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A new version of the quick-firing Linux keyboard launcher GNOME Do landed last week, bringing with it a "theme" that acts as a whole new desktop interface. Let's check out how it works. If you're just getting started with GNOME Do, head to the release page and check out how to download the latest version for your distribution. Using the Docky "theme" requires a 3D compositing manager like Compiz Fusion, or GNOME's built-in 3D effects.

There are numerous little things that a new user should learn and remember when it comes to Linux. Now don't let these scare you, but rather, remember them to ensure that you have a proper user experience. These will also save you from a lot of trouble as you learn Linux.

Let's take a look at Sun Microsystems, the once mighty Unix vendor and maker of servers that powered the Internet, circa 1982. And Red Hat, a company that's been purveying Linux software since 1995. Sun sells more than $13 billion of goods and services per year, while Red Hat sells a little over $600 million. So which is worth more?

LXer Feature: 04-Feb-2009

I interview Jesse Trucks a Director of LOPSA, who along with Chris St. Pierre will be teaching several classes guaranteed to make you a better System Admin at their SCALE University for the second year in a row at the Southern California Linux Expo (SCALE) 20th to 22nd of February in Los Angeles.

As promised in my last article, here is the JavaScript solution to correct mismatched footer column heights [1.]. One change, you will not find the strenuous complaints pertaining the basic inscrutability of all things JavaScript. I must admit my distaste for this scripting language has not lessened, just that my complaints would be less well grounded were I to sound off too much. Hence, let's accentuate the positive. This time my treatment of column height differences is more generalized. Moreover, I even suggest a more abstract approach at the end, albeit, one I neither tested nor verified. Nonetheless, I am confident that even the latter code could be made to work.

VMware is offering a free (LGPL-licensed) client for use with its VDI (virtual desktop infrastructure) thin client technology. The VMware View Open Client lets users access personalized, data center-hosted desktops from "almost any" device, VMWare claims. VMware will continue to offer its commercially licensed View Client stack for Linux and Windows. The commercial stack adds features like USB redirection, multiple desktop sessions, and multimedia redirection.

Everyblock, which sorts police reports, public records, and news by address, is going open source and looking for a business model. The site is headlined by Adrian Holovaty (right), best-known for Django and the Chicago Crime Google Maps mashup. It was funded in 2007 by a $1.1 million Knight Foundation grant.

The recent out-of-band emergency patch for Internet Explorer has many pundits recommending any browser but IE as the best security defense. Although there is some safety in using less frequently attacked software, a better question is which is the safest choice among the most popular browsers? What are the most important security features to look for in a browser, and what are the weaknesses to beware?

If you were to break into my network, getting to the contents of the right computer would be easy. I facilitate digital burglars by naming my computers according to what they actually are; my main desktop machine carries the label "Desktop", my Aspire One is imaginatively named "One", and this trend continues down to "PowerMac G4", "Ultra 5", and "T2". I always found giving computers real names was a tad bit wacky, but as it turns out, it can actually be very useful to give your servers and computers whimsical but meaningful names.

There are some among the FOSS community who pay lip service to Mahatma Gandhi when talking about this genre of software. There are others who actually put Gandhi's methods into practice to spread the message. Four young men from the south Indian state of Kerala recently followed the example of the Mahatma - who undertook a famous march in 1930 against the tax on salt, to defy the British colonial rulers of India - and walked from one end of the state to the other , meeting people along the way, to spread the message of free software.

Reports from several web sites are stating that the next version of the Sidekick from Danger, now a subsidiary of Microsoft, will run NetBSD. According to the reports, the Sidekick LX 2009 will run a custom version of the open source operating system, NetBSD, instead of, as expected by some observers, a modified version of Windows CE with an customised front end.

At the end of last year I wrote about a big Brazilian project to provide 150,000 GNU/Linux notebooks for schools. Now the Brazilian Ministry of Education has topped that by ordering 324,000 "green" workstations running on GNU/Linux (although I can't quite tell whether this is as well as or instead of - anyone know?).

It has been two years since the last official release of Zope and now version 3.4.0 of the web application framework has been released. The Zope development team says that now that 3.4 is out the door, it is renewing its commitment to a short and reliable release cycle of six months.

The graphical user interface is a separate layer on top of a plain-text console subsystem on Linux, Mac, and Windows; this is not unique to Linux, and you need console skills to be an effective troubleshooter-and-fixer on all three platforms. A. Lizard shows you what to do when your graphical environment fails on Linux: as long as your system boots to the console, you can fix anything.

In late 2008 we witnessed the release of Compiz++, a rewrite of the Compiz core in C++ plus other invasive work in order to improve this compositing window manager. With Compiz++ being a branch of Compiz and various other developers working on their own branches, the future of Compiz was unclear, however, today it has been cleared up some.

Dr. Heather Leslie is listed as the "Director of Clinical Modeling " at Ocean Informatics in Australia. But I like to call her the "archetype guru" She has posted an announcement on the openehr-clinical mailing list regarding the launch of the Clinical Knowledge Manager (CKM). It is a pathway to get all members of healthcare involved in developing and vetting archetypes for use in openEHR based applications. Though the email was part of a thread; I will post it in it's entirety and then give a reference to the thread itself so the readers can view the entire context if they wish.

Two veterans from Microsoft's Business Division have joined the management of Openbravo, the Spanish ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) and PoS (Point of Sale) specialist. Jesper Balser, co-founder and CEO of Navision, which Microsoft acquired in 2002, has joined the Openbravo Board of Directors.

Telephony continues to remain the dominant form of customer interaction for most businesses today, and is certainly a fundamental component of effective service. However, given the current downturn economy, many businesses are looking for ways to cut costs, and open source systems have been proven to do just that – resulting in most companies gearing themselves for a boost in open source adoption this year.

Breadbin Interactive, a local open source software company, is looking to use its Freedom Toaster platform to promote and expand open source software into the rest of Africa. The company plans to expand into Africa to make information feely available, particularly in the enterprise and education space. The aim, says the company, is to make up-to-date relevant information free to the public to download from computer platforms entitled Freedom Toasters. Brett Simpson, co-founder of the Freedom Toaster, says: “The name Freedom Toaster is derived from the fact that open source software and open content is free and that Linux users refer to burning CDs as 'toasting'; hence The Freedom Toaster.

How much of a problem is security updating for open source software going to be in 2009? On Jan. 1, Dana Blankenhorn published the sensationally titled The biggest threat to open source in 2009. His thesis is simple: that, because open source software usually lacks any mechanisms for easily updating to the latest security patched version, the growing popularity of open source software will render it more vulnerable to problems than its closed source counterparts.