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The Linux-based Palm Pre is a sleek smartphone full of features-- but is it feature-ful enough? Gerry Blackwell gives a detailed report on this new entry in the smartphone marketplace.

This is a "newbie" mistake, but these little details do tend to get in the way, which is why I'm posting my wee Python tutorial. If you know Python or programming, even reasonably well, this will probably seem way too simple to you. Just giving you a "heads up" so you don't waste your time. I encountered a lesson that teaches storing conditionals using booleans. The code was presented like this:..

Four months have gone by since Google announced their new, innovative communication solution, Wave. Last week was the beginning of its test phase.

My friend Ellie Tomlinson and I introduced ten XO laptops at the first Lubuto Library in Lusaka, Zambia in February, 2009, during our school's two-week winter internship. We went to Zambia with very little of an idea of what we were going to do when we got there.

Dirk Hohndel has been a member of our community since the earliest days. In recent years, he has helped direct Intel's (very friendly) strategy toward Linux - a job which has required, one assumes, a great deal of educational work inside the company. Dirk also spends a fair amount of time outside of Intel, advising the community on how it can work better with vendors, with customers, and with itself. His thoughtful talks on the topic are usually well worth hearing. In two separate talks on the first day of the first LinuxCon, Dirk had some fairly general thoughts on how the next steps toward world domination can be taken.

The FreeBSD developers have released new updates to their operating system to close three vulnerabilities. Users with restricted privileges can reportedly exploit all three holes to elevate their privileges. One of the vulnerabilities is caused by a design flaw recently also discovered and fixed in the kernel. It allows programming flaws to cause a NULL pointer dereference. A function pointer will in this case point to the (virtual) address 0, which is allocated to userland. This enables users to execute code at kernel privilege level.

Last week Plymouth had picked up a DRM renderer plug-in, but now this week it has picked up an X11 renderer plug-in. This plug-in makes it possible to run Plymouth and its graphical plug-ins from within an X Server...

NetGear announced a Wireless-N (802.11n) router supported by its open source Linux development platform and "MyOpenRouter.com" community. The NetGear RangeMax Wireless-N Gigabit Router with USB (WNR3500L) offers an 802.11n WiFi access point, boasting up to 300Mbps bandwidth, five gigabit Ethernet ports and USB storage access, says the company.

The U.S. is known for its patent friendliness. But a Supreme Court decision in 2008 overturned a patent application by Bernard L. Bilski and Rand A. Warsaw for a risk mitigation process. Now Red Hat is using the so-called Bilski case in support of software non-patentability.

[...] Despite this claim ease of use is something Slackware is just not known for. Even with improvements in Slackware 13.0 I still don't think there is anything easy about this distro for anyone other than advanced, experienced users who are extremely comfortable on the command line and with editing configuration files by hand. [...] Slackware also has a well-earned reputation for reliability and stability. Those are the areas where the distribution has always excelled and that tradition continues with Slackware 13.

Linux Journal's Mitch Frazier show you how to use bookmarks in Konsole, KDE's terminal emulator.

When is an open source license not an open source license? The recent rush to "Open Core Licensing" as defined by Andrew Lampitt, the business development director of JasperSoft, raises many questions as to the meaning and purpose of free and open source software. The terms "open source" and "free software" are often confused by companies who want to gain the benefits of a wider developer community. More often than not this has arisen from a misunderstanding of the full implications of "open source" and "free software", and how free software licensing works to the advantage of developers and the companies that are formed to market the software.

Frankly, I'd prefer to work with a book or in a classroom setting. I can read faster than a person can speak in a video. OK, that contradicts my preference for the classroom, but in a class context, I can also directly interact with the instructor and the students. I can't exactly do that using a video. I know I keep telling everyone that I'm a visual learner, so you'd think that a DVD would be just about perfect, but I've always found them something of a problem. This isn't to say that video learning is bad in general or that this product is bad in particular. I'm just expressing my personal opinion before I move on.

Enough people loved Firefox's history and bookmark searching location bar that the name "AwesomeBar" caught on. While this tool is great for productivity, its omniscience is a serious privacy concern. Don't let your boss see that you've been looking for a new career on job search Web sites. You can clear your history, and completely exclude bookmarks from displaying in the bar, but why waste such a useful feature just to hide a few URLs? NotAwesome is a simple, free add-on that allows you to selectively hide bookmarks from the incriminating gaze of the AwesomeBar.

Back in March the open-source ATI Linux driver had gained support for an unreleased IGP known as the RS880, months before it would end up on the market and become known as the AMD 785G Chipset. The open-source support is there for this integrated graphics processor and motherboard chipset, along with the proprietary support through the Catalyst Linux driver, and there is even chipset documentation to help the CoreBoot developers. With the 785G being the latest (and likely last) ASIC in the AMD 700 series, we decided to look at the ECS A785GM-M motherboard. The A785GM-M from Elitegroup Computer Systems is affordable and offers a nice set of features for being a micro ATX motherboard.

For those that are not aware, two radio ads introducing people to Linux and our services/non profit recently ran on KLBJ AM radio in Austin Texas. The results were surprising in part...some of them confirmed wide-held suspicions about computer users in general. Some of them fostered thoughts of running knitting needles through my eyes... often.

I've upgraded ever since Gutsy: to Hardy, Intrepid and Jaunty. But this time, I did a fresh install of Karmic Koala, given the new Grub, ext4 and so on. Here are some things (bugs I mean - with potential fixes) I've experienced running Ubuntu Karmic Koala as my main OS (for about 2 days now):

This document describes how to install a PureFTPd server that uses virtual users from a MySQL database instead of real system users. This is much more performant and allows to have thousands of ftp users on a single machine. In addition to that I will show the use of quota and upload/download bandwidth limits with this setup. Passwords will be stored encrypted as MD5 strings in the database.

Though the open source FreeBSD operating system has changed in many aspects over the last 16 years of its life, one item that has remained relatively static is its underlying network routing architecture. No more: It's getting an overhaul with the upcoming FreeBSD 8.0 release.

Mozilla periodically refreshes its wiki page with what might called public brainstorming of future ideas. In its latest refresh, the popular browser's developers have posted a number of ideas that they're considering for Firefox 3.7 and Firefox 4.0 (above). In a nutshell: simplify, simplify, simplify.