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So you broke down and finally set up a Linux machine on your network. And this time it's not a server! You're running one of the more recent distributions (let's say either Ubuntu 10.04 or Fedora 13) with the GNOME desktop. Here's the thing: you need to allow other users, those using Microsoft Windows-based machines, to have access to specific directories on that Linux box. How do you do it?

LXer Feature: 04-Oct-2010

In this week's LXWR OpenOffice.org gets liberated, a nice review of Linux Mint, The GNU Project celebrates its 27th birthday, Jono Bacon talks about how Ubuntu gets built, a case for Linux in schools, Rad Hat's CEO makes it on Mad Money, Microsoft sues Motorola because of Android and a LXer Feature by our own Hans Kwint on the choices Windows and Linux users both have. Enjoy!

This short, informal opinion column is about the GNU LilyPond project: its team, its world, its community. LilyPond is an open-source music engraving program, devoted to producing the highest-quality sheet music possible. This free software brings the aesthetics of traditionally engraved music to computer printouts.

The Wine development release 1.3.4 is now available. The source is available now, Binary packages are in the process of being built, and will appear soon at their respective download locations.

PyWO is inspired by Quicktile and Compiz Grid, Put and Maximuze plugins and it allows you to easily organize windows on the desktop using keyboard shortcuts. It works with Compiz, Metacity, KDE, XFCE, E16, OpenBox and FVWM.

There is a problem with scanner device permissions on Ubuntu. Regular users (UID>999) can access libsane applications like Xsane and Simple Scan without problems. Linux Scanner Server, which is running in Apache as www-data, can't access them without a chmod o+rw on each scanner device. Nobody seems to know how the permissions work so this has to be fixed manually in a terminal. This is not n00b friendly so I created a GUI application that automatically changes the permissions of every scanner device.

Nginx (pronounced "engine x") is a free, open-source, high-performance HTTP server. Nginx is known for its stability, rich feature set, simple configuration, and low resource consumption. This tutorial shows how you can install Nginx on a CentOS 5.5 server with PHP5 support (through FastCGI) and MySQL support.

To put the Maverick Meerkat through its paces, I ran it on my reliable old laptop companion a Lenovo ThinkPad R61 This 2008 notebook is powered by a 2.2GHz Intel Core 2 Duo processor T7500 and has 2GBs of RAM. I also tried it out on one of my usual desktop operating systems testbed PCs: a Dell Inspiron 530S powered by a 2.2-GHz Intel Pentium E2200 dual-core processor with an 800-MHz front-side bus. This box has 4GBs of RAM, a 500GB SATA (Serial ATA) drive, and an Integrated Intel 3100 GMA (Graphics Media Accelerator) chip set.

This is the first article of at least two articles about this project. The next article will follow once we are further into this project. A possible third article may follow at the end of this project.

While GCC 4.5 has been around since this past April, if you are still living with GCC 4.4 for whatever reason (like being hit with a massive performance regression), you may be pleased to know that on this Sunday afternoon there is the GCC 4.4.5 release that's now available. GCC 4.4.5 was delayed a bit, but it's here and offers up bug-fixes but no major new features.

Love it or hate it, we all know Flash, but Microsoft’s equivalent, Silverlight, is a bit less well known. With Silverlight you can stream video and create animations, in fact you can even use it to create Windows sidebar widgets. However, in what may come as a bit of a shock, Microsoft Silverlight doesn’t play nice with Linux. I know, I know, it’s hard to believe, but true. To remedy this, the folks at the Mono project have created Moonlight – an open source implementation of Silverlight. If you find yourself wanting to access a Silverlight-only broadcast or game, but not wanting to install a second operating system for the privilege, we’ve got you covered.

“That as we enjoy great advantages from the inventions of others, we should be glad of an opportunity to serve others by any invention of ours, and this we should do freely and generously.” — Benjamin Franklin

A task manager is software which enables users to compile a list of tasks to be completed. This list is also known as a to-do list or things-to-do.

I just spent several days testing, fixing bugs, and adding features to Linux Scanner Server v1.2 Beta1. LSS is an easy way to share a non-networkable scanner through a web server. While the interface doesn't allow cropping like Xsane or Simple Scan it does support multiple file outputs, printing, and OCR through Tesseract. Development has stalled with the beta and I encountered some bugs when testing it on Ubuntu 10.04 (Lucid Lynx). Instead of complaining about it, I fixed them.

The community of OpenOffice has highly criticated Oracle work, announcing a new name, a new project and a new foundation that will guide the project LibreOffice. The move underlines the tensions between open-source community and Oracle. Openoffice.org (originally supported by Sun Microsystems) has grown to become a real alternative to Microsoft's Office suite. OpenOffice is a real alternative to Microsoft Office, but the acquisition of Sun by Oracle has challenged the open source projects like MySQL and OpenOffice.

The media has been abuzz with OpenOffice being forked into LibreOffice by The Document Foundation in past few days. The Document Foundation, has already released a beta version of Libre Office that can be installed on Ubuntu.Please note that LibreOffice is still a beta version and not meant for production purposes.

Debian's "testing" distribution is where Debian developers prepare the next stable distribution. While this is still its main purpose, many users have adopted this version of Debian because it offers them a good trade-off between stability and freshness. But there are downsides to using the testing distribution, so the "Constantly Usable Testing" (CUT) project aims to reduce or eliminate those downsides.

In America people are always buying things they don't really need. That fifteenth pair of shoes, a third car, a second house... Well you get the idea. I guess it should really be no surprise then that people in America are also over paying for computer hardware and software they do not need, nor will they ever come close to fully utilizing.

Ubuntu 10.10 Maverick Meerkat release candidate is here and it's packed with a slew of new features. The amount of changes happening with Ubuntu lately is quite overwhelming. Here's a quick look through the improvements in the new Ubuntu 10.10 release candidate.

At the Ubuntu Developer Summit later this month in Orlando for the Ubuntu 11.04 "Natty Narwhal" release, it looks like performance testing may finally be discussed at length by Canonical and the Ubuntu developers.