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Over the years, I've probably created thousands of reports for customers and co-workers. Usually, I have a web-based program that generates reports in either html or comma-separated format. The html format is a lot prettier and usually gives the user what they want. The comma-separated format allows the user to easily import the results into Excel, or into Open Office in the case of my more enlightened users. From there, they add formatting to the raw data and send the resulting report to whereever it's going. All this formating is done manually by customers who tend to want the same report periodically, so this results in a lot of re-work on their part. Most of the time, they're just happy to get the data and don't complain about having to pretty it up a bit. But there is a better way.

Professionals who work on the basis of billable hours rarely take the time out to write an article for publication unless they have a valid reason for doing so. That's why I'm generally a bit sceptical when lawyers come out with articles that attempt to make a case against the use of free and open source sofware. No lawyer would ever be paid the same rates for a third-rate article about FOSS as he/she is paid for listening to a client - hence my scepticism. But, surprisingly, over the past three months two members of the legal profession have taken the time to pen what they, no doubt, consider to be serious objections to the use of FOSS.

When it comes to virtualising Linux, VMWare has always had the edge of Microsoft’s Virtual PC which has limited video display support. Although these were the best two, there have been other lesser-known options like XENSource. Here’s Sun’s VirtualBox and why it is truly kick-ass. You know what virtualisation is; it lets you run – on one physical computer – multiple, separate, computer environments. Each environment behaves as if it is genuinely running on real hardware directly. Virtualisation lets you run an operating system with all its bits and pieces on top of your existing operating system.

The second Akademy day started a bit later in the morning than the previous one, yet somehow most visitors managed to look much more tired. Maybe the social event (read Nokia sponsored beer) from yesterday has something to do with that. Even tired, people visit the talks and write code, so you can expect more code, discussions and blogs today.

Dell is shipping two new laptops with widescreen LCD displays and Ubuntu Hardy Heron (8.04) operating systems with DVD playback. Additionally, the largest U.S. PC maker has started offering Hardy Heron on three models previously available with the earlier Gutsy Gibbon Ubuntu release.

If you run scripts that require a lot of execution time it's a good idea to try to avoid letting them overload your system. You can run them via nice, but if for example your script is sending a bunch of emails your email daemon isn't running via nice and it may itself get out of control. One way to deal with this is by using the values in /proc/loadavg to pause when your system load gets too high.

When Sam Lamonica stepped into the CIO role at Rudolph and Sletten five years ago, he set out to tame an ungainly network by using an orderly open source network monitoring solution. "Basically there was nothing in place," says Lamonica, whose Redwood City, Calif.-based company is a general contractor in the construction industry. "The infrastructure was pretty much a hodge-podge of different, disparate pieces and systems that had been cobbled together by a couple of previous IS directors. So basically it was a swamp.

Finding a satisfactory way to index a lot of data in Linux is a lot harder than it sounds. The most popular tools like Beagle tend to be limited to single keyword searches, which are a pretty blunt tool when looking through hundreds of gigabytes of files. Some tools are a massive pain to set up, I found htree an example of this. Search tools are also frequently set up to default to running as background daemons. While this gives you instant indexed access to anything that goes into the indexed filesystem, the price you pay are massive computer resource usage, to the point where user processes frequently slow down.

The Free Software Foundation can cross off another item on its high priority list of applications that free software needs in order to compete. Version 0.6 of Marble, which ships with KDE 4.1, may not rival Google Earth just yet, but the underlying engine has the potential to do so in future versions. The main improvements needed to reach this stage are a lower level of detail and some additional views and integration into free online resources. Marble is a new tool from KDE Education, the subproject already known for such educational tools as the annotated periodic table Kalzium and the astronomy program KStars. Like them, Marble is not just educational, but has all the makings of a handy reference utility as well.

Firefox's default bookmarks remain painfully limited. They collect only URLS, which can only be organized with annotations and folders. JetArk's Jeteye extension, with its promise to "super-power your bookmarks" promises features more suitable for modern Web browsing. With "jetpaks" that resemble the containers available in the Basket desktop note application, Jeteye largely delivers on this promise. Its main drawback is that it is better at storing than manipulating different elements, especially compared with the rival ScrapBook extension.

