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Learn how to write and run simple Flapjax programs in several modes, including a compiled form suitable for deployment.

On 23 January of this year, in response to censoring the highly information-packed website Uruknet, I sent an e-mail to Google News urging it to keep its internet search engine open.

The same day, I received a format reply:

Thank you for your note about Google News. This is an automated response to let you know that we appreciate your interest and feedback. Please note that this email address is no longer active. There was no follow-up from Google News.

Slackware Linux is the oldest surviving Linux distribution. Late last year the project marked 13 years of non-stop development with the release of Slackware 11.0. The distribution is best known for its no-frills, minimum customizations approach to applications like KDE. It's also notorious for its reluctance to switch to new version of several popular applications like Apache or GCC. No surprise then, that its package management system has seen little change over the years and is still available in just one flavor -- vanilla.

The Mono Project on Feb. 20 announced that it has developed a Visual Basic compiler that will enable software developers who use Microsoft Visual Basic to run their applications on any platform that supports Mono, such as Linux, without any code modifications.

Free advice is worth every penny as someone once famously said. For years, I have been guilty of replacing the word 'advice' with the word 'software' as every attempt I made to get Linux to work properly ended, if not in tears, at least in immoderate language and the dog fleeing the room in terror to avoid low-flying Mandrake CDs.

How much money can a large enterprise save by migrating to open source from proprietary? In Novell's case, it's millions of dollars. During an address at the recent Linuxworld OpenSolutions Summit here, Debra Anderson CIO of Novell, detailed how Novell has transitioned to open source from proprietary for its own operations. It's an effort that is still ongoing.

Although I concentrate mainly on development these days, in previous lives I was involved in internal control and network management in a City financial institution and I like to keep up to date with networking and network security especially as I believe that networking technology represents a long-neglected opportunity for developers.

For years, the lightweight Xfce has been a popular desktop environment for Linux distributions running on older hardware, thanks to its lower demand on resources as compared to KDE and GNOME; it's an ideal desktop for machines with less than 256MB of memory. Until recently, however, using Xfce was a little laborious, but with its latest release last month, Xfce is a much more usable desktop environment.

Usually, representatives of national bodies can go about their business without too much fear of being molested by multinationals pushing their favorite standards. But when the economic stakes are high enough, standards committee members can become the subject of more attention than they wish, and to feel like citizens of Iowa during a presidential year.

OpenLogic maintains a library of several hundred certified open source projects that it integrates into customers' computer configurations. "The pace of adoption [of open source] will pick up, not slow down," said CEO Steve Grandchamp. "We are already at the end of proprietary code. This is why we are seeing a need for complimentary business."

Steve Ballmer has reissued Microsoft's patent threat against Linux, warning open-source vendors that they must respect his company's intellectual property.

Sony Ericsson has invited rival phone vendors to become shareholders in its UIQ Technology subsidiary. UIQ Technology licenses the UIQ user interface framework and application suite for use with Symbian OS. Sony Ericsson believes additional shareholders will increase UIQ's independence within the market and would also lower the operating cost of UIQ technology.

This article shows how you can convert a physical Windows system (XP, 2003, 2000, NT4 SP4+) into a VMware virtual machine with the free VMware Converter Starter. The resulting virtual machine can be run in the free VMware Player and VMware Server, and also in VMware Workstation and other VMware products. VMware Converter comes in handy if you want to switch to a Linux desktop, but feel the need to run your old Windows desktop from time to time. By converting your Windows desktop into a virtual machine, you can run it under VMware Server/Player, etc. on your Linux desktop.

When something goes wrong in an IT server farm, it can take days for system administrators to find the root cause. Splunk is an enterprise-level search tool that can index logs and IT data, including server events, network events, and application events from one or more servers or network devices. You can then search data from across all your servers from just one place with a single browser- or console-based tool. It's designed for data mining in real-time, allowing system administrators to quickly and easily find the cause of a problem on the network.

This week on Open News Ubuntu says "no for now" to proprietary drivers, Open Source is good for business, and Linus gets his game on.

"...Linux is free. Got that? Free, free, free. I'm talking about the freedom of monetary costs. The last thing linux users need is some crusader banging on their ears..."

Wind River, one of the world's top embedded software providers, has acquired a real-time Linux distribution and patented hard-real-time technology from FSMLabs Inc. The acquisition will help Wind River penetrate new and emerging markets requiring extremely tight timing constraints, including the vast, emerging market for low-cost, single-core feature phones, according to the company.

Alongside the five fully featured high frequency CST MWS solvers, the low frequency and static modules included in CST Studio Suite have been ported to Linux.

VMware virtualization software lets system builders offer more functionality without higher costs. Here's how to get it working.

Just a few days ago, Dell launched a site to solicit feedback from customers regarding what they most want to see coming from newer systems. Some of the various feature requests include stock multi-boot systems, an option to have no additional software installed aside from the OS, OpenOffice installations and – topping the list by a margin of 2 to 1 – pre-installed Linux. Whether it be with Ubuntu, Fedora Core, OpenSUSE or others, there are more than 20,000 requests for Dell to begin offering systems with Linux pre-installed by default. Clearly, demand for such systems are rising.