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avahi is installed by default on Debian and Ubuntu systems, but few people seem to use it to any extent. It's supposed to be a service auto-discovery, but what services exactly is it set up to discover? Juliet Kemp figures out if she can actually make it do something she wants it to do.

A non-linear editing system (NLE) is a video editing (NLVE) or audio editing (NLAE) system which can provide editing method for video clips or frams. You will be able to access any frame in a video clip. Non-linear editing is done for film and television post-production. However, the cost of editing system gone down and non-linear editing tools (including software) are now within the reach of most home users.

rom the 'What's All The Buzz About?' files: Red Hat (NYSE:RHT) today officially launched a new open source messaging system called HornetQ. The new effort has its roots in the JBoss Messaging platform, that has been around since at least 2006. In blog post, Red Hat developer Tim Fox wrote that," HornetQ is an open source project to build a multi-protocol, embeddable, high performance, clustered, asynchronous messaging system. HornetQ is an example of Message Oriented Middleware (MoM)." That's right, messaging for middleware is now MoM. I expect we'll see that acronym more over the course of what is left of 2009.

This week the Linux Foundation published statistics of the persons and companies behind the kernel development. Canonical is not mentioned at all.

When people are talking about "The year of Linux Desktop", it seems that there is a large crowd with no knowledge of Linux. People who use computers for a long time also replied the same thing when I talked about Linux with them. This screenshot shows the reply from an user when someone posted a reply in a form with a reference to 'Linux'

Sugar is the desktop environment that is used for the "One Laptop per Child" (OLPC) netbooks. It can also be installed on normal computers. This guide shows how you can install Sugar on an Ubuntu 9.04 desktop.

I have been a fan of yours for many years — since I was a kid in fact! I watched as you created Dell, one of the first (“the” first?) companies that sold computers by mail order. I watched you become wealthy, successful, and then retire, only to come back to Dell to remind its managers what they seemed to have forgotten: listen to your customers. I watched you embrace GNU/Linux; I remember thinking: I wonder if people realise what this will actually mean. I am sure he does. So, here I am: I bought an Inspiron Mini 10. I have no choice but return it. And now I can’t stop wondering: how could Michael Dell get it just so wrong? Read the whole letter at Free Software Magazine.

World of Padman (or WoP for short) features a cartoon-style approach, with maps, characters, weapons and sounds all based upon the Padman animation series. For example, the weapons include Punchy, a funny puppet used for close combat (which will also allow you to move faster), the Bubble G, which shoots bubble gums, or the Splasher, a sniper-equivalent from other games. World of Padman also includes four different player models, each with several other colour customisations.

The Diagramming In Linux course is a 10 page briefing on how to get started with the Dia application in Linux. The course was created for Ubuntu users but also includes a Windows installation tutorial as Dia is available for both operating systems. In addition to the Dia installation this course will outline how to find important tools in the Dia interface, using Dia's tools, and more.

The Android based, VoIP-capable Glass phone with a chip each for operating system and telephony plus an 8" touchscreen is supposed to welcome a new era in business telephony.

It's always fun to stand and watch as two big names slug it out, and they don't come much bigger than Microsoft. Sophos, it has to be said, is no small fry either when it comes to the world of IT Security. So when a Sophos blog posting from it's Chief Technology Office, Richard Jacobs, started with the playground taunt equivalent of 'I've been kissing your mum' by saying "Windows 7's planned XP compatibility mode risks undoing much of the progress that Microsoft has made on the security front in the last few years and reveals the true colours of the OS giant" you kind of new things would get nasty, and quick.

RAID 1 is usually implemented as mirroring; a drive has its data duplicated on two different drives using either a hardware RAID controller or software (generally via the operating system). If either drive fails, the other continues to function as a single drive until the failed drive is replaced. Conceptually simple, RAID 1 is popular for those who require fault tolerance and don't need top-notch read performance. A variant of RAID 1 is duplexing, which duplicates the controller card as well as the drive, providing tolerance against failures of either a drive or a controller. It is much less commonly seen than straight mirroring.

Pidgin 2.6.1 brings in the much awaited Voice and Video support for XMPP and are hoping to get these killer features to other protocols as well. In layman's terms, what it means is that now you can use voice chat and video chat in gmail. Install latest Pidgin 2.6.1 in Ubuntu the easy way.

Linux enjoys a very large software library of games, the vast majority of which can be downloaded without any payment. Helping to identify great games is made difficult by the fact that to a large extent games are a matter of taste. Furthermore, some players prefer games of tactics, others enjoy the communication with fellow gamers. There are those who hanker for games that require quick reflexes, or which truly challenge the mind.

For those that missed it, there was quite a bit happening this week in the Linux world when it comes to graphics drivers. The KMS page-flipping ioctl is ready for the Linux 2.6.32 kernel, KMS and GEM comes to the Neo FreeRunner, and the Assembly shader rework was merged into the mainline Mesa tree was among the open-source driver news. Also taking place this past week was the release of AMD Catalyst 9.8, which finally brought support for the Linux 2.6.29 and 2.6.30 kernels, but continues to lack real public support for XvBA. X.Org 7.5 was also supposed to be released, but to no surprise that did not happen.

Here are 5 of the most popular, standalone feed reader applications for Linux. I didn't include feed readers which come with applications like Firefox, Opera or Thunderbird for example, but these can also be considered a viable alternative to the ones below.

Audacious is a powerful audio player for Linux which resembles the older XMMS, only using GTK2 toolkit for its interface. It supports XMMS and implicitly Winamp 2.x skins, coming with support for various audio formats, including MP3, Ogg Vorbis, FLAC (Free Lossless Audio Codec) or WMA (Windows Media Audio).

"First, if you are unfamiliar with the problem, go to YouTube, pick any video, and double-click on the video, or click on the little fullscreen icon, and you’ll see that the video begins to get really slow, and choppy, from dropping frames."

People contribute to free software in many ways. Some write the stuff; some write *about* the stuff, spreading the word; and some actually spread open source directly by giving away systems to those who need them. We hear a lot about the stars of first group, and the second group make a lot of noise on their own. But too often we take the third group for granted. I want to talk about one of the unsung heroes of open source – someone who has helped many, and now needs a little help from us.

If you are a Linux distributor, you have a number of possible ways to upset your user base. Breaking existing, well-established functionality is one of them. Another would be to install software which appears to be monitoring user activity behind their backs. Seeming to make money off of these activities will not help. Extra points are awarded for doing it all as a surprise. Ubuntu has risked all of the above with the "multisearch" Firefox extension included in the current "Karmic Koala" alpha release.