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The Linux Exposition of Southern California is proud to announce the 7th Annual Southern California Linux Expo scheduled for February 20-22, 2009 at the Westin Hotel near the Los Angeles International Airport. Wide spread acceptance and encouragement from the user community has established SCALE as a premiere Linux/Open Source conference in the Southern California region.

Sun has been getting serious about opening up its software for a few years now. OpenSolaris, an open source Unix operating system like Linux and BSD, released in May, is its latest foray into the open source arena. I found OpenSolaris to be a production-ready OS that works equally well on desktops and servers. OpenSolaris is released under Sun's Common Development and Distribution License (CDDL), which isn't compatible with the GNU Public License (GPL) used by Linux. This means that lots of the technology in OpenSolaris won't be making its way into Linux any day soon. Also, OpenSolaris isn't 100% free, as some components are available only in binary form under the OpenSolaris Binary License.

Familiarity with command prompts and shell scripts is still necessary if you want to get the most from your GNU/Linux system, but the less time you spend doing that the better, right? Two powerful ways to minimize your time at the command line are shell aliases and functions. The examples that follow are for the bash shell, but all the concepts and most of the code are valid for other shells too. Shell aliases are alternative, easy-to-remember names for long commands that you need to execute frequently.

The University of the Western Cape (UWC) and the African Virtual Open Initiatives and Resources (AVOIR) project have released version 1.0.1 of the Chisimba/KEWL3 Realtime Virtual Classroom. Avoir is a a collaboration of 13 African universities specialising in creating free software relevant to African users.

Social media may be hailed as the savior of sagging sales these days, but few have figured out what social media are, much less how to wield them. Even fewer realize that games are the first, and arguably the most viable and sustainable, social medium in the mix.

Back in 2001, I landed my (then) dream job as a full-time Linux kernel developer and distribution maintainer for a small embedded systems company. I was thrilled - and horrified. I'd only been working as a programmer for a couple of years and I was sure it was only a matter of time before my new employer figured out they'd hired an idiot. The only solution was to learn more about operating systems, and quickly. So I pulled out my favorite operating systems textbook and read and re-read it obsessively over the course of the next year. It worked well enough that my company tried very hard to convince me not to quit when I got bored with my "dream job" and left to work at Sun.

Storage is the Achilles' heel of virtualization projects, said LeftHand Networks Inc. as it announced a new version of its iSCSI SAN software, which it claimed could ease the task of rolling out virtual desktop infrastructures (VDI). The company said that the Linux-based software, called SAN/iQ Version 8, runs on an x86 server -- or preferably a pair of them, for redundancy -- and uses storage virtualization technology to turn a bunch of disk arrays into a powerful but relatively cheap SAN in a box. LeftHand said that new features in Version 8 -- including SmartClone volumes, an integrated performance manager, a virtual connection manager and application programming interfaces (API) for links to other management consoles -- would make it easier to manage virtualized environments and cut storage costs.

Life just got easier for users of the downloadable or boxed retail versions of the Ubuntu Linux 8.04 operating system who want easy and cheap ways of adding DVD playback and improved audio capabilities to their machines. Inexpensive add-on applications that will provide audio codecs and a DVD player to expand the multimedia capabilities of the four-year-old Linux operating system are now available for purchase in the Ubuntu online store.

Mark Shuttleworth is tap-dancing to work these days, he writes on his blog. Why? His Ubuntu Linux project has hired a team of "designers, user experience champions, and interaction design visionaries" tasked with the heady chore of making Linux the world's most usable operating system. After acknowledging the significance of the challenge, Shuttleworth admitted that he does not yet have all the answers. But, he said Ubuntu's new "upstream" team -- which will work separately from its "platform" team, to avoid conflicts of interest -- would focus initially on participation in the X, OpenGL, GTK, Qt, GNOME, and KDE projects.

Unified Threat Management (UTM) devices unify all network security elements into a single device. They often include a combination of routing, firewall, intrusion detection, content filtering, URL filtering, spam filtering, VPN, and antivirus functionalities. These devices usually cost thousands of dollars and require subscriptions. However, you can secure your network and save money at the same time with Endian Firewall Community, a free, open source alternative to costly UTM devices. Endian Firewall Community is a Red Hat-based OS running on kernel 2.6.9-55. Endian designed this UTM with usability, flexibility, and ease of deployment in mind. It includes a stateful packet inspection firewall, an application-level proxy with antivirus support, content Web filtering, spam filtering, and VPN support that uses Internet Protocol Security (IPsec) or OpenVPN. The latest version is v2.2 RC2, but it's still in the development stage. The current stable version, which I used, is 2.1.2.

