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In my last installment of this series I introduced a variety of GUI-based tools that can help you discover more about your system to help identify potentially troublesome components. This week we'll look at some of the command-line utilities that do similar work. In fact, some of these utilities are the engines underneath the more attractive GUI tools, and there may be good reasons to employ the engines directly instead of relying upon their graphic incarnations.

Back in February I wrote about using xli to add a desktop background of your choice to a minimalist window manager. I chose to write about xli for two reasons. First, several window manager developers choose to use xli by default. For example, if you look at a .jwmrc file, the configuration file used by JWM, a lightweight window manager I am rather fond of, you will see that xli is used in the section. The second and perhaps more important reason I chose to write about xli is because it’s what I knew and used for years. One thing about Linux and UNIX: there are always different ways to do things. It turns out that many distros include something a bit newer and perhaps better than xli.

The second edition of the Air Mozilla video webcast will take place on Wednesday 1st August at 3:00pm Pacific Daylight Time (10:00pm UTC/GMT). Hosted by Asa Dotzler, the show will feature Bret Reckard, who works on recruitment for the Mozilla Corporation, JT Batson, who is currently working on the new Firefox support project, and Seth Bindernagel, who coordinates the community giving programme, which shares Mozilla's riches with valuable volunteers. The programme will end with a broadcast of Mitchell Baker's OSCON 2007 presentation.

GeeXBoX, a small media center Linux live CD distribution, can run from any small device, such as a USB disk or a wallet CD-R, and can play both disk-based media like DVDs and online media like Icecast streams. The project has been in development for several years and has just released version 1.1. I fed it every kind of media file I could lay my hands on -- Ogg, MP3, MP4, AVI, DVDs, VCDs, and their ripped versions -- and it played them all without a hiccup. But what makes GeeXBoX a fantastic distribution is its ease of use and malleability.

DataPilots are OpenOffice.org Calc's equivalent of what MS Excel and other spreadsheets call pivot tables. Under any name, they are a tool for extracting and summarizing the information contained in spreadsheet cells in a more convenient form. Using a DataPilot, you can immediately see relationships between different pieces of data that would be difficult -- if not impossible -- to find using formulas, and tedious to extract manually. In effect, a DataPilot gives you something of the power of using a database without actually switching out of a spreadsheet. Small wonder, then, that over half of spreadsheet users are said to use datapilots or pivot tables.

Some of the concerns expressed about the Completely Fair Scheduler were reports that it might not handle 3D games as well as the SD scheduler. In a recent thread, Ingo Molnar noted, "people are regularly testing 3D smoothness, and they find CFS good enough and that matches my experience as well (as limited as it may be). In general my impression is that CFS and SD are roughly on par when it comes to 3D smoothness."

Linus Torvalds, creator and maintainer of the Linux operating system kernel, has reacted angrily to suggestions that the kernel's development process is skewed in a way that prevents improvements on the desktop. Torvalds was responding to criticism by programmer Con Kolivas, who had developed a patch designed to improve the performance of specific Linux desktop features.

A look at GCC's recent migration to GPLv3, as well as other large migrations and the press reaction.

Enea, a provider of network software and services, today announced that its LINX for Linux product is now freely available as an Open Source offering complete with source code, documentation, test programs, a startup guide, and program build system guide. LINX(TM) for Linux delivers transparent, reliable, high- performance interprocess communication services for complex distributed systems that employ multiple operating systems.

Nokia researcher Jamey Hicks recently proposed a Open Source Hardware License (OSHL) for approval by the Open Source Initiative (OSI). Is there a need for a hardware-specific license? If so, what makes hardware different from software?

In our last article, we solved a problem by adding additional configuration to an existing environment. And while fairly trivial, it wasn’t something available in any official documentation. This month, we’ll take that same approach to answering a very common question in regard to Provisioning with the Red Hat® Network® (RHN) Satellite server.

"1.10 has been branched," DragonFlyBSD creator Matt Dillon announced, noting that the official release is expected soon, "no release date has been set yet but this coming weekend is looking real good now." Among the new features of DragonFly 1.10 are improved virtual kernel support, a new disk management infrastructure, improvements to wireless networking, and support for the new syslink protocol.

When we first started talking about LAMP, it stood for Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP, Perl, Python... and other M and P projects, such as mod_perl, mod_python, PostgreSQL and so on. The letters were arranged horizontally, but many IT builders began talking about them vertically: as a "stack": Linux on the bottom, and a pile of other stuff on top.

The sheer ignorance regarding casual Linux users astounds me to no end. While I'm not interested in pointing fingers, there is a lot of misinformation about the Linux community, and we will help to dispel some of these myths, once and for all.

[Wait a second, FUD master Matt is going to dispel Linux myths? I thought he only tried to create them. - Scott]

Monitoring Ubuntu Services Using Monit

Straightaway, I would like to apologize if the title of this piece feels a little strange, but I'm going to be exploring what most of us would do if all of the different flavors of Linux were to suddenly "vanish" into thin air. Realizing it would never happen, I beg you to bear with me here, as I think you will find this interesting.

[Talk about not being able to think of anything to write about.."I've got an idea, what if Linux didn't exist?".. - Scott]

VHCS2 ISP control Panel Setup Guide in Debian Etch

South East Asia's premier open source software event, the Thailand Open Source Software Festival - or Tossfest 2007 - splashes down in Bangkok this week.

Like many of you, I feel confused in regards to the advantage of using Google Desktop on my Linux PC. After all, if I needed such a thing, Beagle has been readily available for a long time now. And of course, there are also other alternatives to Beagle as well should the need to index your desktop be something that you are interested in.

Sourceforge has announced the winners of their Community Choice Awards during the OSCON conference. The awards recognise open source projects with the most supportive community following and the most respect from the community.