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"Business gets done between people who get along."
-Bill Joy, co-founder of Sun Microsystems (paraphrased from an interview)

It is easy to focus on the purely technical side of engineering: design, coding, documentation, licensing issues, and the release process. The interpersonal aspects of engineering also have a vital part to play. An important and frequently overlooked part of the successful free/libre and open source (F/LOSS) enterprise are the soft skills of communication, administration, and relationship building.

URL rewriting allows you to tailor URLs for search engine optimization, maintain backwards compatibility with old archives, and make your URLs short and friendly. Sukrit Dhandhania's introduction us to Apache's powerful mod-rewrite for customizing and managing URLs.

PDF Christian Einfeldt Microsoft is at the beginning of a major product launch, called Bing, in an attempt to catch up to Google in search, following the collapse of Microsoft's take-over attempt of Yahoo. While Bing is a re-branding of Microsoft's clunky distant third place "Live Search" search service, Bing is also an attempt to add new features to search. Microsoft calls Bing a decision engine, in that it purports to offer more comparisons in its search results, rather than the simple blue links which have characterized search up to the recent arrival of Wolfram Alpha. But rather than a search engine or even a "decision engine", Bing also appears to be a spin engine, in that it provides partisan answers to controversial topics, such as Steve Ballmer's propensity to throw chairs to blow off stress.

Getting together information The only problem I encountered at first is getting together the information to know exactly what to use and how to use it. I started by reading the sources for some programs I found on my system and debugging them to learn the way they are processed. This was a great learning experience, my knowledge has quickly expanded by doing this. Still there were some important things I really needed to help me trough the learning process. I needed good reference material, examples and a book. Sadly enough there doesn't seem to be any printed book about perl-Gtk, luckily I did find some great tutorials on the perl-Gtk site. I also found some other helpful tools and resources by accident.

Developer Michael Prokop has announced the release of grml 2009.05, codenamed Lackdose-Allergie. grml is a Debian based Linux distribution that's specifically aimed at system administrators and users of text tools, such as awk, sed, grep, zsh, mutt[ng], slrn, vim and many others. The release features several new boot options, including the persistent boot option which allows users to easily store their settings and reuse them on reboot, avoiding the older config framework. The new findiso option searches for ISO files on all disks and the bsd option allows users to boot the minimal MirOS BSD operating system and run the minimalistic hardware detection tool (HDT).

Sun is set to launch the latest version of OpenSolaris, tuning it for the enterprise with a new support contract, processor support, and networking and storage technology. Sun, which is in the process of being acquired by Oracle, is expected to introduce OpenSolaris 2009.06 on Monday at the CommunityOne developer conference in San Francisco. OpenSolaris is the open source version of Solaris, and previously it has been aimed mainly at developers and as a platform for testing features that will later make their way into Solaris itself.

There's been quite a bit of hubub about the KDE project ever since the 4.0 release last year. Critics have slammed the 4.0 series repeatedly, citing the mentality of "Well, it's not good enough to be a full release.". Between the poor publicity, the crashes in Plasma, and the still-developing early features, KDE was definitely not having a good time. Developer blogs were plastered with hateful comments, and one of my favorite devs Aaron Seigo had to temporarily shut down his blog. However, for all the bad rap that the 4.0 series received, KDE has grown wonderfully.

Red Hat has opened Sun Microsystems' annual week of Java activities with an application server strategy targeting fellow open-sourcer SpringSource. The company, which made its name in the Linux business, has added a third server to its JBoss application server and middleware family targeting what it called "mid-sized" workloads. JBoss Enterprise Web Platform slots between Red Hat's existing JBoss Enterprise Application Platform and the Enterprise Web Server, while retaining the enterprise-edition's clustering, caching, persistence, and security the company said Monday.

In my last article about Xorg, I touched upon several points that have been in a state of continual flux in Xorg. Here’s a follow-up on that article, as it seems to have generated quite a lot of interest. However, I didn’t expand much on some features and their implications, so I will do so here. I will, also, touch upon a few improvements other than pure graphics. Read the full article at Free Software Magazine.

