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Converting an old PC into a home or office server may look like a good idea on paper, but in reality, the idea has a few serious drawbacks. For starters, old PCs tend to be noisy, power-guzzling monsters, and older components make them less reliable. Turning an old PC into a server also means installing and configuring all the necessary software, which can be a time-consuming and laborious process. If the drawbacks of this approach outweigh for you its possible advantages, consider instead Bubba Two, a nifty Debian-based device that can be used for a variety of tasks.

Chances are you have some sort of web site. Linux has a rich history of text processing which can be used to turbo-boost your blogs. In fact, blogging goes to Linux like a hand to a glove. The theme for this month is “I didn’t know you could do that in Linux,” and today I’ll show you how Linux can really help your blog take off, both in terms of improving its performance as well as giving you a much greater handle on what’s happening.

Adding a second (or third or more!) hard drive to your computer is a great way to, well, give your computer more disk space. Ok, the concept is pretty logical but the process to make it work needs some explanation. Here’s what to do, plus one thing the Linux filesystem does brilliantly which Windows can’t do at all.

Windows, whether XP or Vista, is home to all the major instant messenger (IM) clients, and for things like Skype, unquestionably has the best versions. But if you’re hankering to talk to multiple friends on multiple IM systems at the same time, and you want some open source goodness without having to go through the pain of learning Linux, try Pidgin for Windows instead – the open source program that lets you talk freely.

No Linux distribution can bundle every package that users might want, so most distros host software repositories from which users can download and install additional applications. Since 2006 Slackbuilds.org has served as a high-quality repository for Slackware users, but using it requires several steps and switching between a Web browser and a virtual terminal. Sbopkg is a new ncurses-based utility that helps users build packages from SlackBuilds.org and seamlessly integrates the repository with the operating system. Slackbuilds.org is closest thing available to an official Slackware repository. It is administered by people on the Slackware development team and recommended by Slackware's maintainer, Patrick Volkerding, in the Slackware release notes. Sbopkg automates and streamlines the process of working with Slackbuilds.org to build packages.

The Linux Foundation (LF) announced a "LinuxCon" conference that will be open to end-users. Set for September 2009 in Portland, Ore., LinuxCon will co-locate with the annual Linux Plumbers Conference (LPC), says the group. The LinuxCon announcement follows up on The LF's first end-user event, which is scheduled to take place on October 13-14 in New York City. This Linux Foundation End User Collaboration Summit offers an opportunity for "sophisticated" end users to "learn and interact with leaders from within the Linux community, including the highest level maintainers and developers," said the non-profit organization.

In a recent independent test, Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 5 Advanced Platform trumped all other operating systems that process more than 1 million transactions per minute -- and at 22% lower cost than its next closest competitor. The San Francisco-based Transaction Processing Performance Council (TPC), which performs benchmark tests of database transactions, validated Red Hat's processing of 1.2 million transactions per minute on an IBM System x 3950M2 with the new Intel X7460 Xeon processor.

The tech sector is experiencing a crash -- not of stock prices, which rebounded somewhat on Wall Street on Tuesday -- but in its ability to take new companies public. So far this year, there have been just six venture-backed initial public offerings; last year, there were 86, according to the National Venture Capital Association (NVCA). The recent collapse of investment banks Lehman Brothers Holdings and Bear Stearns Cos. is exacerbating the problem.

Online office suites are attractive for organizations with modest document processing needs, especially due to their low cost (read: free). But if you don't like the idea of storing your documents outside your network, try OpenGoo. It's an online office suite that installs on your local network and allows users to collaborate with others both inside and outside the network. The open source software, still under active development, is an easy to install and use, and if it's not quite ready for real-world large-scale deployment, it's getting there fast.

ICANN, IANA, IETF, ISOC, IAB, IRTF, SRS, NSI, RIR, NSO-- who or what are these, and what do they have to with what you can do with the Internet? Charlie Schluting explains the roles of the many organizations and governing bodies that operate behind the scenes.