In the final presentation of the talk days at KDE's yearly world summit, Akademy 2008, the KDE-PIM hackers surprised the KDE community with a couple of announcements, covering nearly all aspects of PIM-related data handling. After demonstrating the Kontact suite on Windows and Mac OS during this year's LinuxTag, the KDE-PIM team continues to raise the bar for competitors on the enterprise desktop. Read on for more details.

Hadoop is a library for writing distributed data processing programs using the MapReduce framework. It's got all the makings of a blogosphere hit: cluster computing, large datasets, parallelism, algorithms published by Google, and open source. Every four days or so, a nerd will discover Hadoop, write a “Basic MapReduce Tutorial with Hadoop” tutorial on his blog with some trivial examples, and feel satisfied with himself for educating the world about a yet-undiscovered gem. Comparatively, very few people actually use Hadoop in practice, and those who do don't write about it. Why? Because they're adults who don't care about getting on the front page of Digg.

At LinuxInsider, we've been busy these past few weeks trying to bring you all the most important news from the world of our favorite operating system, as we always do. But it turns out we missed something. It wasn't until we began compiling our Linux Starter Kit -- which we're fervently hoping will help show more of the world the light that is Linux -- that we discovered it: Lindependence 2008.

This blog post covers the main presentation from our ODF workshop that took place in Redmond last week: Peter Amstein’s explanation of the guiding principles behind our support of ODF in Office 2007 SP2. I’ve added explanations of some of the details that were covered verbally in the workshop, but if anything’s not clear here, please let me know.

When it was first released a year ago the tiny Asus EEE PC sparked a new generation of ultra-portable PCs called netbooks. As the name suggests they tend to be not much bigger than a medium-sized novel and are designed to surf the Internet and check email on the move. And when the EEE PC was first released it was shipped with a version of Xandros Linux.

The Puppet project allows you to issue system administration commands to one or more machines, and will smooth over the differences between distributions for you. For example, if you want to install MySQL, that action should be your primary aim, and you shouldn't have to worry about if the machine is running Maemo, Ubuntu, or Fedora. Most folks have a desktop and perhaps a server machine at home, one or two laptop machines, and perhaps a Mobile Internet Device (MID) and mobile phone running Linux. Making a single change on all your Linux devices becomes a burden to perform manually. This is compounded by the fact that a MID's Linux distribution might not be very similar to that of your laptop.

IBM's Lotus Domino Web Access software, also known as IBM Lotus iNotes, will bring your Lotus e-mail, calendar and contact details to the Apple iPhone 3G. IBM says the Lotus functionality is planned for delivery to the iPhone sometime in 2008, although no official announcement has yet been made and the company is stating that Lotus iNotes on the iPhone represents "current IBM plans and directions, which are subject to change".

Both StarOffice 9 and OpenOffice.org 3 will offer an office HP LaserJet M3035 MFP series - Starting at $1,599. Save up to $500. Click Here. suite of tools compatible with Microsoft (Nasdaq: MSFT) Latest News about Microsoft Office. Both are based on the same code base, and both will be native on the Mac, no longer requiring X11. Sun's Louis Suarez-Potts explained the key differences to TMO and what the customer should know before selecting one or the other. The first thing we should know, according to Suarez-Potts, the Community Manager for OpenOffice.org at Sun Microsystems (Nasdaq: JAVA) Latest News about Sun Microsystems, is that both products are based on the same code base, slight differences are close to zero, and one can use each product on the Mac interchangeably.

I'm not above engaging in a little shameless name-dropping, especially when I know the dropped name will spark a reaction. So while chatting with attendees at the LinuxWorld conference in San Francisco last week, I made no secret of the fact that I had interviewed Richard Stallman a few days earlier. I marveled at the awe and admiration on the faces of many of my listeners.

Here are videos from presentations in technical conferences. They should be useful for people lacking time or money to attend these conferences. In agreement with the speakers, these videos are released under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 license. These videos are encoded with the Theora open and royalty-free video codec, and with the open and patent-free Vorbis audio codec. More and more players are available. See Theora.org for details.