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Python programming is all the rage because it is clean, easy to learn, and powerful. It supports creating both command-line and graphical applications, and has at least four good toolkits for writing graphical applications. Akkana Peck introduces us to Tkinter, and shows us how to create an all-purpose timer (for cooking and other reminders for absent-minded geeks) in one lesson

The recession has sharply accelerated interest in open source technologies among enterprise IT buyers, says an eWEEK story. Pointing to recent remarks made by Alfresco GM Matt Asay, the story says that cost pressures and the growing maturity of open-source software has led to a pronounced shift in recent months. Only two and a half years ago, potential buyers of Alfresco's Linux-ready web content management tools were telling Asay that open source software was "too risky" for them. A week ago, the same buyer changed his mind, telling Asay that in the current economic climate, he could lose his job buying expensive proprietary software, according to the story.

Freescale may be the first semiconductor company to associate itself aggressively with portable Linux devices. The former Motorola semiconductor division is sharply targeting the low-priced Linux-based Netbook market, which is hot in the world market and just starting to get warm in the US. read more

Back in December we looked at the Sapphire Radeon HD 4650 512MB OC graphics card. This mid-range ATI graphics card had performed well under Linux and what separated it from the other Radeon HD 4650 graphics cards on the market was its factory overclock of 650/900MHz. While not factory overclocked beyond the RV730PRO specifications, PowerColor has the PowerColor SCS3 Radeon HD 4650 512MB, which instead offers passive cooling. Is this an ideal candidate for a Linux-based HTPC? In this article we are looking at the PowerColor SCS3 Radeon HD 4650 512MB.

When VoiceCon kicks off in Orlando, The VAR Guy will be looking for information about open source Asterisk information. But it looks like traditional closed source solutions will dominate the conference. Here are seven key trends worth tracking at the event.

By default, Windows applications ran through Wine don't look very well, since that's the look and feel of Windows 98 at best, to mention nothing about XP: So what follows are a few easy steps which will allow to change the way applications ran through Wine look like. If you need guidance for installing Wine, here are two tutorials I recently wrote, for Ubuntu 8.04 here and here, and for Debian Lenny here. These should also work in Ubuntu 8.10 (and the upcoming 9.04 Jaunty Jackalope) and the latest Wine release.

This story is part bug hunt, part open-source love-story. The bug was a particularly gnarly, beautiful little bug and I'm going to try to convey some of that to you. But the other half of the story is really the thing here; The Guardian is serious about engaging with the wider technology community - while we work hard to open out our data to the world at large, we also participate by speaking at conferences, sponsoring events, and sometimes in the simplest way of all; contributing code and fixes for the Open Source software that we use.

The NY Times is reporting on 2 articles to be published in the NEJM. One on a study from the RWJF and the second from the esteemed Mandl-Kohane brain trust out of Harvard. A highlight: "the current health record suppliers as offering pre-Internet era software — costly and wedded to proprietary technology standards that make it difficult for customers to switch vendors and for outside programmers to make upgrades and improvements... encourage the development of an open software platform on which innovators could write electronic health record applications"

New Zealand Prime Minister John Key has announced the government will throw out the controversial Section 92A of the Copyright Amendment (New Technologies) Act and start again. The provision involved a three strikes and you're out plan for alleged copyright infringement. "Section 92a is not going to come into force as originally written. We have now asked the minister of commerce to start work on a replacement section," the prime minister said.

Standards always imply wide public access, an openness of the standard in both setting of the standard as well as access to the standard. It is therefore important to realise that an Open Standard would necessarily have to meet higher standards of openness than those provided by article 41 of document SCP/13/2. It is furthermore important to add that “de facto standards” are typically not standards, but vendor-specific proprietary formats that were, as the secretariat correctly pointed out in the introduction to this discussion, “strong enough to impose themselves on the market.” It is for this imposition on the market that “de facto standards” are commonly used to describe monopolistic situations and corresponding absence of competition, which conflict with the basic purpose and function of standards.

