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Linux users are not an easy bunch to profile or to count. Many Linux users download the operating system for free and never perform any kind of systems registration to enumerate their hardware. That's where Smolt may be able to help fill the gap. Smolt is an open source hardware profiling technology that is already being used by Red Hat's Fedora and is set for inclusion in the upcoming Novell OpenSUSE 11.1 release.Ubuntu is currently considering Smolt as well.

Much is being said about Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer's comments on open source in Australia this week. As GigaOm notes, Ballmer took a bold swipe at Google's Android platform while speaking Down Under, but he also directly said he found open source browser engines "interesting." Among other things implied here, there could be some big changes in how browsers compete.

Sometimes just seeing what's laying about can be more interesting than you thought :) It's been a while since we touched on network port-knocking, like we did back in December in our post on non-maliciously scanning for open network ports. And, in all that time, we've gotten sidetracked so many different ways we're just now getting around to addressing the complement to mass-querying network ports on other hosts in our network (hosts run by folks who, of course, don't mind if we query all of their machine's ports.

Open source office suite needs some decent open and royalty-free clip arts. This tutorial presents valuable clip art repositories and an extension which enables direct downloading of graphics into the OpenOffice.org documents.

Web developers have many options for the servlet containers they use to host Java apps. Included in these choices are both classic proprietary and a host of open source containers. For the typical Java application developer, the container that holds one or more Java applications together is fairly transparent. From a non-techy's perspective, servlet containers are largely redundant.

There is one universal truth in desktop computing, regardless of operating system: There are more music players out there than you'd be inclined to try (never mind use) on a regular basis. Some focus on the simpler, basic functions, and others strive for improved music and media management and delivery. A few of these players achieve their goals and gain a loyal user base. More fall short and get lost in the noise. New music players, then, need something distinctive (that's well developed and delivered) to draw new users, and keep them coming back.

The T-Mobile G1 has been jailbroken, or at least root has been obtained in a few simple steps to provide full read and write system access to the device. It's easier than you might imagine.

Many network-attached storage (NAS) devices, in addition to offering network storage, offer features such as VPN access, calendaring, wikis, and even an iTunes server. The open source Amahi Linux Home Server provides all of that and more in a complete NAS box integrated with a Fedora 9 base.

Let's say you are on an expensive satellite link that can barely provide enough bandwidth for your company's Internet access and you will want to do whatever you can to get as much as possible out of this link. Moreover, occasionally you lose power from the utility company, long enough for your UPS to run out. There are a few things you could do to get a lot more from your link. In this article, we will be looking at speeding up your dns requests by keeping a cache of responses to your dns requests on your hard disk. Subsequent dns request are then served from the cache and because a copy is on disk, you don't lose it when there is a power outage or a reboot.

Asustek is not a name most people know. The Taiwan-based hardware maker traditionally operates in the PC-board sector. But a few years ago the company began to make its own notebook PCs. Branded Asus, the initial slew of notebooks escaped most people’s attention, except geeks who already knew of Asustek’s good reputation in the PC-board market.

Phoronix Test Suite 1.4 "Orkdal" will be released tomorrow, and while this release is coming just two months after the release of Phoronix Test Suite 1.2, there are in fact quite a few changes for this Q4'08 release. In two months time we have pushed out five development releases of Orkdal, there are over 220 official changes, and the diff output between the Malvik and Orkdal releases amount to over 20,000 lines of code. The most prominent features in Orkdal are compatibility the Mac OS X operating system, support for Cascading Test Profiles, support for Self-Contained Test Profiles, new modules being added, updates to all in-tree test profiles, WINE test coverage, and improved hardware/software detection.

Sun Microsystems has released the updated 5.1 version of the MySQL open source database software it recent acquired, promising improved performance and management of larger database applications. "If our users initially choose MySQL because of its low cost, they continue to use MySQL for its high performance, scalability and broad platform support," said Marten Mickos, Sun's SVP of its database group. "MySQL 5.1 continues this tradition by performing up to 15 percent faster than previous versions in our own internal tests--making it a compelling solution for demanding Web-based enterprise applications."

A major technology distributor is evaluating ways to work more closely with Sun Microsystems' portfolio of open source software. Here’s the scoop, only from The VAR Guy.

This article documents the steps, with a working example, for how to use gettext as a translation management system for a static website. For the impatient, it's boiled down to 11 steps at the end.

Hi All, I might as well start easing back into the OpenLDAP Weekly Newsletter by doing some "OpenLDAP Quick Tips". Here's the first one.

With the festive season approaching, you might want to make decorative labels for presents or christmas cards. It is easy to make labels in OpenOffice and, if you have the Open Clipart collection installed, you can choose from a wide range of graphics to decorate them.

It's been coming along for some time, but today RPM Fusion has officially launched as the premiere third-party RPM repository for Fedora and Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) users. The Dribble, FreshRPMs, and Livna repositories had merged to form RPM Fusion...

Support for RESTful Web services, JBoss Seam and Java refactorings and code inspections are among the new features in IntelliJ IDEA 8, JetBrains' Java IDE for Linux, Mac OS X and Windows that began shipping today. If you're not familiar, JetBrains' raison d'être is to make an integrated development environment that keeps developers productive and integrates tightly with other open source development tools such as Ant, JUnit and Subversion.

A. Lizard's in-depth howto on setting up secure remote graphical desktops wraps up today with the final server and client setup, and how to get through firewalls.

Kid3 is a free opensource tool to easily tag multiple MP3 files (e.g. full albums) without typing the same information again and again and allow you to control and edit ID3v1 and ID3v2 tags. It’s one of those things I started doing so enthusiatically and then give up after a few tracks and finally this should help me get around this.