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The basic set of GNOME panel apps ranges from the practical, such as clocks and system monitors, to the mildly amusing, but apparently too traditional to dispense with, such as Fish. However, in the last few years, an increasing number of GNOME applications are being designed to fit into the panel. Since many of these recent apps are interesting but too minor to rate a full-length review, here's a roundup of some that have caught my attention. Although all of them are in early release, each hints at new functionality and levels of customization that might soon be available on the desktop.

Sometimes I just get it plain old wrong. Yesterday's entry on using Google Apps as a risk management decision, and then to consult your internal legal team. Then as one reader pointed out, the idea was sound, but then I advocated using Drupal and Linux on any old shared environment. So basically, I advocated against Google Apps, and then said to do the same thing that Google Apps do, which is provide a shared collaborative environment that the company does not control by buying some 5 dollar a month hosting company. The reader was dead right, and I was dead wrong. Here's why.

It’s easy to criticize the humble newspaper as being outmoded, out of style and out of business options. What’s far more difficult is to imagine how newspapers can take their goodness — the award-winning investigative reports, the service journalism, the knowledge of the community — and combine that with new technology and the Internet to reach and interact with an enlightened, empowered audience.

This year’s Python Convention, being held this weekend in Dallas Texas, started off with an inspiring presentation by an engineer from the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project (Ivan Krstić) , showing off the hardware features of the new “OLPC XO 1” prototype, as well as some “dangerous ideas” about its software design: a large part of the user space code for the laptops will be implemented in Python, mainly because of the ease of manipulating the source code. The OLPC laptop software will be 100% free software, not just in principle, but in spirit as well—the assumption of open source design is literally built into the hardware.

Computer users wanting to run Vista on Mac OS or Linux will have to buy an expensive version of Vista if they want to legally install it on their systems using virtualization technology.

In this article we will be looking at the impact of CONFIG_NO_HZ/Dynamic Ticks, which will be found in the Linux 2.6.21 kernel. The option has been available as a patch for quite a while, but not until Linux 2.6.21-rc1 had it been merged into the upstream kernel. When enabled, there will only be timer ticks when they are needed. The end-user benefit is cooler-running processors and increased power savings. We have investigated this change with a notebook and desktop computer.

In the current business environment, it is essential that databases, as well as other components of IT infrastructure, remain functional at all times. Downtime of databases is increasingly expensive to companies, and the industry is searching for ways to avoid planned or unplanned downtime. Hosting organizations widely depend on commercial high-availability suites, such as Veritas Cluster Server or Sun Cluster, that provide robust, very customizable, and flexible failover capabilities to a wide range of applications. However, these solutions also carry a significant price tag.

At least one school district in Ohio has decided to take the leap and switch to Linux. One of the reasons is cost, and although they make it sound like Linux requires license fees like that other OS, it is a positive article for Linux. (Bexley is a suburb of Columbus Ohio).

The Possibility Forge and Mandriva successfully completed the testing requirements for openEMR at the 2007 IHE Connectathon in North America. To connect and share information openEMR uses IBM's Open Healthcare Framework (“OHF”). The Possibility Forge and Mandriva, using OHF, represent openEMR, the first open source electronic medical record system to participate, and successfully complete the interoperability standards at the IHE Connectathon

Just when I was beginning to feel upbeat about all the events and innovations going on in China this year, I see this thread from the CentOS List. The thread is not new, nor is the ‘offer’ being made in it. For all my years in China I do remember the days when distro’s were sold for 68 RMB and all our BLUG members celebrated the active distribution of Linux software for the low cost of 68 RMB ($8 USD). Back in the day downloading ISOs was near impossible, especially for most of the local software engineering students. We thought this was a great way to get Linux into the hands of a greater number of local developers.

KateOS is a Polish (and polished!) community-driven distribution. Each new release of the system brings decent innovations and offers an even better GNU/Linux *lightweight multimedia desktop*. On February 12th a new beta version KateOS Live 3.2 was released. I decided to give it a try and share my experience with this modern Linux distribution.

Grundig Mobile has launched a Linux phone based on a single-core, single-chip architecture, long considered to be the "holy grail" of modern handset technology. The U900 runs Linux and an RTOS (real-time operating system) on an NXP ARM9-based SoC (system-on-chip), using VirtualLogix platform virtualization technology.

There's nothing like free software to save some drain on your storage management or data protection budget -- if that free software works, of course. Here are 10 storage utilities you can download and start using to manage your storage-area network (SAN), deploy network-attached storage (NAS), or monitor and assess the privacy of your network.

Mozilla Corp. today released updated versions of the Firefox browser, v1.5.0.10 and v2.0.0.2, for Windows, Mac, and Linux, that close a major security flaw called the "location.hostname vulnerability." The fix stops hackers from being able to tamper with how websites are displayed.

The larger the garment industry has become, the more apparel companies have operated opaque businesses and employed questionable (if not abominable) practices in order to keep up with the goliath scale of manufacturing. At this point, most consumers have at least partial awareness of the perilous conditions of sweatshops, but the majority of clothes still come from behind a veil; and because consumers know how limited our choices are for goods with a transparent backstory, we don't always choose to try to see what's behind that closed source.

Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) provides an easy way to declaratively create an image using XML, and XForms provides an easy way to edit XML. In this article you will put the two together to create an XForms-based XVG editor for creating SVG images such as logos.

In the past, Microsoft has said that its ASP.NET AJAX (Atlas) framework could be used sans Microsoft development tools. Particularly, the client-side library in ASP.NET AJAX can interact with several web-based programming languages as it consists of nothing more than JavaScript. That being said, one industrious Microsoft dev has gone ahead and created a library called "PHP for Microsoft AJAX Library" that allows PHP developers to easily interact with Microsoft's rich client framework.

An engineer from Advanced Micro Devices has reportedly released source-code of BIOS (basic input/output system) for a mainboard by Gigabyte Technology. The move allows die-hard Linux followers to reprogram BIOS according to their needs, for instance, to get better overclocking functionality.

IBM is not ready to guarantee that its computer programs are compatible with Oracle Corp.'s recently launched version of the Linux operating system, an IBM spokesman said on Friday. This means that if IBM software programs turn out to be incompatible with Oracle Enterprise Linux, then it will be up to Oracle -- and not IBM -- to resolve the issue, said IBM spokesman Matthew McMahon.

As part of Mozilla Corporation's ongoing stability and security update process, Firefox 1.5.0.10 and Firefox 2.0.0.2 are now available for Windows, Mac, and Linux for free download from getfirefox.com. Due to the security fixes, we strongly recommend that all Firefox users upgrade to these latest releases.