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When the Space Shuttle Endeavour launched last week, the astronauts onboard and the technicians on the ground at mission control will have at their disposal new software that could streamline the process of problem reporting and analysis. The software, called the Problem Reporting Analysis and Corrective Action (PRACA) system, was created by the Human-Computer Interaction Group at NASA's Ames Research Center, and is designed to give a wide cross-section of people in the Space Shuttle ecosystem access to a single database package for tracking problems with the Shuttle and its associated infrastructure.

So...let's keep on handing out cd's, holding our Lindependence events, flooding You Tube with Cube videos ad nauseum and anything else we can think of that reaches hundreds of people in a months time. Microsoft is reaching millions a day. And their doing it with your penguin.

Hosted, and generally free, office applications are being touted as a big threat to Microsoft's dominance of the desktop, but a survey of US Internet consumers found that free desktop based office apps like OpenOffice are what Microsoft should fear most. For now at least.

With a default install of Ubuntu Desktop 8.10, there are quite a few mono packages installed as standard. In fact there seem to be quite lot really (I counted 28!), especially considering they are only there to support two fairly minor applications: Tomboy and F-Spot. Although the good news is that Intrepid Ibex comes with one less Mono application than did Hardy; which also included Banshee.

There's a blurb on the back cover of this book; a quote of Greg Kroah-Hartman, who is a well respected contributor to the Linux kernel and the current Linux kernel maintainer for the USB, driver core, debugfs, kref, kobject, and the sysfs kernel subsystems. As you can imagine, his word carries a certain amount of weight in the Linux development community. Regarding this book, he says, "The first edition of this book has always been kept within arm's reach of my desk due to the wonderful explanations of all areas of the Linux userspace API. This second edition greatly overshadows the first one and will replace it." That certainly speaks volumes.

This article focuses on software which emulates home computers, a class of personal computer which reached the market in the late 1970s, and became immensely popular in the following decade, selling many millions of units. Leading home computer companies included Commodore, Sinclair, Atari, Apple, Acorn, Tandy Radio Shack, and Amstrad. Many of the earlier machines (in particular the ZX Spectrum and Commodore 64) often ended up being very game oriented. However, the later home computers had more sophisticated hardware which widened their use in other areas. For example, the Atari ST was used professionally in music studios, in desktop publishing, and had a wide selection of office software available. However to many users it was still regarded as a games machine.

It would be a strange thing indeed if Xubuntu ended up running better on my Gateway Solo 1450 than the flagship Ubuntu distro. While I've had luck with Xubuntu in the past (I think my favorite version was 7.04), regular Ubuntu always seemed to be more polished and stable than Xubuntu or Kubuntu. Until now.

This is a really sad day. Not only the organizers of National Conference On Free Software 2008 taking place at CUSAT seem to be utterly misguided when they decided to let Novell be on-board as their main sponsor, they even took the extreme step of bringing in police to silence the lone voices of the Boycott Novell protestors.

Here is blow by blow account of trouble that brewed up on the second day of National Conference on Free Software 2008 in Cochin university. The activists put up posters against the Novell Corp (the main sponsor of this event) at the Free Software exhibition complex.

A virtual affair is ending a real-life marriage in southwest England. Amy Taylor filed for divorce when she discovered her husband cheating in Second Life -- an online community where players adopt personas calledavatars, mingle with others and teleport themselves into a series of artificial worlds.

This document describes how to install a Postfix mail server that is based on virtual users and domains, i.e. users and domains that are in a MySQL database. Passwords are stored in encrypted form in the database. In addition to that, this tutorial covers the installation of Amavisd, SpamAssassin and ClamAV so that emails will be scanned for spam and viruses. I will also show how to install SquirrelMail as a webmail interface so that users can read and send emails and change their passwords.

There are many a diagnostic program/system/framework/architecture out there to help the systems administrator/programmer/network administrator along with their day to day lives. Ultimately almost all of the good pieces of software that exist allow for easy interaction: that is send back a signal and/or a message. The problem: writing the original diagnostic scripts to begin with. In this text a look at writing shell scripts to check on conditions from many points of view - that is from the perspective of local checks only versus remotely executing checks using secure shell.

I didn’t go for GIMP / Inkscape etc because they were overkill for what I wanted to do. Many a times, I just wanted to touch up a screenshot or make a simple flow image by drawing a few boxes, use a few pointing arrows, and add some text here and there. All this could be done with the previous mentioned programs as well but took a bit more steps than I wanted (stroking the selections / paths for lines, boxes, circles, and even then, no arrows).

We all knew it was only a matter of time until the bit bucket flowed over ;) This is a humorous little fake CERT-like advisory concerning the implementation of /dev/null on all Unix and Linux operating systems and the disastrous effects of ignoring the problem. The bit I've put here was pulled from Ian's Humor Pages, which you might want to check out and find all the other funny stuff on there.

A recent article caught my eye and turned it a nice shade of red. It discussed the hardly new idea that the future of software usage must involve a mixture of free and proprietary products something the writer refers to as “mixed source”. The piece was entitled “Mixed source - the best of both worlds” which may give you a clue as to where I disagree with it. The article was an opinion piece by Steve Harris, senior director for open source products at Novell in issue 78 of Linux User & Developer magazine. Sadly it’s not yet available on-line and I don’t honestly know if it will be. If it is I’ll post a comment with a link here so you can read it for yourself.Freesoftware Magazine

Aside from the fact that the FSF seems to have lost interest in .NET cloning, the key difference between dotgnu and Mono is that the former is intended to bring legacy applications over to GNU/Linux (much like Wine), whereas the latter — Mono — is somehow making its way into GNOME/GTK applications.

The Linux Foundation has published a series of video interviews from the annual Linux Kernel Summit held Sept. 15-16 in Portland, Oregon. In the videos, 16 developers — including Linux creator Linus Torvalds (shown at left) — discuss their development activities. The Kernel Summit is an annual invitation-only meeting during which kernel developers discuss the current state of the Linux kernel and plans for future development.

Last year we hosted a 2007 Linux Graphics Survey and received more than 20,000 submissions of users sharing their video card preferences, driver information, and details about different aspects of X.Org. This year we're hosting the survey again to allow the development community to get a better understanding of the video hardware in use, what open-source and closed-source drivers are being used, and other relevant information.

To create loadable Fedora 10 PV image we would have to manage at Xen 3.3 CentOS 5.2 Dom0 either multibooting with Hardy Dom0 or remote.To install Fedora 10 PV DomU local NFS share will be utilized. Local Apache Server simulating HTTP mirror may be used as well. Installer provides both options. Attempts to perform install on Ubuntu Hardy Dom0 failed. Looks like Hardy has problems with the most recent Fedora’s file system. ISO image mounted via losetup doesn’t work correct versus it happens on CentOS 5.2

Recently, I stopped by a local T-Mobile Latest News about T-Mobile store, the home of the new G1 phone. This is the so-called Google (Nasdaq: GOOG) Latest News about Google phone, the mobile device with Google's Android operating system. Many in the press have anointed the Google phone as a potential "iPhone killer." That is, a device capable of knocking the iPhone off its pedestal as the most desirable and most well-reviewed smartphone on the market. While the iPhone is not yet the leader in sales, it's moving along here as well; latest reports show that the iPhone has surpassed RIM's BlackBerry to reach second place in smartphone rankings.