Phoronix.com is the definitive Linux hardware review site, featuring articles on motherboards, processors, memory, power supplies, cases, and other components. While other sites throw a hardware review into the mix occasionally, hardware reviews are the primary focus of Phoronix.com. Phoronix founder and executive editor Michael Larabel has it down to a science -- so much so that he was able to package and released his primary tools as an open source hardware testing suite. Now it is easy for anyone to obtain reliable and repeatable benchmarks for the components in their personal computer.

Eric Geier is back with more tips and tricks on transitioning to OpenOffice.org (OOo). This tutorial continues by highlighting OOo Options you may want to change, discusses the PDF exporting feature, and shows how to overcome two vexing issues you may encounter when working with images.

One brake on the GIMP's popularity is that, while it boasts dozens of filters, a rival like Photoshop boasts thousands. You may only occasionally need a special effect that imitates a pencil sketch or a famous style of painting such as Impressionism or Cubism, but, when you do, having a filter to create the effect instantly saves serious amount of time. To help bridge this divide, the GIMP is reviving the User Filter from its 1.x releases. This filter is a kind of meta-plugin that allows users to import and manage Photoship filters or, if they have the knowledge, to write their own. The GIMP User Filter is available from the project's SourceForge.net site as source code or as a Debian package that may or may not work on Ubuntu, to judge from mailing list chatter. Once you install it, you will find it under Filter - > Generic -> User Filter.

Storage is the Achilles' heel of virtualization projects, said LeftHand Networks Inc. as it announced a new version of its iSCSI SAN software, which it claimed could ease the task of rolling out virtual desktop infrastructures (VDI). The company said that the Linux-based software, called SAN/iQ Version 8, runs on an x86 server -- or preferably a pair of them, for redundancy -- and uses storage virtualization technology to turn a bunch of disk arrays into a powerful but relatively cheap SAN in a box. LeftHand said that new features in Version 8 -- including SmartClone volumes, an integrated performance manager, a virtual connection manager and application programming interfaces (API) for links to other management consoles -- would make it easier to manage virtualized environments and cut storage costs.

Designing and building Web sites can be a maze of tasks these days. One tool that can simplify the task is the well-known Firebug extension, which lets you edit and debug HTML, CSS, and JavaScript from within Firefox. As useful as Firebug is on its own, it can actually be extended past its initial setup with additional extensions that can make your work as a developer or designer even easier.

Faithful readers of this column may remember news we reported back in early April that the next Ubuntu release had been cunningly named"Jabbering Jackass." The news came from a memo that got leaked to the Linux Loop, the story went, and it was, of course, an April Fools' Day joke -- which we knew all along.

The U.S. Department of Homeland Security has not met requirements to provide "open source" intelligence--that is, publicly available information--for state and local law enforcement, a new report shows. The House Committee on Homeland Security released a report Friday criticizing the department after interviewing more than 350 state, local, and tribal law enforcement officials about the DHS's open source intelligence efforts.

LXer Feature: 14-Sept-2008

This week's LXer Roundup is full of all kinds of good stuff, but not if your Microsoft. HP is attempting to work around the Vista GUI, an ad campaign that doesn't seem to be about anything and to top it off The London Stock Exchange went down because of a .NET crash. Also, Mark Shuttleworth says that the Linux Desktop needs a facelift, a very funny article on why you should switch from Linux to Vista. Did you know that the largest and most complex scientific instrument ever built, called the "Large Hadron Collider", which when powered up could theoretically create a black hole and suck the entire Earth into it? It runs Linux.

Firefox, what's not to love about this open-source web browser? Well, a number of users following the development work on Ubuntu 8.10 (the Intrepid Ibex) are feeling rather outraged over Mozilla Firefox 3.0.2 and later. In the latest Ubuntu packages, Firefox requires an EULA (End-User License Agreement) be accepted the first time you launch the browser. The EULA mostly deals with agreeing to Mozilla's trademark policies for Firefox.

Distinct personalities in real and imagined worlds collided recently at the fourth annual Second Life convention in Tampa, Fla. That was only the beginning of the confusion for those outside Second Life, the virtual online community that is anything but confusing to those immersed in the virtual world.