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I finally had a chance to meet with our new librarian today. After being without an actual librarian for so long, it was incredibly cool to talk with someone who knew something more about academic research than how to Google. When I asked her how she felt about spending big chunks of her budget on commercial library software like Follett’s Destiny, vs. potentially more labor-intensive but free open-source solutions, she said, “I’m not afraid of learning new things. Why don’t you set up a server with one of the open source systems and I’ll give it a shot.” Rock on.

Discovering the perfect formula for profiting from an open source project is not easy. There are countless variables that must be considered, many of which determine early on whether or not a project will be successful with the community using it.

"My experiments show that when there is not much free physical memory, swapoff moves pages out of swap at a rate of approximately 5mb/sec," Daniel Drake noted in a recent discussion about swapoff performance. He added, "I've read into the swap code and I have some understanding that this is an expensive operation (and has to be)." Hugh Dickins acknowledged, "Yes, it can be shamefully slow. But we've done nothing about it for years, simply because very few actually suffer from its worst cases. You're the first I've heard complain about it in a long time: perhaps you'll be joined by a chorus, and we can have fun looking at it again."

Mark this Saturday, September 15th, in your diary. It’s Software Freedom Day and it’s coming to you. That's "free" as in "free lunch" but also "free" as in liberty. Software Freedom Day is described by its organising body as a global, grassroots effort to educate the public about the importance of software freedom and the virtues and availability of free and open source software (“FOSS”). Previously, Software Freedom Day garnered 200 teams around the world and is sure to well exceed that figure this time around in 60 different nations.

The Sixth Annual SoCal Linux Expo will be February 8th-10th, 2008. It will again be at the Westin LAX. SCALE has reserved more of the hotel resources for SCALE 6X which will help address some of the seminar crowding issues that arose during S5X (success is a nice problem to have).

Curtis Poe on oreillynet.com hasan important opinion piece in which he argues:"...thatany software with substantial risk to harm your life or liberty must be open source. I’m not saying that it should be free or that manufacturers should not be allowed protections, but the protection of the people must come first. Certainly we could come up with schemes for various systems which might purport to thoroughly test them without opening up the code, but there are too many systems and too many parameters for us to do this safely on a case-by-case basis..." Editor's note: Electronic Medical Record falls firmly in this category.

In what many will see as a long-overdue move, OpenOffice.org announced today that IBM will become an active supporter of, and contributor to, OpenOffice, the leading ODF-compliant competitor to Microsoft Office. The question that many will be asking is this: What took so long?

Take an unwieldy stylesheet and refactor it into smaller and more maintainable pieces of code and build a sample app that uses these features to save time and code with XPath 2.0 and XSLT 2.0 Here are the three key new features of XPath 2.0 and XSLT 2.0 that allows you to create the most elegant solutions to processing XML.

South African programmer Charl van Niekerk has been invited to be part of the Joomla development working team following his successful Google Summer of Code project.

Could this be the badly needed 'fix' that we need in the wireless world with regard to Linux? While it does present a new world of simplicity with getting innovation underway, I do not think this alone is going to help get more wireless vendors on board with the Linux movement anytime soon.

If you have a point-and-click digital camera made by Canon, you may be able to turn on all sorts of features usually reserved for more expensive SLRs. That includes live histograms, depth-of-field calculation, under and overexposure highlighting, and -- best of all -- shooting your pictures in RAW. The secret is CHDK, an enhanced, free software replacement firmware.

Is PC maker Lenovo looking for a Linux distribution to ship with their product range? A blog by a senior Lenovo staffer calling for users to vote for their favourite distribution suggest the company may be doing exactly this.

ZoneMinder is the top Linux video camera security and surveillance solution. In this document I will cover how to get ZoneMinder up and running on Ubuntu 6.06.1 LTS or Dapper Drake with the recent updates included. The surveillance system I am covering here utilizes 4 Dome CCTV cameras hooked up to a single Kodicom kmc-8800 capture card, in addition I also used infra red LEDs so my cameras could see in the dark (Honestly I am abit scared to look). ZoneMinder also does a good job with IP Cameras, unfortunatly they are considerably expensive in my part of the world, hence 4 cameras would blow my budget.

Sidux 2007-03 is a Sid-based Live CD. For those who need a "more-friendly" and more stable Debian sid, then Sidux is for you. I think Sidux would also appeal to those users who prefer a rolling-release type of Linux distro, so that they don't have to reinstall the resident Linux distro whenever the "hot cake" arrives every 4 to 6 months. Other Linux distros taking such approach are Debian Etch, Gentoo Linux, Arch Linux, etc. By the way, MEPIS LLC is going to to implement the same rolling-release approach in its much awaited SimplyMEPIS 7.0 too.

IBM will join the OpenOffice.org community and contribute code and resources, the company announced today. IBM has been a major supporter of the Open Document Format (ODF) which originated at OpenOffice.org, but hadn't yet taken the plunge to help out with the development.

Sliverlight for Linux? Not so fast. You’ll need to pay some ‘Microsoft tax’ first, for protection from Novell — a ‘protection’ that expires within about 4 years. How do we know this? Thanks to our reader, Victor Soliz, we have it right from the horse’s mouth. To paraphrase Victor and quote Miguel de Icaza, he says that in order to legally use Moonlight you will have to “download it from novell.”

The OpenOffice.org community today announced that IBM will be joining the community to collaborate on the development of OpenOffice.org software. IBM will be making initial code contributions that it has been developing as part of its Lotus Notes product, including accessibility enhancements, and will be making ongoing contributions to the feature richness and code quality of OpenOffice.org. Besides working with the community on the free productivity suite's software, IBM will also leverage OpenOffice.org technology in its products.

Welcome to this year's 37th issue of DistroWatch Weekly! Enthusiasm for Linux and open source software is clearly growing; with last week's announcements about Lenovo's preferred Linux distro poll and AMD's opening up its ATI video drivers, things have never looked this exciting on the Linux-supporting hardware front! But some questions remain: do we really want every major PC manufacturer to support Ubuntu only? And will other distributions be able to catch with the increasing dominance of Canonical's operating system? Read more in our editorial. In the news section, openSUSE shows faith in KDE 4.0, Puppy Linux launches a major upgrade, and StartCom announces a new release of its workstation for audio enthusiasts. Finally, if you live in or near Toronto, don't miss the upcoming Linux conference called Ontario Linux Fest. Happy reading!

Regional Linux users received a boost today as open source leader Red Hat announced the opening of a regional support centre for the Middle East. The Red Hat Certified Support Centre is set to open in Dubai on December 1. Red Hat's local partner Opennet will operate the facility, which will be only the fourth partner-operated centre in the EMEA region.

Recently on this blog, I wrote You Have the Right to Read Your Accuser. In this, I argued that any software with substantial risk to harm your life or liberty must be open source. I specifically mentioned some breathalyzer software that people were fighting to see the source code of. Though the Florida legislature and many regional prosecutors obviously feel that the breathalyzer company’s rights were more important the individual rights, the New Jersey Supreme Court ordered that source code to a popular breathalyzer be revealed. The results, if you’ll pardon the pun, are breathtaking.