The Uncomplicated Firewall (UFW) is a new tool from Ubuntu whose goal is to make configuration of the built-in Linux packet filter less complicated and more secure for novice users. You must run UFW commands as root, so in Ubuntu, you must preface them with the sudo command. With UFW, enabling and disabling packet filtering is a simple matter of issuing the sudo ufw enable and sudo ufw disable commands. You set the default policy for filtering packets by running the sudo ufw default command and passing the allow or deny argument, depending on what you want to achieve. If you issue the sudo ufw default allow command, all incoming packets will be allowed by default, creating a very unsecure packet filter but giving you the broadest range of allowed services. The command sudo ufw default deny will block all incoming packets, requiring that you allow specific services to pass the packet filter.

The 2008 Linux Kernel Summit was held September 15 and 16 in Portland, Oregon, immediately prior to the Linux Plumbers Conference. At this invitation-only meeting, some 80 developers discussed a number of issues relevant to the kernel and its future development. The following reports were written by Jonathan Corbet, who attended the event and was a member of its program committee.

It is coming out a bit late, but the beta release for the upcoming Fedora 10 release (codenamed Cambridge) is now available. It has been almost two months since the last test release and a lot of work has been accomplished when it comes to the new and exciting innovations found within this Red Hat distribution.

Both One Laptop Per Child and Intel are now moving into million-unit sales numbers for their respective 4P Computers, the XO laptop and the Classmate PC. Last week, the Economic Times reported that OLPC is looking to sell 1 million XO laptops in India for $300 each. But this would not be to the Indian government, which alternates between calling the XO "pedagogically suspect" and attempting its own "$10 laptop". OLPC is looking to India's wealthily elite to fund educational empowerment through an Indian Give Many + Give One Get One:

As I listen to all this talk of lack of trust in the banking system, of inflated values ungrounded in any reality, of “opacity”, and of “contaminated” financial instruments, I realise I have heard all this before. In the world of software, as in the world of finance, there is contamination by overvalued, ungrounded offerings that have led to systemic mistrust, sapped the ability of the computer industry to create real value, and led it to squander vast amounts of time and money on the pursuit of the illusory, insubstantial wealth that is known as “intellectual property”.

Bluefish is a GUI-based text and code editor that runs on "most (maybe all?) POSIX compatible operating systems including Linux, FreeBSD, Ma cOS X, OpenBSD, and Solaris." It has an impressive feature list, and is both lightweight and speedy. It is not currently under heavy development primarily because it is a mature program that already does exactly what it is supposed to do with no fuss or complaint.

Open Source is emerging for the first time as a central theme at the CeBIT 2009 conference. Linux Magazine, together with the conference organizers and the Linux Foundation, is now encouraging Open Source projects to bid for free booths at the conference. CeBIT 2009, the largest global IT trade show opens March 3-8 in Hannover, Germany. For the first time Open Source becomes a central theme. Without these projects free software would be unthinkable, therefore not only will industries take part, but free projects will have the opportunity to share their work with the larger public. Linux Magazine, together with the conference organizer Deutsche Messe AG, is therefore seeking out projects that wish to present their work publicly at CeBIT Open Source.

"Where does all my money go?" If you want to know the exact answer to that question, you need HomeBank, a personal finance manager that can help you keep track of your income and expenses with consummate ease. HomeBank started its life in 1995 on the Amiga platform, so it has had plenty of time to mature and become a first-rate application. Today, you can find HomeBank in the software repositories of many mainstream Linux distributions, including Fedora, Mandriva, openSUSE, and Ubuntu. While HomeBank may be less well-known than alternatives such as GnuCash, KMyMoney, or Grisbi, it is the preferred personal finance manager of several lightweight distros such as Puppy Linux and SliTaz due to its small size and simplicity.

Jim Zemlin, executive director of the Linux Foundation, says technologies such as Linux and open-source software can help enterprises cut costs during tough economic times. Zemlin says users should look to open source and Linux, systems management tools, and virtualization technology to keep budgets in line. In lean times, look for technologies such as Linux and open source to do well. The current financial crisis may just be one of those times.

Unless you have fully embraced the virtualization movement, you probably have more than one machine in your home or office, particularly if you run more than one operating system, and you probably have more than one keyboard and mouse on you desk. If you would like to regain some desk space without having to purchase a KVM switch, x2x may be the solution. Simply put, x2x takes advantage of the X Window System's ability to run a display over a TCP/IP network. In this case, you are not running a display as much as you are taking charge of another display's mouse and keyboard.