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With the global crusaders on the march, with every politician spewing factoids about his or her campaign saving the Earth with new environmental measures, with hybrid cars being constructed in droves, with new energy saving light bulbs all the rage, isn't it time to look at the greener alternative in the PC World? I'm talking about the Linux computer, and it's becoming clear that it's the green monster.

Want to find open source tools? Linux distros have long had the tradition that software is bundled into easily-installed packages. Yet, finding packages can be less than intuitively obvious and even then they may not appear to be available for your flavour of choice. Here’s how to get the most out of Linux packages.

sshfs is a file system in userspace (FUSE) and can be used to mount a remote ssh account locally in a folder. This is absolutely great - If I need to work on files from my server I can use a simple command and mount the remote file system over a encrypted connection. None of the programs are aware the files are remote and working on a file in the folder sshfs/ is the same as for local files - at least if the connection is fast enough. The great thing thing about autofs is that the commandline is no longer needed. The mounting of the remote file system is done in the moment I try to access the folder by the autofs daemon.

Mandriva and Turbolinux announce a partnership by creating a lab named: Manbo-Labs. This Lab is the result of an agreement between Mandriva and Turbolinux to share resources and technology to release a common base system on each of the Linux distributions. Mandriva, the leading European editor of Linux distributions, and Turbolinux, a leading Linux client and server distributor in Japan and China, signed the agreement about Manbo-Labs last October and have been working together since then. Both companies decided to wait until first internal delivery to issue this announcement.

Most analysts agree it all depends on what Sun does with MySQL, the leading open-source database management system. So will this move give Sun the software stack its customers need? Will it prove an expensive, badly managed merger? The ultimate answer lies in Sun's hands.

John Palmieri of Red Hat is developing a new D-Bus debugging tool called D-Feet. D-Bus is an interprocess communication protocol for the Linux platform that is used extensively in the GNOME desktop environment and KDE 4. D-Bus allows users to call methods and trap signals from other applications and services that are running on the computer. D-Feet is very useful for Linux desktop application developers who are attempting to write programs that integrate with existing software through D-Bus.

Red Hat, the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, today announced that Corte dei Conti, an Italian government institution that safeguards public finance and guarantees the respect of jurisdictional order in Italy, has selected Red Hat Enterprise Linux for its server farm, consisting mainly of HP BL20 G3 and BL20 G2 blade servers. Corte dei Conti’s Red Hat solution is integrated with multiple different internal systems, including Oracle software largely used in the Court’s IT system.

Last year, an industrious hacker known as Penguinbait provided instructions that described how to install the KDE desktop environment on Nokia Internet Tablet devices. As we noted at the time, the instructions required extensive use of the command-line and were not really geared towards a mainstream audience. Fortunately, the availability of recently released unofficial KDE Maemo port packages vastly simplifies development.

If only laptops could run on qi—the spiritual energy that, in traditional Chinese philosophy, pervades all things. Well, if anyone has come close to making that happen, it’s Mary Lou Jepsen, founding chief technology officer at the Cambridge, MA-based One Laptop Per Child Foundation (OLPC). On New Year’s Day, Jepsen’s long-planned departure from OLPC became official. But she hasn’t gone far: the next gig for Jepsen, former CTO of Intel’s display division, is Pixel Qi, a Hull, MA-based startup she has created to design and build components for low-cost information devices that could be sold to consumers right here in the United States, as well as to people in the developing world.

This document describes how to set up TrueCrypt with GUI on Ubuntu 7.10. TrueCrypt is a free open-source encryption software for desktop usage. This howto is a practical guide without any warranty - it doesn't cover the theoretical backgrounds. There are many ways to set up such a system - this is the way I chose.

Shuttle is doing some very nice boxes, and its CES showings were proof of that. The prototypes shown off at Computex were now working models, and more importantly, they contained some amazing surprises.

Sun Microsystems is to pay $1bn for open source database developer MySQL. MySQL's open source databases are widely used online, but Sun is hoping to increase their use in more traditional IT and enterprise settings. The database is used by many websites - 50,000 copies a day are downloaded.

I think this is a temporary offer only, and I don't have many more details than what is in the product page, but it looks like Acer is making a limited laptop series available now with Ubuntu Linux pre-loaded. What's more interesting is the price: NZ$699, making it a great value when compared to the ASUS Eee PC, which has only a 4 GB flash memory for storage and costs the same.

"I do hate doing -rc's for so long, but I hate releasing when not feeling it's simmered enough even more. And the changes since -rc7 are bigger than the changes between -rc6 and -rc7 were (partly probably because people were still on vacation between -rc6 and -rc7, so we had something of a small trickle come in afterwards)," Linus Torvalds began, explaining why he posted another release candidate rather than the official 2.6.24 kernel. He continued, "that said, the changes here really aren't that big, and the shortlog is fairly boring. So I'm pretty sure this is the last -rc"

Sun Microsystems, Inc. today announced it has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire MySQL AB, an open source icon and developer of one of the world's fastest growing open source databases for approximately $1 billion in total consideration. The acquisition accelerates Sun's position in enterprise IT to now include the $15 billion database market. Today's announcement reaffirms Sun's position as the leading provider of platforms for the Web economy and its role as the largest commercial open source contributor.

This morning, Sun Microsystems announced plans to acquire MySQL AB. After all the industry speculation about MySQL being a “hot 2008 IPO”, this probably takes most of us by surprise — users, community members, customers, partners, and employees. And for all of these stakeholders, it may take some time to digest what this means. Depending on one’s relationship to MySQL, the immediate reaction upon hearing the news may be a mixture of various feelings, including excitement, pride, disbelief and satisfaction, but also anxiety. Being part of the group planning this announcement for the last few weeks, I have had the fortune to contemplate the consequences during several partially sleepless nights (I usually sleep like a log). And over the coming days and weeks, I’ll provide a series of blogs with various viewpoints of the deal.

It was only a short time ago I wrote a piece detailing my initial thoughts on the little Everex boxes running a Google branded OS (Linux) that magically had no actual Google fingerprints anywhere on it at all. Today, I learned that their main distributor, Wal-Mart, has completely sold out of them. I have to admit, I'm speechless.

Free software projects have the irritating habit of choosing names that fail to reflect what the software does. A case in point is KBarcode. Although KBarcode does generate the barcodes you would expect from its name, for most people, it is probably far more useful as a label and business card editor. Anyone looking for these functions could easily overlook it because of the name -- and that would be unfortunate because, even with some awkward interface designs, KBarcode still compares favorably to similar programs.

A lot of us spend a lot of time talking about how we are preaching the value of Linux to our Linux using friends, but how hard are we collectively working to make sure others outside of our comfort zone understand that popular Linux distros are a viable OS alternative? If you are like me, you probably are not doing nearly enough.

[I vehemently disagree, it is because of our perseverance and personal advocacy that the use of FOSS continues to grow by leaps and bounds. - Scott]

Apple's new MacBook Air is in the same market as the Eee PC, but that does not mean the two will compete with each other. In fact, it appears the Air will help the Eee PC sell even more.