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The second of four days at the 10th annual Ottawa Linux Symposium got off to an unusual start as a small bird "assisted" Rob Landley in giving the first talk I attended, called "Where Linux kernel documentation hides." The tweeting bird was polite, only flying over the audience a couple of times and mostly paying attention. Landley did a six-month fellowship with the Linux Foundation last year to try to improve the Linux kernel's documentation. He explained that it was meant to be a year, but after six months he had come to some conclusions about how documentation should be done, which he said the Linux Foundation both agreed with and did not plan to pursue, and so he went back to maintaining his other projects.

"The following paper I wrote a few months ago because I got sick and tired of seeing people switching to GNU/Linux only to continue to run their Windows programs without even bothering to look for alternatives. Of course, they all used either WINE or Cedega to achieve this. Since I am active in testing WINE for a few select Windows-only applications, my views on what WINE should be used for differs greatly from others."

If you like free software, Blender, cartoons and animations then Terry Hancock at Freesoftware Magazine has the lowdown on the latest offering: Big Buck Bunny, a product of Blender's Peach Open Movie Project. You can read the background and details of the movie and the project at Freesoftware Magazine

When most people install a free software mail transport agent (MTA) they plumb for Postfix, Exim, qmail or Sendmail. Whilst these are all fine, they can be a little over the top for some smaller systems or systems where all you need is some kind of local MTA functionality. In these cases many people will install their favourite MTA anyway — but there are more lightweight alternatives. Here I look at one of them: Smail. Before I go any further I should clarify — for those who don’t already know — that Smail is not a mail client. It won’t do what Thunderbird, Evolution, Kmail and Mutt do. It delivers email for those programs. It also does not provide POP3 or IMAP services. Like most MTAs it performs a single core task; it routes email from one place to another.

Is OpenID a panacea, a placebo, or something in between? Opposing viewpoints took turns on center stage Wednesday afternoon at OSCON 2008. The session entitled "A Critical View of OpenID" started off as anything but critical, but once the audience got its turn to raise questions, things got more interesting. Moderated by author Jason Levitt, the session featured four speakers explaining the theory, security model, implementation, and importance of the OpenID single sign-on system. Simon Willison gave an overview of the system, Scott Kveton of Vidoop examined its security, Chris Messina of the DiSo project described its potential impact on social networking, and Yahoo!'s Membership Team architect Allen Tom related his company's experience deploying it.

Microsoft sponsored OSCON. Very, very handsomely. Lots of money exchanged hands so that Microsoft can be nearer to its #1 competitor (according to Steve Ballmer and Ray Ozzie).

Some people seem to challenge the idea that most (if not all) free software projects need a benevolent dictator—that is, somebody who has the last say on every decision. They are quick to point out Linus Torvalds’ past “mistakes” (see the speech marks): using BitKeeper to manage the kernel, not allowing “pluggable” schedulers in Linux, etc. As a software developer, I feel that a dictator is absolutely necessary in every free software project. Here is why.

A Finnish Internet community is seeking to apply the collective approach taken by online collaborators like the authors of Wikipedia to start a mass movement toward electric cars. The plan is to encourage the conversion of used gasoline-powered cars to run on electricity, with the first rollout due this year.

Listen is a not so widely known audio player written in Python and using the GTK toolkit, with an interface similar to the one of Rhythmbox, and including features like a music library, podcasts support, lyrics fetching, Wikipedia integration, and Last.fm song submission.

My wife and I have been using (and collecting) computers for years, and we’ve shared this interest very effectively with our children. Now I am the victim of my own success: my household now has four physical computers, one of them dual boot. All are on a single internal Local Area Network (LAN) with five real users plus sundry administrative ones on each. Some of the computers are also running services. I also have two computers sitting in a box, which will probably be added to this mess soon, plus my wife plans to get a laptop. Like it or not, I now manage a network bigger than many small businesses! But I can’t afford to pay a system administrator, and the tedium of “network plumbing” is my least favorite part of computer technology. Surely, there must be a way to automate this mess? Enter Zenoss…

Arch Linux, the simple, fast and stable distribution which was first released in 2002 has not changed much since. The default installation will give nothing more than a text based operating environment with some basic utilities to manage packages, networking etc. All configurations are done by editing the corresponding files directly rather than by a tool.

How does the system startup look like? This question usually does not come into mind of a normal computer user. Oh, he presses the power button, goes to the kitchen to make a coffee and when he comes back, the password can be entered on the screen in the prepared field. Sometimes however, in the minds of a bit more keen computer enthusiasts, the question is born “how does it actually work?”

A coalition of individuals and corporate backers are creating the Open Web Foundation, an attempt to create a home for community-driven specifications following the open-source model similar to the Apache Software Foundation. The group was announced July 24 here at the O'Reilly Open Source Convention.

In December of last year, Google posted a brief announcement of a new experiment in online publishing. At first blush it seemed to represent a challenge to the Wikipedia - but with a few significant differences. Whether it succeeds or fails is more important than you might think.

This guide attempts to provide a Xen based test environment where you can practice setting up a two node cluster (cluster setup itself is not discussed here - I am merely giving you what you need to set it up).

Only 3 months late, the Government has finally released a consultation into potential legislation aimed at curbing illicit filesharing on the net. Several of the legislative options on the table are worrying, and mirror schemes being discussed in various national and international fora. They include streamlining the legal process to require ISPs to provide personal data relating to an IP address, handing responsibility for taking action against illicit filesharers to a third party body, or requiring ISPs to take action against users themselves or to install filtering equipment to block infringing content.

Yahoo! subsidiary Zimbra has released beta 3 of Zimbra Desktop, its new email application designed to make it simpler to work with multiple web mail accounts, even when offline. The program also includes calendaring facilities.

Looking for a good job in IT? Sharpen your knowledge of open source development frameworks, languages, and programming. A just-published study of available IT jobs found that 5 percent to 15 percent of the positions now on the market call for open source software skills. Written by consultant and author Bernard Golden in conjunction with O'Reilly Media, the 50-page report attempts to document the spread of open source in the enterprise. Although the study did not quantify the actual percentage of open source products used in the enterprise, the strong growth in available jobs -- in a period when overall IT job growth may be slowing -- points to a surprising breadth of adoption. Indeed, the recession may be pushing budget-strapped IT execs to examine low-cost alternatives to commercial software.

Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) has emerged as a popular technology for modern voice communications. Many organizations have replaced their analog or proprietary digital telephone systems with VoIP-based solutions. This allows the consolidation of telephone services into an existing IP infrastructure. In addition, using IP to host voice services lets the organization leverage existing expertise–while retaining all of the network’s management advantages. Though not without its disadvantages, VoIP provides a compelling option to those looking for a telephone solution.

A new survey by KACE, a systems management appliance company, suggests that 60 percent of those surveyed have no plans to deploy Microsoft Windows Vista, a 10 percent rise over a similar survey administered by KACE in November 2007. A full 42 percent of these are actively exploring Vista alternatives, with 11 percent having made the leap to alternative platforms like Mac OS X or Linux.