The open-source version of Microsoft's Silverlight is adopting hardware-based decoding for video, a move that will boost multimedia on Linux devices. Moonlight is adding support for Nvidia cards to offload the work of H.264 and VC1 decoding from the software player to the actual hardware. Nvidia features the Video Decode and Presentation API for Unix (VDPAU) so that the video card - not the software player - does the decoding. It's a small but significant development.

Discussing in good faith the likeness and differences between distros, between desktop environments, and between FOSS programs is a vital part of uplifting the entire FOSS process. So why do some inisist on being rigid dogmatards whose only purpose is to argue meaningless points? Larry the Free Software Guy has one word for those who are so inclined: Stop.

JAMA has a blockbuster article on Health IT vendor 'Hold Harmless' contracts. Linux Medical News readers know is just the tip of the proprietary Electronic Medical Record iceburg such as the interoperability scam, the failed EMR business quandry, and the sustainability conundrum among many other things that has yet to be widely discussed. Courageous and forward-thinking past LMN contributor Scot Silverstein has a number of further analyses. Unfortunately the knee-jerk solution will likely be to change the proprietary contracts which naturally the proprietary vendors will want more money for. The real answer is education among purchasers to only use EMR software that is Affero General Public Licensed and a law that states that all Electronic Medical Records purchased with federal funds be Affero General Public Licensed.

This is the second article in a two-part series that looks at a hands-on approach to monitoring a data center using the open source tools Ganglia and Nagios. In Part 2, learn how to install and configure Nagios, the popular open source computer system and network monitoring application software that watches hosts and services, alerting users when things go wrong. The article also shows you how to unite Nagios with Ganglia (from Part 1) and add two other features to Nagios for standard clusters, grids, and clouds to help with monitoring network switches and the resource manager.

Bringing the freemium model to the musty world of textbook publishing, Flat World Knowledge (FWK), a Nyack, NY-based publisher of open-source commercial textbooks, has raised $8 million in its first round of funding. Investors include Greenhill SAVP, High Peaks Venture Partners and Valhalla Partners. Founded in 2007, it received $1.5 million in seed money. The company recruits authors on various subjects, and then makes its books available as free web-hosted textbooks for any student to use.

I know this won't get the pageviews that a good rant will, so I guess you could say the rants subsidize the positive articles. At any rate this is not about me, but about two genuine community-driven Linux projects that aim to help children learn about tech, and to engage them in high tech in a good way, rather than trying to turn them into good little compliant button-pushers: the Helios Project and the Qimo 4 Kids project.

Memory leaks and code exploits are a fact of life for both browser developers and their users — regardless of the specific browser in question. For the developers at Mozilla, both issues have been on their minds this week, as browser bugs of both sorts have been all over the news. Security researchers published code on Wednesday that reportedly would allow an attacker to load unauthorized software on a target's computer simply by having the target view a specially-coded XML file. According to reports, Mozilla developers were blindsided by the bug and immediately raced to find a patch.

Red Hat Inc. posted a lower quarterly profit on Wednesday, but the results surpassed most estimates as sales grew sharply and the software company moved aggressively to rein in costs. In after-hours trading, shares of Red Hat, a provider of open-source software used by businesses, rose more than 4% to $15.72 following the report.

It was a short presentation that focused dryly on "opportunities" for open source in something he called the "service-driven data center." But when he turned to the need for Linux to inter-operate with Windows in this service-driven data center, Novell's chief executive Ron Hovsepian delivered an apology - of sorts - for his company's controversial marriage to Microsoft in 2006. Speaking at the Open Source Business Conference (OSBC), Hovsepian said he could have done a "better job" of communicating about the deal and suggested he got caught up in thinking about customers, instead of the perception and possible fallout from dealing with Microsoft.

With the publication of drive by download attack code this week which impacts Firefox security on all platforms by exploiting an unpatched and critical flaw in the browser, and the successful hacking of the Firefox client (as well as IE8 and Safari) at the CanSecWest PWN2OWN competition, you might be getting a little concerned that the ‘more secure than Internet Explorer’ choice isn’t, perhaps, so secure after all.