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While the use of Linux continues to sail along at a nice clip, the number of people kicking the tires is shrinking, for all the right reasons. While Linux and complex RTOS products offer such attractive capabilities, they're also correspondingly difficult to learn and use due to these robust arrays of services. Linux includes hundreds of system services, virtual memory, and tens of millions of lines of open-source code. High-end commercial RTOSs also include many features and lots of code, making them (and Linux) a challenge to master.

A number of corporations are moving into the free software arena, and this has resulted in legions of programmers, paid by companies, moving into free software communities, Simon Phipps, chief open source officer at Sun said Friday at FOSS.IN, a conference on free and open-source software in Bangalore, India. This development has thrown up questions about how open-source developers on corporate payrolls can protect their freedom and rights from the demands of their employers, and resist corporate influences that may run counter to the free software community's interests.

At the end of November, LWN posted a pointer to Novell's announcement for its SUSE Linux Enterprise Realtime offering. The resulting comments were surprisingly negative. Readers questioned the need for realtime response in "enterprise" settings. Anybody who is still wondering about the value of that product will be doubly confused now that Red Hat has announced a realtime distribution service of its own. It's not surprising that the two companies most interested in selling Linux-related services into the enterprise market have announced offerings within a week of each other. What is surprising is the amount of silly sniping which has come with these releases.

If you are old enough to remember CB radio (i.e.: mid-30s and up), you pretty much understand IRC-at least in the human sense of the experience. The younger crowd can think of IRC as a suped-up free version of text-messaging in serious steroids.

Distros have changed. In the past, they were made up of a small, tightly knit group collaborators working toward a common goal. With distributions today we now have an informal, large group of collaborators...some of which may not even be aware of the main goal of the distro. That informal collaborator may just want package foo version 2.2 included in his/her distribution so that he/she can use it on their desktop. How does that informal collaborator become empowered? How can the developers reap what that collaborator sows and harness the collective collaboration of thousands of informal contributors? The answer for many software projects is version control. But how can this system benefit package management?

The KDE Education Project is developing high-quality software for the K Desktop Environment. Its primary focus is on schoolchildren aged 3 to 18, and the specialized user interface needs of young users. Several programs were also made to aid teachers in planning lessons, and others that are of interest to university students and anyone else with a desire to learn. Here are some of the KDE-made programs that you may find interesting and useful.

Illegal downloaders of music and movies are at the forefront of technology—and it's time the industries caught up.

The "brains" of the Ares I rocket that will send four astronauts back to the moon sometime in the next 12 years will be built by Boeing, NASA announced today—but the specifications will be open-source and non-proprietary, so that other companies can bid on future contracts. The avionics unit will provide guidance, navigation and control for the launch rocket, which will carry the Orion crew vehicle into Earth orbit.

Adobe Systems today announced it will release the remoting and messaging technologies used in Flex, Flash and other Adobe products as open source projects. Because the technologies are fairly mature, Adobe isn't so much looking for help from the open source community as it is looking to get its technology into more hands. Adobe intends to release the remoting and HTTP-based messaging technologies in its LiveCycle Data Services ES along with the Action Message Format (AMF) protocol specification under the named BlazeDS. They will be made available as public betas under the Lesser General Public License (LGPL) v3 and downloadable from Adobe Labs.

go-mobile, a provider of popular extensions for SugarCRM, has released ZuckerDocs version 2 which integrates the open source KnowledgeTree document management system into SugarCRM. Using ZuckerDocs users can access KnowledgeTree's document management features from within SugarCRM, including version control and full-text document search. Documents within the KnowledgeTree repository can also be associated with SugarCRM objects such as accounts, opportunities and leads.

As the date for the February BRM (Ballot Resolution Meeting) on ISO/IEC JTC1 DIS 29500 (a/k/a Ecma 376, a/k/a Microsoft OOXML) approaches, more and more attention is being paid to how Ecma will propose the disposition of the comments submitted during the general voting period. Yesterday, Ecma issued a press release that offers a bit of a peek behind the curtain.

Palamida, the San Francisco company that helps companies to audit their use of open source software, has released a list of what it calls "the top five most overlooked open source vulnerabilities." To this list, Palamida has added an additional five vulnerabilities exclusively for Linux.com.

GNOME theme engine designer Andrea Cimitan has implemented support for transparent widgets in the Murrine GTK theme engine, bringing Vista-like translucent glass effects to the GNOME desktop. Cimitan used RGBA colormaps to implement the feature and says that, with only 10 or 20 extra lines of code, translucency can easily be added to other theme engines that support RGBA.

Red Hat added a peculiar name to its Exchange software store by picking up OS morphing code from Transitive. Last year, Red Hat launched RHX (Red Hat Exchange) as a centralized shop for customers looking to pick up software that runs on the Red Hat Enterprise Linux server operating system. RHX offers up code such as Alfresco's content management software, the MySQL database and Zimbra/Yahoo!'s messaging products. Red Hat vows to support these applications, resolving issues with RHX partners on behalf of the end customers.

Last wee we learned how to create text frames, and how to control text flow across multiple frames. Today we're going to learn some great shortcut for navigating long documents, some simple tricks for managing photo printing, and how to turn on KWord's text-to-speech engine and make it read to you.

In 2004, health care software vendor McKesson Provider Technologies began focusing on ways to cut IT costs for customers, including hospitals and medical offices. The cure for IT cost bloat: moving many of McKesson's medical software applications to Linux, which could then be used on less expensive commodity hardware instead of expensive mainframes.

This document describes how to set up and configure a Samba Domaincontroller for small workgroups (up to 250 users) on Fedora 8 with the Samba Web Administration Tool. The resulting system provides an easy-to-manage domaincontroller for your Windows network.

Yesterday OpenLogic announced that it would be running a global census to collect and share quantitative data to count how many enterprise installations there are in the world for each open source software package.

Ok, I admit. I thrashed the Digg.com servers for a little while using an open source website mirroring tool, which I wont mention, but it’s easy to find. :) About 30,000 user icons later, I present to you a product created by a couple very short and sweet command line tools. So how can you make your own mosaic? Simple! Download and install metapixel, if you’re running Ubuntu, it’s located in the universe repository.

Your Debian / Ubuntu Linux box security depends upon access to system services (one of many aspects). For example, you may need to provide a web server (Apache service) to serve web pages. However, if you do not need use a service, you should always turn off all unused services to avoid exploits.Under Red hat and Centos Linux you can use chkconfig command (ntsysv command) to configure Sys V style init script links. There is also service command to stop / start / restart services. So if you are addicted to the service command under RHEL / CentOS / Mandriva Linux and have wondered what to do in Debian / Ubuntu, Linux try sysvconfig package.