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Since today is Halloween, I thought that an article discussing some of the scary things in the FOSS world would be a nice touch. Now obviously I don't celebrate Halloween myself, but I know a lot of people who do, so this article is right in keeping with the holiday. So the question boils down to this. What are the scariest things in Open Source? In a sort of tongue in cheek way, the scariest thing to Linux and FOSS users is proprietary software. Or at least that's what you'd think given the response from most of them. I for one am in that camp, as the more I've learned about proprietary software, the less I've found it desirable to use.

Linux has been making inroads into PC sales lately because it runs so well on lightweight netbooks with limited RAM and processing power. Windows 7, though, appears to run well on lightweight hardware as well, which could mean that it's Microsoft's Linux killer. At the recent PDC, where Windows 7 was unveiled, Windows and Windows Live senior vice president Steve Sinofsky claimed that Windows 7 used less than half of the 1 GB of RAM on his Lenovo S10 netbook. Making the new operating system lightweight has clearly been Microsoft's goal. In addition to light RAM use, Windows also strips out a variety of applications, including Windows Mail, among others.

I tested OpenSolaris earlier this year shortly after the developers announced the project's first official release. Although I was impressed with the ease of installation and several other aspects of the user experience, I also pointed out several areas where there was room for improvement. In order to compete with Linux on the desktop, I argued, OpenSolaris has to make its innovative features more accessible to regular end users. One particularly impressive enhancement that helps achieve that goal is the new ZFS snapshot visualization functionality that will be included in the next major release of OpenSolaris.

The Foreign Ministry is migrating all of its 11.000 desktops to GNU/Linux and other Open source applications. According to Schuster, this has drastically reduced maintenance costs in comparison with other ministries. "The Foreign Ministry is running desktops in many far away and some very difficult locations. Yet we invest only one thousand euro per desktop per year. That is far lower than other ministries, that on average invest more than 3000 euro per desktop per year."

DigiKam is an application to manage your digital photos professionally, with a claim of: “Manage your photographs like a professional, with the power of Open Source”. We'll check what's new in the KDE4 version of the program.

Thank God these folks had a place to vent ;) This end-of-the-weekend humor comes in the form of some funny (I'm hoping "intentionally funny" ;) bug reports that get out there into the mainstream. I'm sure the open source community (especially for successful and/or widely-used projects) can't be on top of everything all the time, and this is, in no way, a poke at them (they may, very well, be responsible for it. Just a bit of levity to help pass the time on a Sunday and (maybe, just maybe) make you forget that another work week is just around the corner.

This is WFTL Bytes!, your occasiodaily FOSS and Linux news show for Friday, October 31, 2008, with your host, Marcel Gagné. Today's scary stories include an Intrepid IBEX from Ubuntu, a netbook from HP, Canonical's finances, fast loading PCs courtesy of Linux, a Miro channel guide, and a DRM-free zone over at the BBC.

If there is one operating system that has a special place in my heart, it's QNX. This microkernel operating system served as my main desktop operating system for months and months back in the day, during the short-lived QNX Desktop scene - which died out due to a lack of interest from QNX' parent company, QNX Software Systems. The money is in the embedded and high reliability markets, and that's where QSS - understandably - focused its efforts. QNX was sort-of open sourced in September 2007, and today the company has announced the release of QNX 6.4, the first major release since 6.3 in 2004.

A groundbreaking training tool for the global energy industry which uses virtual worlds to simulate potential disasters is attracting significant interest within days of its launch. The technology has been developed by Second Places, which specializes in creating presences in online virtual worlds for corporate clients.

Ampache is a Web-based Audio file manager. It is implemented with MySQL, and PHP. It allows you to view, edit, and play your audio files via the web. It has support for playlists, artist and album views, album art, random play, playback via Http/On the Fly Transcoding and Downsampling, Vote based playback, Mpd and Icecast, Integrated Flash Player, as well as per user themes and song play tracking. You can also Link multiple Ampache servers togeather using XML-RPC. Ampache supports GETTEXT translations and has a full translation of many languages

I love using some the newer features on the Ubuntu 8.10 Intrepid Ibex desktop. Guest session, wireless detection, improved assisted technologies, create encrypted folders, tabbed file browsing, cruft remover and more.

Without much fanfare, developers of Ubuntu Linux have delivered the latest version of the open source operating system that scores higher than Windows Vista in performance testing, does a better job than Windows in making wireless connectivity easy and, overall, leaves fewer reasons to stick with Windows than any other previous release of Linux.

This post is about an interview with Ales Katona (also known as Almindor) - A contributor to FPC, Lazarus and have few of his own open source projects as well such as Lentilwars and lnet. I have asked Ales to have an interview with me regarding the open source projects and some information about himself, and I hope you all find it interesting as I have.

The pre-release of netward - a simple packet watcher - has been released. Netward monitors for repeated scans that might be break in scans. Not a drop in replacement for a full blown Intrusion Detection System (IDS) netward compliments such systems or acts as a great tool for watching scans on a host. Additionally netward is good for low priority systems (or internal) where the threat level is neglible. Last and not least the true purpose is to expose leveraging libpcap and how it cane be used to save your network.

This week, we're really happy to be sharing some work we've commissioned to deliver BBC content (mainly radio shows from the BBC Audio & Music team) on demand for users of GNU/Linux. In RAD, we've wanted to experiment with non-DRMed content for a while - and managed to assemble some content which was available to access in a number of ways.

This "Mastering Eclipse" series of articles teaches complete newcomers to Eclipse the ins and outs of the Eclipse IDE. By the end of the series, you'll be on par with advanced users. Here in Part 1, you will learn the parts of the Eclipse IDE and how to customize them.

I have to confess, I haven’t paid much attention to Opera Software until recently. The Norwegian company has been an also-ran in the browser market for 13 years. On Friday, I had a chance to sit down with its co-founder and chief executive, Jon Stephenson von Tetzchner. I can’t say that I’m convinced that Opera is now poised to take the Web by storm, but his take on the browser world makes good sense and paints a picture of a future with browsers everywhere.

Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols reports that it's not easy for a Linux company to let go the reins of control over its community Linux distribution. Just ask Red Hat, which started to let go of Fedora and then decided to keep managing it. But, now Novell is loosening its apron strings on its community Linux openSUSE.

The answer is Yes, it does, though with some qualifications. The short answer: it's all in the implementation. The long answer starts with taking a look at Canonical's successes in opening new doors for Linux deployments.

JBoss Operations Network (JON) recently became available as an open source solution through the Jopr project. (That’s pronounced “jopper.”) We interviewed Chris Morgan from Red Hat’s JON group to learn more.