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Desktop search engines are all the rage these days. While Beagle may be the most popular desktop search engine for Linux, there are alternatives. If you are looking for a light-weight and easy-to-use yet powerful desktop search engine, you might want to try Recoll.

Me: “How could you tell they’d hacked it?”

Caller: “Well, when it booted, it didn’t say Windows or Microsoft or anything! It said something about Deviant Linux, I think, and the main screen looked nothing like my good, legal Windows screen at home! I think they hacked that, too!”

If you write something is the New York Times obligated to publish it? Must the Washington Post run a sharply worded op-ed? Can I compel Fox News to give voice to my liberal opinions? The answer to all these questions is an unequivocal no. Private media is permitted editorial control of their content. Websites and blogs are no different. They are simply a newer, different form of private media.

Richard Mathew Stallman or “RMS”, his famous initials of the hacker community at Harvard where he graduated magna cum laude in Physics in 1974, is the most prominent American Free Software Advocate alive today.

According to the blurb on the book's back cover, "This book offers a highly accessible introduction to natural language processing, the field that supports a variety of language technologies, from predictive text and email filtering to automatic summarization and translation". Putting it all together, this book teaches the reader how to do something highly specific and practical with the Python programming language. I put it this way because there are many books out there that will teach you how to learn Python, or some other programming language, which includes learning various typical tasks, but they don't teach you where to go next.

Ironically there has not been as much crossover in my current environment (at least as of this writing) and my hobbyist/home coding/administration life in quite some time. For once I have found something I wrote at my job that has a direct translation into something other admins would find useful; a script that performs and reports multiple checks at once. In this the first part of the series a look at the motivation, helper functions and some core generic functions of the script. I provision a lot of systems, a lot of them; almost 1/week (although not at that frequency - the frequency varies) - some of these systems are virtual machines, some are cloned virtual machines, some are physical servers while in the rare instance some are just devices of some type (or really dumb servers). Part of the post installation setup is adding systems to the appropriate Nagios monitors.

We presume , that xen-3.4.1-5.fc12.src.rpm has been already installed on the system and Xen Host been built via mentioned “rpm” , Libvirt 0.7.1-15 and 2.6.31.6 pvops kernel is up and running at the time of upgrade. Apply following patch to /root/rpmbuild/SPECS/xen.spec

Google unveiled an experimental open source project in early November aimed at reducing web site load times. SPDY, as it is called, is a modification to HTTP designed to target specific, real-world latency issues without altering GET, POST, or any other request semantics, and without requiring changes to page content or network infrastructure. It does this by implementing request prioritization, stream multiplexing, and header compression. Results from tests on a SPDY-enabled Chrome and a SPDY web server show a reduction in load times of up to 60%.

A data warehouse is a repository of an organization's electronically stored data. Data warehouses are designed to facilitate reporting and analysis.

The 4.0 release of the KDE software compilation marked a major milestone for the KDE community. While the underlying development platform has seen a modernization to better work with increased demand of applications, the community also saw a shift in its development methods. Interaction design has become much more important, and hence the need to collect feedback from the user in a structured manner. Ultimately, this leads to more understandable user interfaces and simpler handling of the underlying complexity of modern computers and portable devices. Nuno Pinheiro, a well-known artist and icon designer in the KDE community and engineering psychologist Björn Balazs from the Open Source Usability Labs and director for analysis, design and testing at Apliki decided they wanted to help with this.

When we say that Linux is UNIX-like, what are we saying? At my college, we have a course that is named 'an introduction to UNIX using Linux'. All over I hear people use the phrase 'UNIX/Linux' when referring to UNIX-style systems. It is somewhat hilarious to me, as Linux and the surrounding community have, for the most part, left the UNIX philosophy behind.

LXer Feature: 28-Nov-2009

The idea is to store ones files on a cloud (Ubuntu One), so that they remain private, using encryption, but so that they can be transparently uploaded and downloaded and accessed, as if they are unencrypted files.

One of the frustrating things about learning how to program is that you have to start somewhere. I know there's no way of avoiding this, but when you learn your first programming language, you are also learning the basic structure of how to program in general. It's easy to get mixed up at this stage and lost in the details of a particular language, losing sight of the overall goal.

Desktop astronomy has become more accessible over the last few years as hardware and software have come down in price. For an outlay not much greater than a top of the range PC it is possible to put together a CCD powered telescope that is more than adequate for hunting comets or prospecting for asteroids, which are still popular pastimes among amateur astronomers. This optical hardware can be augmented by a substantial range of free software to process the raw images and guide amateur astronomers on where to look and what to see...

During a planning session at the Ubuntu Developer Summit last week, a decision emerged to remove the GIMP from the default Ubuntu installation. Although this decision has generated a bit of controversy, it's a sign of Ubuntu's growing maturity as a mainstream platform for regular users. As a participant who attended the session in person, I want to shed some light on how and why the decision was made.

Tiny Core lead developer Robert Shingledecker has announced the availability of version 2.6 of Tiny Core Linux. Tiny Core is a minimal Linux distribution that's only about 10 MB in size and is based on the 2.6 Linux kernel. The latest release includes several bug fixes, changes and updates.

Drop your bags, grab a drink, and grab the XP CD—it's time for the holiday ritual of fixing up your relatives' computer. Here are some tips and downloads to keep handy while you're cursing all the auto-starting cr@pware. For this guide, we're going to do a bit of assuming. We're assuming the relative with the busted computer is running a Windows system, and has an internet connection that works when the computer does. We're assuming all the physical pieces of the computer work—hard drive, memory, disc drives, and anything else that's crucial. We'll also assume the computer's in one of two states: Failing to boot and needing an OS re-installation, laden with unnecessary system tray/startup applications and/or spy/mal/ad-ware, or just needing a little optimization.

Ever since the Ubuntu One cloud service played an important role in Ubuntu 10.04, a new prototype of a KDE client has become available. A port to Fedora is also in the works.

If you just can't get away from email over the holidays, you can at least help test the release candidate for Thunderbird 3.0. The Mozilla folks released Thunderbird 3.0 RC 1 on Tuesday with more than 100 changes in the release. It's been a long time in coming, the first release in the 2.0 series was back in 2007. But Thunderbird 3.0 looks like it might be worth the wait when the final is released.

Wind River and Kontron announced a global, multi-year agreement under which the embedded system manufacturer will distribute Wind River's VxWorks and Wind River Linux distributions. The agreement is expected to extend software and service offerings across a range of industries, says Wind River.