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Occasionally, when using the version control system Git, you may find yourself committing a file you didn't intend to. For example, you might want to commit two files separately, with different log messages (making it easier to roll back unconnected changes separately), but accidentally use the usually helpful shortcut git commit -a and commit both at once.

Build apps for your mobile phone from your browser with Google's creation suite. Google announced the App Inventor beta, a web-based, visual programming suite designed to create custom apps for Android-powered phones.

SystemRescueCD is a free, Linux-based CDROM image for system recovery that boots into a minimal graphical interface and provides a host of useful tools culled from many sources. In addition to the suite of dedicated recovery and repair utilities, the disk can get you to a basic desktop that includes network connectivity and a web browser. This is an important feature as, let's face it, most recovery work requires the odd visit to a search engine.

Windows is still the server platform of choice in India but enterprises, especially small and midsize businesses (SMBs), are increasingly favoring the Linux operating system, according to a new report Monday by Springboard Research. Between April 2009 and May 2010, overall Linux server OS adoption in India increased to 8.1 percent from 7 percent, and continues to rise, Springboard said in a statement. The study was based on data compiled from 408,756 servers in the country. The Windows Server platform, on the other hand, currently has a 91.8 percent share in India's enterprise market, with Windows Server 2003 accounting for 70 percent of adoption.

If you like mplayer, you will love SMPlayer and Gnome-Mplayer. Both SMplayer and Gnome-Mplayer are really good MPlayer front-ends and they do work great. SMplayer has long been my favorite multimedia player in Ubuntu and we have even featured SMplayer among the most wanted multimedia apps for Ubuntu.

Last October I wrote about running Ubuntu 9.10 with older PC hardware, but over this past weekend I restored an even older Phoronix test system to see how it runs with the most recent Ubuntu 10.04 LTS release and the very-latest Ubuntu 10.10 development snapshot in relation to the older Ubuntu 8.04.4 LTS. This antiquated system has an Intel Pentium 4 2.8GHz CPU, 512MB of RAM, an 80GB IDE hard drive, and an ATI Radeon 9200PRO AGP graphics card.

Since late 2009, talk of how Google's Chrome OS is being positioned to "take on" Microsoft Windows has been promoted by individuals who I believe have no idea what they're talking about. By Google's own admission, Chrome OS is being designed for near exclusive use on netbook computers, due to its minimalist nature. And as we know, netbooks make up a small piece of the collective PC market. This clearly leaves out of desktops and laptops, which will remain dominated by the Windows OS (near term, at least).

At first it was F.lux. Then came Redshift (inspired by F.lux) which also got a GTK version but only for switching it on/off. And now, a Redshift fork called RedshiftGUI finally brings a GUI for customizing everything. But what are these? All the applications mentioned above serve only one purpose: to change the color temperature of your screen by the time of day, making it easy for your eyes. This is achieved by entering your location and then Redshift (in the case of this post: RedshiftGUI) takes care of the rest.

The health care sector is set for a technology-driven transformation as the federal government pushes adoption of electronic health records and pursues national health information exchange. Hardly surprising, the Open Source Convention (OSCON) has a health care track. But will health care IT consultants embrace open source? Here's an overview.

In which the FBI moves in on Frank, Carl and Marla move in on the real hacker, and - oh my - could this really be the end?

Using open source software? Then we have something for you. In collaboration with the open source community, we’ve designed some classy stickers you can use to spice up your notebook or netbook and show the world your support for open source software.

Google has unveiled an experimental tool that lets non-developers develop applications for Android phones. This Google Labs project is known as App Inventor for Android, and it's based on platforms built at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, including Scratch, the well-known visual web app builder designed for non-programmers as young as eight years old.

Ubuntu provides an easy install process for Apache. However, it is important that you understand the directory system that is used with Ubuntu and how it set up the Apache web server.

Here are some screenshots of the recent PCLinuxOS 2010.07 release with KDE 4.4.5, the Linux kernel 2.6.33.5, and various up-to-date applications. If you like KDE or are interested in a highly graphical desktop environment, check out PCLinuxOS 2010.07 KDE. PCLinuxOS puts on one of the best displays of KDE and makes a great distro for beginners.

Skype on linux works great but the problem that I faced was that it does not handle the buttons on the bluetooth headsets. My wife uses skype to call into her work related conference calls and was pretty frustrated that she had to keep sitting in front of my laptop (her laptop didn’t allow to install skype) just to switch mute on and off. So, I whipped up this little trick to do so.

Google on Monday revealed a new software tool that lets just about anyone make apps for mobile phones that use its Android software. The beta version of the website for App Inventor for Android went live from Google Labs with a video showing how easy it is to make apps, including a number of ideas for apps people can make themselves.

LXer Feature: 12-July-2010

Quake is a first person shooter game and design inspiration for Guake Terminal Emulator came from consoles in computer games such as Quake which slide down from the top of the screen when a key is pressed, and slide back up when the key is pressed again. Guake is originally inspired from KDE's Yakuake.

When I write these lines, the latest version of Imule is 1.4.6. But ... It relies on packages version (libgcj10, libstdc++6) that are released with the unstable (sid) version of Debian. So either you upgrade Debian to unstable version or you choose a lower version of Imule. I chose the latter: to install an old version of Imule. I tested few of them and Imule 1.3.5 seems to work quite well with Debian Lenny (stable).

The Wine development release 1.2-rc7 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.