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For those of you who think Google Wave is all that and a bag of chips, I put on the brakes and give you a few questions to ponder.

This guide shows how you can install and use BleachBit on an Ubuntu 9.04 desktop to delete unnecessary files. BleachBit deletes unnecessary files (such as cache, cookies, Internet history, localizations, logs, temporary files, and broken shortcuts) to free valuable disk space, maintain privacy, and remove junk. It wipes clean Adobe Reader, APT, Bash, Beagle, Chromium, Epiphany, Firefox, Flash, GIMP, Google Earth, Java, KDE, OpenOffice.org, Opera, RealPlayer, Second Life viewer, Skype, VIM, XChat, Yum, and more.

LXer Feature: 01-Jun-2009

We have a lot of big stories is this week's roundup like the news that the U.S. Army has decided to upgrade from MS Office 2003 to MS Office 2007 and Vista in order to “bolster Internet security”, which begs the question, why isn't the entire military already using SELinux? For those who want to learn some Linux/Unix history and happen to have spare 40ft wall, then this poster might be for you, and SourceForge takes down the rtmpdump project after receiving a cease-and-desist notice from Adobe.

Novell, having reported its second quarter financial results yesterday after Wall Street closed, said it had inked a deal with Dallas-based Affiliated Computer Services to have that outsourcer take over its ERP systems and related data center in Provo, Utah. While the operating system supplier is headquartered back in Waltham, Massachusetts, a big chunk of its operations are still back in Provo. And in an effort to cut costs and to get ACS on board using Novell's products in its outsourcing engagements, Novell has cut a two-way deal with the outsourcing firm.

There was a time when SCO was a great company. No. Seriously. SCO Unix was a great Unix for x86 systems, and, for a brief shining moment it looked like SCO would bring together the best things of both Unix and Linux. Then, SCO's ownership got it into their heads that trying to take IBM, Red Hat, Novell, and anyone who else who used Linux was a great plan. Ha! As Pamela Jones, editor of Groklaw, points out, SCO appears to be heading towards Chapter 7 Bankruptcy. For those of you who don't know, Chapter 7 can be thought of as the Go to Jail card in the game Monopoly. "Go directly to Jail. Do not pass Go. Do not collect $200." Or, go out of business; do not come back; please leave the plumbing in the restrooms on your way out the door.

Truong Nguyen Quang has announced the release of Hacao Linux 4.21, a beginner-friendly, Vietnamese desktop Linux distribution based on Puppy Linux and supporting Intel Classmate PC and other low-cost portable computers. This version is based on the recently released Puppy Linux 4.2.1, but has been modified to include full support for Vietnamese and other enhancements designed for the local market. The release comes in two editions - the 120 MB "Standard" edition includes Unicode support, Unikey, Font and Stardict, while the 319 MB "Pro" edition also contains OpenOffice.org 3.0.1, a Vietnamese spell-checking utility, Skype with video support, the GIMP image manipulation program, WINE for running Windows software, and other popular software applications.

GNU Screen is a terminal multiplexer program that Linux folk have used for ages. It allows you to turn one terminal into many, and run processes even after logging out. In this article we will give a brief overview of screen usage for the uninitiated, then talk about how Ubuntu's defaults and new screen-profiles package have taught us about new and wonderful features of screen.

The GNU C library (or glibc) is a fundamental component of the Linux operating system. It provides much of the user-space interface to the kernel as well as a sizable portion of the utility routines that are used by virtually all Linux applications. A variant of glibc—known as Embedded glibc or EGLIBC—is not very well known outside of the embedded space, but that looks to be changing with the announcement that Debian will switch from glibc to EGLIBC.

Sometimes, you just have to let go. Not all Netbackup media management problems can be solved by the book

Adobe Systems is today expected to release code for an environment to unify design and development, plus code and a major re-branding for its next Flash and AIR RIA tool. The company will that announce Flash Catalyst, previously codenamed Thermo, is available as a public beta. Accompanying Flash Catalyst is beta code for Flex Builder 4.0, the next version of Adobe's Eclipse-based IDE that's yielded to the marketing iron and emerged as Flash Builder.

Now ready for testing Tiny Core V2.0 Release Candidate 4 and introducing MicroCore a 7MB no X environment iso based on Tiny Core.

Database vendor Ingres has teamed up with Red Hat to offer an open source developer stack with features intended to be comparable to proprietary offerings from the likes of IBM or Oracle. The Ingres Development Stack for JBoss combines the Ingres database with Red Hat's JBoss Developer Studio and JBoss Enterprise Application Platform. This allows the development of Java applications and provides the middleware and database software to support those applications, Ingres said in an announcement.

The New Zealand Open Source Society is calling on Auditor-General to scrutinise government procurement of Microsoft software after the collapse of negotiations for a new three-year all-of-government software licensing deal.

The stream editor, sed, is a filtering program that automates repetitive editing tasks and is used to process information sent from other Linux commands in pipes. In the simplest form sed looks like...

D*I*Y Planner Dynamic Templates is a nifty little application that comes with a few handy templates you can tweak and save as ready-to-use PDF documents.

PLplot is a cross-platform software package for creating scientific plots that has been in continuous development since its inception 17 years ago. On May 23, 2009 the PLplot developers quietly celebrated our ten thousandth commit since our initial software repository was populated back in May 1992.

Back in April, we looked at the Linux kernel patches for Intel's Trusted Execution Technology (TXT), a mechanism to verify the integrity of the kernel before booting it. Since that time, another version of the patchset has surfaced. The relatively few comments on the feature were largely concerned that there might be opposition to its inclusion—not because of technical considerations, but instead because of ethical concerns about what TXT could enable.

[Well, this should start a conversation or two.. - Scott]

The Swiss News Agency (SDA) reported on Thursday, 28 May, that the Swiss Federal Administrative Court had issued an immediately enforceable ruling ("Superprovisorische Verfügung") that stops the award of a large federal government order to Microsoft. The Swiss Federal Office for Construction and Logistics (BBL) had previously awarded an order to Microsoft for the extension of licences, maintenance and support worth 42 million Swiss francs, without putting it out to public tender. Many open-source firms – including the Linux suppliers Red Hat, Univention and Collax and the groupware specialists Zarafa and Open-Xchange – objected to this award procedure.

One of the most exciting developments in the last few years has been the application of some of the core ideas of free software and open source to completely different domains. Examples include open content, open access, open data and open science. More recently, those principles are starting to appear in a rather surprising field: that of government, as various transparency initiatives around the world start to gain traction.

A new release of Blender, the immensely popular open-source 3D modeling software, is now available. This is not the much-anticipated Blender 2.5 release, but instead version 2.49, which brings forth several prominent changes and improvements while the developers continue work on the next major release. As part of the 2.49 release, the Blender Game Engine (BGE) has also received improvements too.