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The quest for easy wireless client management on Linux continues; Eric Geier takes us on a tour of three Linux network management tools for managing roaming, profiles, and encryption keys.

FOSS (Free and Open Source Software) community rejoices today as google finally lived upto their promise of releasing the android source code. Now, the things that is left to be evaluated is that how much of it is actually true, or whether there are some binary blobs still in there.

Puppy Linux makes it easy to remaster its distribution, which probably explains the sheer number of Puppy Linux variants, called puplets, in the wild. Some of these puplets differ from the original only in offering different software bundles or use different window managers, while others target specific hardware platforms (for example, Pupeee). Minisys Linux, or Muppy, is an interesting puplet in the form of a modular Linux distro based on a Puppy Linux and Slackware 12 mix.

The problem these days is that the Linux SA's which WERE and ARE still highly regarded, are being flooded with LAZY admins that have and continue to flood the Networking and Microsoft world. In the past year I have met a few interesting Microsoft Engineers who actually knew the product very well besides the normal right click and actually knew how to script and automate ( This baffled me ).

Recently, there has been a lot of buzz surrounding the Moblin Project, designed to bring open source applications to mobile devices. Though the news generally focuses on big name distributions getting involved, Moblin still features the "community feel and involvement" that draws many to open source projects. One tool that Moblin offers the community to (hopefully) encourage participation is the Moblin Image Creator. The MIC allows developers to easily define projects, build them for mobile platforms, add applications and function sets to the target system images, and easily create images for live distributions (with the option of enabling rewrites/persistence), installation, or testing in virtual terminals.

With its EVO Smart Console, Envizions Computer Entertainment Corporation out of Atlanta, Georgia, has brought a Linux-based console to market that should appeal to both gamers and multimedia fans alike. The EVO Smart Console runs on the company’s Fedora 8 compatible Mirrors Evolution platform.

The GIMP -- the GNU Image Manipulation Program -- is one of the flagships of free software. On October 1 the project released version 2.6, with many new and improved features. Most of the user-visible features are just polish; the real changes are lurking under the hood. How you install the GIMP 2.6 depends on your distribution. Check your package manager to see if it's already available in a repository. If not, you can download it and build it from source using the usual ./configure && make && sudo make install routine.

Battered by competition and slowing demand, Sun Microsystems swung to a big loss in its fiscal first quarter, dragging the server and software maker's results below Wall Street's forecast. Sun also plans to write down the value of its business, a sign of the company's deteriorating competitive position and vulnerability to the economic meltdown.

Last month we had looked at the ATI Radeon HD 4670 under Linux. This graphics card had worked just fine with the Catalyst Linux Suite, but when using either of the two open-source ATI drivers there were problems with the DVI connectors. While using an analog VGA connector works if you are just after mode-setting support, the R600/700 GPUs still lack 2D, 3D, and video acceleration using any non-Catalyst driver. Sapphire Technology though has sent out an ATI Radeon HD 4550 512MB GPU to see whether this sub-$50 USD graphics card plays nicely with the xf86-video-ati or xf86-video-radeonhd drivers.

The Xbox Media Center (XBMC) is a media center application for Linux, Mac, and Windows that allows you to manage/watch/listen to/view your videos, music, and pictures. It has a nice interface, can be controlled from the desktop or a remote control or via its built-in web interface, and it can be extended by custom scripts. This guide shows how you can install XBMC on a Fedora 9 desktop (i386).

As more and more consumers download smartphone applications, it's become increasingly vital for developers, phone makers and wireless carriers to have a deeper understanding of how customers interact with them. That's where a company like Flurry comes in. The San Francisco-based startup has developed software that gives demographic information about mobile application consumers.

It is good practice to use a different password for each Web site you need to log in to. Good passwords tend to be long and contain a wide selection of characters. That can make remembering all your passwords difficult. But you can make things easier on yourself by storing passwords for various Web sites in an encrypted file on your computer. I'll take a look at a four programs that give you easy access to your passwords when you need them and protect the password file itself against compromise.

A couple of weeks ago we wrote that a mobile edition of Firefox was expected within weeks. Well, now there is an alpha version of Fennec. We decided to give the little fox a spin to see what exactly the Firefox team had been up to over the past few months.

Independent software vendors (ISVs) in the mobile space face increasing pressure to build business models around open source, but need to weigh risks in adopting a suitable strategy, says analyst firm Ovum.

International Data Corporation (IDC) has analyzed PC sales figures for EMEA in the third quarter of 2008 and discovered that netbooks are responsible for more than half the nearly 30% sales growth. Linux is to ride along on the wave, which is to remain at its current level.

This weekend the xf86-video-intel 2.4.98 driver was released with hopes of releasing the Intel 2.5.0 driver on Monday. This driver is arriving a bit late compared to its original target of last month, but it's now available. This open-source Intel X.Org driver update features GEM integration (on supported systems), kernel mode-setting (on supported systems), improved EXA 2D performance, and quite a number of bug-fixes.

Engine Yard, a software developer of cloud deployment and open source tools for Ruby on Rails applications, last week released an open source framework for building fast, high-performance Ruby applications. Called"Merb," the programming tool is similar to Ruby on Rails. Merb is an MVC framework.

We gave Solaris zfs the treatment. Now it's time to go after those zones ;) A while ago (back in May, 2008, I believe), we took a look at working with storage pools using ZFS on Solaris 10. As we know, ZFS stands for the Zettabyte File System and not the Zone File System (which some folks think it does. Not criticizing. It makes more sense than a lot of other things you might get from those initials ;). The point being, we never stopped to take a look at zones and lay down some simple procedures for working with them.

Dutch Linux consultant Armijn Hemel clarifies in his recently issued GPL Compliance Engineering Guide how to check for GPL breaches of electronic devices.

Slowly but surely, Canonical plans to add a range of third-party Ubuntu Linux applications to the company's online store. The strategy could convince more businesses and VARs to deploy Ubuntu Server Edition, reports The VAR Guy.