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People who use laptops often need different configurations. They may want the option of removing their external display, docking station, or other peripheral. In some cases, like with network cards, it's quite easy and normally the user doesn't need to modify anything. In some cases the user needs to execute some commands to modify the default behavior. Normally when you need to re-execute the same command twice it's time to write a script and put it in the right place to be executed in the right moment.

This is WFTL Bytes!, your occasiodaily FOSS and Linux news show for Wednesday, December 3, 2008, with your host, Marcel Gagné. In today's news, not only is Linux apparently broken, so is the open source business model. Mandriva falls on hard times again, viruses cripple US military base, Microsoft pays for recommending them, OpenSUSE throws out the EULA, the costs of piracy, and a new browser war.

After many years of development, the Songbird open source software is finally released as version 1.0. Multimedia player Songbird is one among a group of Mozilla Foundation tools with Linux versions for 32-bit and 64-bit systems.

This tutorial shows how you can set up a Fedora 10 desktop (GNOME) that is a full-fledged replacement for a Windows desktop, i.e. that has all the software that people need to do the things they do on their Windows desktops. The advantages are clear: you get a secure system without DRM restrictions that works even on old hardware, and the best thing is: all software comes free of charge.

Hi All, Here's the 17th tip in the "OpenLDAP Quick Tips" series: "You've successfully built your own instance of OpenLDAP but want to make sure you've done it right":

Not long ago the Moonlight development team announced that the Linux Silverlight adaptation was drawing ever nearer to the 1.0 release. On December 1st, the Moonlight 1.0 beta version was released.

While Novell may be the second largest commercial Linux distributor, it still gets the bulk of its sales off of NetWare and related products. The Open Enterprise Server hybrid, which puts NetWare services on top of SUSE Enterprise Linux, bridges the gap for Novell, and today, OES got a service pack to make it more appealing. The company also announced that it has merged its ZENworks systems management tools with its recently acquired PlateSpin virtualization management tools and put them under a single PlateSpin brand.

Michael Geist describes his film: "The open source software movement figures prominently - Red Hat co-founder Bob Young describes the role of copyright policy in the development of Linux, while Russell McOrmond, who leads a Canadian open source group, explains the effects of DMCA-style laws. Why Copyright? Canadian Voices on Copyright Law, which I produced together with Daniel Albahary, features a wide range of Canadian voices."

If you've recently switched from Windows to the Linux distribution Ubuntu, you've probably experienced a decrease in spyware -- and malware in general -- on your system. But although Ubuntu is billed as the ultra-secure solution, you should know that even though Ubuntu's default install has its flaws, like every other operating system. To combat these weaknesses, IT Security has prepared a guide to help you close your system's backdoors and protect you from some of the common Ubuntu exploits.

Virtual Bridges and Canonical today announced general availability of a Linux-desktop solution designed to drive significant savings compared with Microsoft-desktop software by amplifying Lotus collaboration software and Ubuntu to a larger user base through virtualization.

There are many reasons why you would want to generate bogus data for your database. Perhaps you’d like to know how well your databases will perform when filled with data, or maybe you just need some data so that you can start creating a front end for the database. I recently ran into the problem of not wanting to generate lots of data manually. I initially thought that I would write a shell script to do this, but figured I might as well look around first. I stumbled across a program called Spawner which is great for generating data for database testing.

The Alfresco Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) whitepaper, based on publicly available pricing from a range of vendors, shows how it is possible to save, in the first year of implementation (based on a 1000 user configuration) up to 89 percent of the cost of SharePoint purchases and up to 96 percent of the cost of other ECM solutions by using Alfresco's open source ECM. The whitepaper aims to demystify some of the complexity around current proprietary ECM pricing and demonstrate how choosing and implementing an open source ECM solution can be a transparent and cost-effective process.

With the end of the year approaching fast, it is easy to look back, but hard to look forward. The question, though, is not what will happen, but what you want to happen in this coming year? What would you like to see happen to Linux in 2009?

Teri Takai, California CIO: "We’re going to be moving away from some of our older mainframe technologies, running on COBOL. We’re moving definitely towards greater use of open source, to either a dot-net of Java environment for development. We’re moving towards many more services as self-service.."

With the JShot screen capture and uploader utility, you can quickly put all or part of your screen on the Web and send a URL to it to a friend. JShot is free for noncommercial use, and is great when you want to show people a screen capture and don't want to have to deal with file names and upload permissions.

You can protect yourself from everybody some of the time and some people all of the time, but you can't protect yourself from mother ;) Today's post is going to be about security on Linux and Unix, since we're building up to doing some work with CAPTCHA in the near future and need to keep ourselves awake and interested ;) To be more specific, today's post is going to deal with site, and user, security on the Internet (although you could apply these examples to various arenas).

With the EXT4 file-system being marked as stable in the forthcoming Linux 2.6.28 kernel, and some Linux distributions potentially switching to it as an interim step until the btrfs file-system is ready, we decided it was time to benchmark this journaled file-system for ourselves. We ran a number of disk-centric Linux benchmarks along with several of our real-world tests from the Phoronix Test Suite to gauge how well the EXT4 file-system performance will be noticed by desktop users and computer gamers. We have compared these EXT4 results to the EXT3, XFS, and ReiserFS file-systems.

If you’ve shied away from Linux because of the hassle of working with removable media, you may want to take another look. Thanks to automation — and with the help of these tips — you may find that removable media is downright user friendly.

Within the next 12 years, 40 percent of IT jobs will be related to open source, and open source-based cloud computing will be solving many problems in the real world, open source advocates have predicted.

How to dual-boot Windows XP and Linux, on a system where you have already installed XP. Easy step-by-step tutorial that doesn't assume prior knowledge of Linux.