The Elive Team is proud to announce the release of the development version 1.9.28

• Partitions: Better detection and listing of the partitions for the live mode and the installer. If you encounter any problem since this version of Elive, please report it!.
• Raid: Now the fake-hardware (featured by the motherboard Bios) RAID disks are supported (thanks to the help and tests of watchwolf). A small help about RAID (software mode) is added in the installer describing how to install Elive on raid devices.
• Macbooks: We have switched from Lilo to Grub, in the previous versions of Elive you saw that sometimes the system doesn't boot anymore after running the fine-tune step because of some problems with lilo. This is now solved by using grub.
• Installer: The development is now all concentrated on the installer, with a large number of minor bugfixes and features.

An ASUS Eee PC prototype with a Snapdragon chip-set and running the open source Android operating system has been sighted at Computex Taipei, the Taiwan trade show. Qualcomm refers to designs using the ARM based Snapdragon chip-set as 'smartbooks' and expects to see Snapdragon based smartbook devices available in Autumn 2009. The chip-set/smartbook specification lists 3G connectivity, Wi-Fi, 3D graphics, Bluetooth and GPS among its defining features.

grml is a Debian-based Live-CD. It includes a collection of GNU/Linux software especially for system administrators and users of texttools. grml provides automatic hardware detection. You can use grml for example as a rescue system, for analyzing systems/networks or as a working environment. It is not necessary to install anything to a harddisk, you don't even need a harddisk to run it, unless you want to. Due to on-the-fly decompression grml includes more than 2GB of software and documentation on the CD.

I suspect that Windows is slowly killing the netbook concept. I realized this when I walked into a big computer shop and saw the following sign beside the Netbooks aisle: please note that these computer have reduced functionality and will not run games. After investigation it seems that the sign was put there by the salesmen because...

iPhone, BlackBerry, Symbian, WinMo, Android -- the world is awash in smartphone platforms, and this fragmented landscape is a pain for developers, who have to build an app four or five times in order to reach all users, as well as enterprises, which have to pay for the work. However, if the mobile browser world were to rally around WebKit, could it be the answer to simplified mobile development?

The OpenStreentMap Project has announced that it now has translations in German and partially in French on its main OpenStreetMap site. The project, run by the OpenStreetMap Foundation, is an open source project that is building free online maps, not based on any copyright or licensed map data. The project was started in August of 2004 and has become increasingly popular.

Welcome to OpenOffice.org, the world-class office suite that’s also free and open source. This is your new-user orientation. Read on to discover support, tutorials, community insights, templates, clip art, extensions, and blogs.

It has only been one week since the release of Phoronix Test Suite 2.0 Alpha 2, but we happen to be ahead of schedule on the third (and possibly the final) alpha release for 2.0 Sandtorg. In the past eight days there has actually been a very large number of changes to the Phoronix Test Suite, both to pts-core and the included test profiles and suites.

The Gimp FX Foundry SourceForce project made it its assignment to provide scripts for porting into the current GIMP or allow creating them from scratch. The scripts allow GIMP graphics to be endowed with special effects, such as blurring or distorting them in certain ways. The Foundry now provides 117 new scripts for GIMP 2.6 that are not part of the graphic software's standard installation.

The Eclipse Foundation, a not-for-profit, member supported corporation that hosts the Eclipse projects, recently announced the Eclipse Community Survey 2009 in The Open Source Developer Report. According to the report, Linux has become the most common deployment platform for the developer community. There is a shift from the Microsoft Windows to Linux and Mac OSX for their desktop development operating system.

An article in the Wall Street Journal says that European Commissioner for Competition Neelie Kroes is considering imposing tighter regulations on Microsoft. It says the company could be compelled to package browsers that compete with Internet Explorer, with its Windows operating system. Jonathan Todd, a Commission spokesman, had stated similar considerations publicly in February. A response from Microsoft was still being considered at that time, but it evidently made no impression on Commissioner Kroes.