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LXer Feature: 11-Feb-2009

This weekend, the 9th Free & Open Source Developers' Europe Meeting (FOSDEM) took place at the Université Libre Bruxelles (ULB) in Brussels. Your editors Sander Marechal and Hans Kwint attended this meeting to find out for you what's hot, new in the area of the Linux environment and might be coming to you in the near future.

Here is the blow-by-blow of the first day with talks about Mozilla's future, the role of Debian, two OSI talks, Reverse engineering and much, much more.

Inspired by Roku's awesome Netflix video download box and impressed with Boxee's free A/V media center platform, it was merely a matter of time before I'd create the BoxeeBox, an Ubuntu-powered HTPC that I call my "one box to rule them all." Here's how it's done.

Do you know what’s happening in middleware? Budget crunch keeping you from attending industry gatherings? Bring the conference to your desktop. Take a minute (or a few hours) and attend the JBoss Virtual Experience.

Audacity is a free opensource audio editing and recording software. Audacity can run on Linux, Windows and Mac OSX. Audacity can manipulate digital audio wave forms. In addition to recording sounds directly from within the program, it imports many sound file formats, including WAV, AIFF, AU, IRCAM, MP, and Ogg Vorbis.

Screen is great for letting you start a terminal session, walk away from it, and then come back later. Maybe you need to start a long running process such as a complicated data conversion or a multi-hour build. You can use screen to start the ball rolling, go home, and resume the already-in-progress and uninterrupted activity that you started at work. Jeremy M. Jones shows us how.

Some skeptics say you can't make money from open source. But Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst has offered up two key financial metrics to prove growth and profitability are a reality for well-run open source companies. Here's the scoop.

Every now and then somebody attempts to debunk the usual Linux myths. Having quite some experience in that area I have a good idea of what will happen. If your article is picked up by the Windows community, you will get quite some comments. In order to save them some time and possibly prevent them from causing a devastating BSOD I've decided to collect their comments and publish them here, so they just need to reference this page.

"With so much turmoil today, the good news is that there are more areas of opportunity for new products and services than ever. The even better news is that most of these opportunities won't attract venture capital."

Periodically, we here at OStatic like to round up our ongoing collections of open source resources, tutorials, reviews and project walkthroughs. These educational tools are a central part of the goal here at the site. We regularly round up the best Firefox extensions, free online books on open source topics, free tools for web developers, resources for online video and audio, Linux tutorials, and much more. In this post, you'll find more than 30 collections and resources. Hopefully, there is something right up your alley here, and the good news is that everything you'll find is free.

Czech kernel developer Pavel Machek wants to be root on his T-Mobile G1 Android Linux mobile phone so that he can exploit security holes simply to extend usability of the phone.

How Linux and the open source community contribute to the world of cloud computing. Cloud computing and storage convert physical resources (like processors and storage) into scalable and shareable resources over the Internet (computing and storage "as a service"). Although not a new concept, virtualization makes this much more scalable and efficient through the sharing of physical systems through server virtualization. Cloud computing gives users access to massive computing and storage resources without their having to know where those resources are or how they're configured. As you might expect, Linux® plays a huge role. Discover cloud computing, and learn why there's a penguin behind that silver lining.

GSmartControl is a graphical user interface for smartctl (from Smartmontools package), which is a tool for querying and controlling S.M.A.R.T. (Self-Monitoring, Analysis, and Reporting Technology) data on modern hard disk drives. It allows you to inspect the drive's S.M.A.R.T. data to determine its health, as well as run various tests on it.

Rob Savoye has been engaged in numerous projects, but in his work on Gnash, a free implementation of the Adobe Flash Player, he found a hard nut to crack: how to decipher the protocol details of the Real Time Messaging Protocol (RTMP) it uses. He has now presented his solution at the FOSDEM '09 conference in Belgium.

Just as Google’s CEO Eric Schmidt hinted over the past few months, Google is moving from managing the world’s information to managing your personal energy data. On Monday night Google tells us it is developing an online tool called “PowerMeter” that will allow users to monitor their home energy consumption. For now Google is testing the web-based software with Google employees, but the search engine giant is looking to partner with utilities and smart energy device makers and will eventually roll out the tool to consumers.

More than a year ago, the netbooks took the hardware world by assault. What at first looked like an innocent mini laptop, turned out to be the best thing that happened to hardware providers in the last five years. It all started with Asus and their EeePC, and now there isn't a big name in the industry that hasn't either already started a line of netbooks or planning to launch one soon. From Acer to Dell to more underground firms, companies try to offer the cheapest and smallest laptops, providing at the same time functionality needed by today's standards.

Colin Turner is a dedicated Free Software activist and Fellowship member, working as a scientist and teacher at the University of Ulster in Northern Ireland. He has been advocating Free Software in schools and universities for many years and generously shared some of his experiences with us in this fourth instalment of our Fellowship interview series.

How to install ATI fglrx driver in debian. Fglrx is a proprietary, Linux binary-only driver for ATI graphic chips with support for 3D acceleration..This tutorial will explain How to install ATI fglrx driver in debian.

The vast majority of questions I get about combining GPL and proprietary software concern embedded systems, since Linux is a component of so many consumer products these days. It's impressive, for instance, to look at Sony's web site where they fulfill their GPL obligation, and see the dozens of TV models and many other products that contain Linux. So, this discussion concerns primarily embedded systems. (Desktop and server applications really only have one path to keeping Open Source and proprietary products separate: make them physically separate programs, each with its own license. Fortunately, most of the libraries on a Linux system are under licenses that allow them to be combined with a proprietary program without trouble.)

This weekend, I decided to check out GNOME Do’s latest 0.8 release with the new Docky task bar. As someone who has managed to avoid all the launcher hype bestowed on programs such as Launch Box, Quicksilver and Ubiquity, I have to admit that in the beginning, I was more than a little bit skeptical about GNOME Do. How useful can this program really be?

Work can be stressful. Take some time off and tune a NIC ;) Hope you're having an enjoyable Friday and are looking forward to getting out of the office just as badly as I am. It's a long story, but I can't even begin to explain how close I came to just snapping like a twig and going incendiary on my cubicle, the office, the parking lot, the CostCo down the street and pretty much the entire business district.