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The OSGi Alliance has released version 4.2 of the OSGi (Open Service Gateway initiative) specification. OSGi is a Java component technology which serves as a basis for development environments like Eclipse. The OSGi components, called bundles, export code and services to others. They can be installed and exchanged individually at runtime. As a result, OSGi allows software modules to be dynamically discovered at runtime. The platform requires a Java Virtual Machine (JVM) and provides a JVM-based OSGi framework.

If you're a Vonage user and you'd like to keep tabs on your bill as the month progresses, the script described here can help. The script uses curl to login to your Vonage account and download the web page with your current balance. The balance is then extracted using grep and sed.

But it has some quirks that some days make me want to slap Firefox silly, like when it crashes and there are multiple Firefox windows open, all of them vanish. This is the sort of thing that makes me wonder if Firefox isn't just a little too Windows-happy.

In part one of this series we looked at the basic building blocks needed to put together your very own high-end Linux workstation. This time Paul Ferrill finishes the actual hardware assembly, encounters Windows-required-for-BIOS-update follies, and starts to gaze towards putting some software on this beast.

Now this is good tech news in its purest form: After eight years of development, a new operating system called Haiku has been released in alpha form. It’s an open-source reconstruction of BeOS, the mean, lean, multimedia-savvy OS which I really liked when I reviewed it for PC World, um, eleven years ago. (If I recall correctly, I compared it with Windows 98 and an early version of Red Hat Linux.) It’s certainly a happier development than we’re accustomed to hearing about BeOS, a product which failed to become the next-generation Mac OS back in the 1990s and was then sold to Palm for a measly $11 million, whereupon it pretty much vanished except for the occasional legal aftershock.

A comment in one of my "backup" blogs (i.e. little used and just sitting there ... waiting) alerted me to a new blog, Tropic of Vector, which chronicles one guy's effort to find the right operating system for a Pentium III-era laptop. After trying everything from Xubuntu down to Puppy and Damn Small Linux, he settled on Vector Linux Light, which aims to make the already resource-sparing Vector Linux run even better with slower CPUs and smaller memory footprints.

Web-based Distributed Authoring and Versioning, or WebDAV, WebDAV is a protocol that allows for convenient mounting of a remote server on your desktop for easy file access. Once setup, using it is as simple as any other drag and drop navigation on your desktop. In this how to we will show you how to install webDAV on ubuntu 9.04

Microsoft's Zune HD might not be a serious iPod Touch challenger, but it's a huge leap forward from the original Zunes. That's why including pre-roll ads in front of their free apps makes so little sense.

Building your own corporate phone system using the Asterisk open source telephony suite could result in massive cost savings for your company, and setting up a test box to hone your Asterisk skills costs nothing but time. Paul Rubens gets you started on this sophisticated open source iPBX.

Open Source events tend to be rather spread out across the year. linux.conf.au starts things off in January, followed by Linux Journal staff favorite Penguicon in May, two of the major yearly conferences in July, the Linux Symposium and O'Reilly's OSCON, the new but integral Linux Plumber's Conference in September, and wrapping it all up, the Linux Congress in October. Added to that, just days from now, is the inaugural LinuxCon and the Geek High Holy Day, Software Freedom Day.

On Saturday, Nov. 7, approximately 600 top LAMP developers from around the U.S. will converge on Nashville suburb Franklin, TN, to learn from innovative companies that will share their on-the-ground reports about the latest developments in LAMP offerings and implementation. Note: Nashville, TN is home to some 150+ healthcare companies (many of which can trace their roots back to HCA. This is the FIRST broad open source integration event in this area (there was a Red Hat Summit in recent years). You'll note, as of now, there is no open source healthcare representation. Let's change that!

Trademark law, like copyright and patent law, is often abused and misused, and can have effects and consequences that are inconsistent with the best objectives and principles of free and open source software. But, just as free software licensing in the form of the GPL relies upon the existence of copyright law to make it effective, so the companies that distribute free software rely upon branding and trademark law to give the services they provide a unique identity, and to protect themselves from misuse of their names and brands.

Pioneering portable media company Archos has introduced the Archos 5 Internet Tablet, a handheld device with a touchscreen offering Internet access, video viewing, and music playing. The Tablet is one of the few non-phone devices to run on Google's Android operating system.

Scribus is the leading open source solution for desktop publishing (DTP); it supports professional features like press-ready color separations and PDF output, as well as every media file type under the sun.

Shell Scripts are very useful but not all that fun to look at. They have simple user input and output text. But, there is a way to spice up your scripts and make them a bit more eye catching with a simple program called "Figlet". read more

In this article, we learn about templates with Cacti 0.8. You learn to create or edit a graph template and host template. Also, we learned to how to import and export Cacti templates.

[For those of you who didn't hear of Cacti - like me - it's a "frontend to RRDTool" - hkwint]

There have been proposed quite a few themes for Ubuntu Karmic Koala 9.10 and if you want to install them all in Ubuntu Jaunty for instance, you can just do: sudo apt-get install community-themes But not all the themes will be installed because the community-themes package in Ubuntu Jaunty repositories is currently version 0.14 I believe, while the Karmic version from Launchpad is already 0.17. But you can install the Ubuntu Karmic community-themes package (currently version 0.17) in Jaunty without any issues (in fact, it might work on Gutsy, Intrepid, etc, but I cannot test it). Obviously, if you use Ubuntu Karmic Koala, this will also work for you. Read on!

This article is intended to all programing enthusiasts on all levels who do wish to understand pointers in C++ language. All code presented here is not a compiler specific and all examples will be written in plain ANSI C++. Debate about pointers can stretch for miles, and you would need to go really far to master it all. If you really want to run that far, this article gives you a clear understanding of fundamental concepts about pointers and prepares you for that journey.

This three-part series is your starting point for tuning your system for power efficiency. In Part 1, get up to speed on the components and concepts you need to fine-tune a Linux-based System x server for power efficiency. Learn how to enable the Linux CPUfreq subsystem, get instruction on C and P states, and determine which of the five in-kernel governors you need to boost power efficiency on your system.

Intel will work with Google on the development of its Linux-based Chrome operating system for netbooks, the chipmaker's open-source technology chief has said. Imad Sousou, who is in charge of the Moblin mobile Linux project, told ZDNet Asia's sister site, ZDNet UK on Wednesday that Intel did not view Moblin as a competitor to other versions of Linux. The company will work with Google in the same way it is working with other Linux distributors such as Novell and Canonical, he said.