizing a collection of Linux patents against Microsoft if it comes down to it. In short, we have ourselves a virtual cold war of intellectual property (IP) propaganda.

There are a lot of free file managers. There is Nautilus, Konqueror, Dolphin, Thunar and more. All of them offer great functionality. However, they enjoy as a rule very intertwined interdependences, they demand a lot of libraries connected with their graphical environment, and they need X Window System server running. Of course, console zealots and users looking for “light” solutions are not left alone. They have MC!

User-Programmed Service model allows each SourceKibitzer user to participate in programming and development of the service.

Normally Linux systems can only read from Windows NTFS partitions, but not write to them which can be very annoying if you have to work with Linux and Windows systems. This is where ntfs-3g comes into play. ntfs-3g is an open source, freely available NTFS driver for Linux with read and write support. This tutorial shows how to use ntfs-3g on a Fedora 7 desktop to read from and write to Windows NTFS drives and partitions.

This is an open letter to the creators of MainActor. MainConcept, I fully understand your need to better focus your efforts on your encoder business. But correct me if I 'm wrong, is MainActor not the perfect vehicle for moving the MPEG encoder?

LightScribe technology, which allows users to etch labels directly onto CDs and DVDs, finally arrived on GNU/Linux in late 2006. LaCie LightScribe Labeler for Linux (4L) was released in October 2006, with Hewlett-Packard's LightScribe business unit releasing its own Simple Labeler a month later. Both are free downloads with proprietary licenses, but they are currently the only tools available for using LightScribe on GNU/Linux. Both offer basic labeling, but each is limited in its own way.

European Union regulators have charged Rambus Inc. with antitrust abuse, alleging the memory chip designer demanded "unreasonable" royalties for its patents that were fraudulently set as industry standards.

[May not seem like a Linux article, but think of things like OOXML and the Mono Project. The European Union is acting against Rambus for submitting standards for certification without disclosing that the standards could not be met without patented technology. - dinotrac]

Blue GNU has launched a simple poll aimed at understanding whether and how FOSS projects market themselves. The 4-week project is an effort to help the community understand marketing and its impact on the progress of various projects.

YaKuake is a Kuake terminal emulator that acts like a videogame drop-down console. Perfect for accessing a console quickly, read on for a review.

Installing Fedora 5 on Toshiba Satellite A135-S2246 laptop. Includes Atheros WiFi. Interesting stuff is around getting Mobile Broadband Wireless Card via PCMCIA Slot to work including a solution for "NO CARRIER" error for Sprint Pantech PX-500 mobile broadband card.

The feature freeze, upstream version freeze, and the first artwork deadline passed last week for Ubuntu 7.10 Gutsy Gibbon. With these freezes, Ubuntu 7.10 Tribe 5 has been released with the last of the new features until Ubuntu 8.04 LTS. Ubuntu has now adopted system-config-printer (which was originally developed by Red Hat and Fedora) for handling the printing needs that gnome-cups-manager once had controlled, CUPS being upgraded to 1.3, a plug-in finder wizard and extension manager for Firefox in Ubuntu, and the new displayconfig-gtk panel for graphically controlling your X settings. Ubuntu 7.10 is shaping up very nicely and we have one more Tribe release and then the beta release, followed by the final release of Gutsy Gibbon on October 18.

This for the “how the hell have I done this job this long & not known this already?” files. Debian has a file called /etc/rc.local which runs at the end of all the multi-user boot levels, and which you can therefore put stuff in. I’ve had trouble with autofs not starting properly on certain machines (there seems to be a correlation with SCSI or SATA rather than IDE drives, although I do not know why this should be), and putting the line /etc/init.d/autofs restart in /etc/rc.local, whilst arguably a hack, does the trick just fine.

In our first article in this series, we introduced the Conga management interface. In this article we show how Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.1’s Advanced Platform can be configured to automatically provide High Availability for Virtual Machine Guests. Using the Conga management interface, the reader is walked through the process of setting up a shared filesystem guest repository, enabling the failover settings, and demonstrating zero downtime failback.

Opinion: I recently took a look at Microsoft's most active open-source projects and—there's no polite way to say this—they are all junk. OK Microsoft, you want to be taken seriously by open source? I know that's a rhetorical question, I don't believe for one moment that you're ready to really embrace open source. You just want to be able to confuse the market by being able to say that you're "open source friendly." What a crock. Microsoft is open-source friendly in the same way that a butcher is friendly to a cow.

OpenEMR version 2.8.3 and its companion FreeB 0.13 release are now available fromSourceForge. This release has had a heavy focus on billing improvements, and is a major upgrade.

All integrated development environments (IDEs) share similarities because they're all built for the same purpose. But they have differences, too. Some of these can be attributed to application domains, but others result from the IDE design. Getting started with Eclipse can be confusing. New concepts, such as plug-in architecture, workspace-centric project structure, and automatic build can seem counterintuitive at first

Most of the ISO images and other software you grab off the Internet come with a message digest -- a cryptographic hash value that you can use to verify their integrity. While almost all Linux distributions come with utilities to read and generate digests using MD5 and SHA1 hash functions, the md5deep utilities can do that and more. md5deep computes MD5, SHA-1, SHA-256, Tiger, and Whirlpool digests across Linux, Windows, Mac OS X, *BSD, Solaris, and other operating systems. It can recursively traverse directories, computing sums for files under subdirectories as well.