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It could go either way. After a week of using GNOME Shell, the preview of GNOME 3.0, on Fedora 13, that is the closest I can come to a prediction about how GNOME's new desktop will be received when it is officially released in the spring of 2011. On the one hand, GNOME Shell is an attractive and easy to use interface that integrates multiple workspaces better than any desktop that I've seen. On the other hand, it requires some adjustments in the way you work, and, in its present form, feels inflexible -- although part of that inflexibility may be due to features that haven't been implemented yet.

All you need to record a live stream from the web is MPlayer. Use the -dumpstream argument to capture a MMS, ASF or Live WMV stream to a file called stream.dump.

Forget Perl’s claims, Emacs really is the Swiss Army chainsaw of the *NIX world. Join Richard Smedley for the second of a three-part series revealing how you can do most of your day-to-day tasks without leaving Emacs – from contacts and appointments to GTD, there’s an Emacs way to productivity paradise…

Due to the international audience, all presentations will be in English. Thursday 14 October - Interoperability tests (suppliers only) The first day of the event is reserved for Abisource, DiaLOGIKa, Google, IBM, Itaapy, KO GmbH, Microsoft, Novell, Sun/Oracle, OOo... Interoperability testing starts at 09:30, the scenario's will be published on the OpenDoc Society wiki. Friday 15 October - Presentations Please note that the number of participants is limited. Registration is therefore required but free of charge.

[An excellent opportunity to meet LXer's Senior Technology Editor Sander Marechal in real person! - hkwint]

Rhythmbox is, as you all know, the default gnome music player and default music player for Ubuntu as well. Canonical integrated Ubuntu One Music Store with Rhythmbox through a plugin with the release of Ubuntu 10.04 "Lucid Lynx" and the implementation works pretty good. The store has a discreet selection of music if you live in UK or USA, for everyone else it's a very small selection of music, but that's another story.

LinuxCertified Inc, a leading provider of Linux training and services, announced its next Embedded and Real-Time Linux Development class to be held in San Francisco Bay Area from October 20th - 22nd, 2010.

LXer Feature: 29-Sept-2010



A while ago, Graham Morrison wrote: "The trouble with Linux: there's too much choice". Implicitly, the article refers to "more choice than with Windows". The article led to reactions from Carla Schroeder [1], Caitlyn Martin [2], Alastair Otter [3] and Ron Miller [4]. While the articles provided for an interesting discussion, none of them addressed the fundamentals of Linux distributions and choice of desktop software in my opinion. Because from an objective point of view, Windows users face as many choices as Linux users do. But most Windows users are just not aware of all the choices they're making.

OpenVPN, or Open Virtual Private Network, is a tool for creating networking "tunnels" between and among groups of computers that are not on the same local network. This is useful if you have services on a local network and need to access them remotely but don't want these services to be publicly accessible. By integrating with OpenSSL, OpenVPN can encrypt all VPN traffic to provide a secure connection between machines. The OpenLDAP backend of iRedmail allows you to integrate all kinds of applications and to realize centralized account management. This tutorial shows you how to integrate OpenVPN into the iredmail ldap backend on Ubuntu 10.04; passwords will be stored in ldap and you can change passwords through webmail.

Lots of young companies / start-ups are only interested by open source as long as it helps them to create value and be bought by a larger and often closed source proprietary company. They only focus on the economical and legal aspect of open source and somehow disregard other key aspects of open source like : social/community, ethics, political/governance, etc. Lots of recent example (OpenOffice/Oracle, Java/Oracle, MySQL/Oracle, Zimbra/VMWare, ...) can be studied. Most of those open source projects are flaky at best and have to design an emergency plan (think disaster recovery here) in order to ... survive. The long term effects are linked to the brand damage those case produce on the Open Source brand...

Yesterday the Open Office community announced they were forking the project. The results of splitting off an FOSS project means many things to many people. Why should the end user care about the forking of Open Office?

OpenOffice's future was doomed from the day when Oracle acquired SUN Microsystems. The eventuality became even more obvious when they pulled the plug on OpenSolaris. Thankfully, OpenOffice is an open source software and leading contributors of the original project has forked OpenOffice and the new project will be called LibreOffice.

Want to install the new LibreOffice on Ubuntu or a Debian-based distribution? Although the Document Foundation doesn’t yet offer .deb binaries for these distros, you can use the provided .rpm packages to install LibreOffice on a machine running Ubuntu or Debian.

f you want to share files between Ubuntu and Windows computers, the best option is to use Samba file sharing. The installation and configuration can be done by command line or by via GUI, In this post we will see how to install and configure samba in ubuntu 10.10 Maverick Meerkat via GUI.

I've been carrying this book around with me and sampling its wares for a couple of months now, but haven't had the bandwidth to write a review before this. Fear not. The wait is worth it. This is the "twentieth anniversary edition" so I imagine some fanfare went along with the book's release (though I can't swear to it). The question is, why do you want to buy this book? There's a little blurb on the book's back cover that's different than most other blurbs. Most books have quotes of praise from the authors, from readers, and from other people with an investment in the topic, but never (which is to be expected) from the competition. Remember that Prentice Hall publishes this book. Tim O'Reilly (yeah, that Tim O'Reilly) actually touts this book...publicly. It must be something. In fact, it's so good O'Reilly wrote the book's Foreword. Like a number of technical book titles that have gone the distance, UNIX and Linux System Administration Handbook has already established itself as a classic. People will buy this book just because they really liked the 3rd edition. But what's new in the 4th edition? I went looking for the answer.

OpenOffice.org has established itself as the free alternative to Microsoft's Office suite—but not necessarily the better alternative. Now the project heads are breaking off and starting LibreOffice. It's a great chance to remake the project. So, what should they prioritize?

The Fedora Project announced the Beta release of "Fedora 14 "Laughlin," featuring faster JPEG downloads and MeeGo 1.0 for Netbooks. The Fedora 14 Beta also adds improved debugging and IPMI server management, and debuts the "Spice" virtualization desktop framework and "Systemd" management technology for faster start-ups.

The Red Hat sponsored Fedora Linux community distribution is out this week with the first beta of the Fedora 14 release. The new distribution updates key applications and introduces new security and virtualization capabilities as well as support for the latest open source programming languages.

Thanks to Oracle, not only is OpenSolaris now dead along with other open-source projects previously funded by Sun Microsystems now facing hardship, but the OpenOffice.org community has now decided to part ways too. The OpenOffice.org community has decided to launch The Document Foundation as a new, independent organization. The Document Foundation will now be backing "LibreOffice" as the brand rather than OpenOffice.org.

There are no profound revelations here...at least not in this post. It just serves to reinforce something we already know.Chase, Ami and Zeneda are three fairly recent recipients of HeliOS Project computers, ages 12, 13 and 11 respectively. When we go into a home to give a child a computer, one of the first things we do is explain to them that we have installed Linux on their computer, not Windows. This announcement is usually met with even stares or shrugs. They don't care...they are just jacked that they are finally entering into the tech age at home. Most times, any concern expressed is with the parent. Of course it would be.

One thing you may not know about SSH is that it has an escape character: ~. To try it out, hit return (the escape character is only picked up at he start of a line, so you must make sure you are) at the console in an active SSH session, then enter ~. Nothing will show on screen; so far so good. Next, hit Ctrl-Z and the session will be suspended -- handy if you want to check something on your local box without logging all the way out of SSH. This trick will also work from within screen, and even from within mutt. To return to your SSH session, type fg and hit return.