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Last week I talked a bit about the bipolar world of printing on Linux: the best of times, the worst of times; the easiest and the hardest; the most reliable and the most annoying. I raised a number of questions such as why do print jobs disappear without a trace, then reappear days later? Printing multiple copies, if you had hit the print button in frustration multiple times. Is this printer really online and working? Does it have enough toner and paper? If there is a problem, why won't it tell me in a reasonable way? Why isn't there an obvious, easy button for "cancel the print job plz, kthx"?

The iPhone and iPod Touch haven taken the mobile market by storm. Apple's AppStore is full of interesting applications that take advantage of the two devices's capabilities. But what's in there for Linux users? Sadly, GTKPod and Amarok cannot yet transfer files on an iPhone with the 2.x firmware upgrade, but there are other interesting ways your iPhone can interact with your Linux desktop and even servers.

All the time you hear the constant nagging "Backups! Backups! Always have good current backups!" But this is often easier said than done, especially in the world of expensive, restrictive, overly-complex proprietary backup applications. But, as usual, Free software takes a sensible, user-friendly approach to backups and recovery. Deann Corum shows us how to get started with Bacula, the powerful backup and recovery application that supports both tape and disk storage.

Wikipedia is one of the preeminent examples of what can be done in an open setting; it has, over the years, accumulated millions of articles - many of them excellent - in a large number of languages. Wikipedia also has a bit of a licensing problem, but it would appear that recent events, including the release of a new license by the Free Software Foundation, offers a way out.

Two years ago this month, Microsoft Corp. forged its controversial partnership with Novell Inc. that, among other things, had the two companies agreeing not to sue each other over intellectual property issues, in part to protect SUSE Linux users over any patent litigation from Microsoft. Just how well has that deal worked out? That depends on who you talk to. Microsoft and Novell paint nothing but a rosy picture of the arrangement. Customers "like the idea that Microsoft and Novell are in the same room," says Susan Hauser, Microsoft's general manager for strategic partnerships.

Here is a fairly new Linux distribution and like many new ones out there this distribution is based off of Ubuntu Linux. The installation was just an easy 7 steps just as most other Ubuntu based distributions. What makes this distribution stand out is the fact that most of the necessary Media Apps and Codecs are already installed for you so you do not have to do that for your self.

p://blog.internetnews.com/skerner/2008/11/php-zend-framework-17-adds-ado.html The open source Zend Framework 1.7 is now available expanding the PHP framework to work better with Adobe Flex and AIR applications. Adobe and Zend announced back in September that they would be collaborating for Zend Framework and now they've delivered.

It's no secret that Digium has recruited executives from ADTRAN, a neighboring networking company in Huntsville, Alabama. But here's another interesting trend: Some customers are starting to use ADTRAN and Digium Asterisk in tandem.

From its name, you'd never know that sK1 is a good vector graphics drawing program, in the same category as better-known names like Inkscape, Dia, and OpenOffice.org Draw. Moreover, sK1 includes a feature that other Linux applications lack: it can read CorelDraw's CDR files and convert them to Linux-friendly formats. sK1 derives its name from Sketch, a free vector graphics editor that appeared about 10 years ago. Sketch eventually became Skencil, but development seemingly got stuck (and eventually stopped) after version 0.6.17 in June 2005, when work was started on a port to GTK+. A group of Ukrainian programmers began working with the Skencil source code around 2003 and produced a fork that became sK1. The focus was to provide full support of professional printer requirements, such as the CMYK color model and PostScript and PDF formats.

Last year we hosted our first annual Linux Graphics Survey as really the only study that's been done to get a better understanding what the Linux community is using in their computers to fulfill their graphics needs, what their key interests are, and where they are looking for improvements. We're hosting this survey once again so we ask that between now and December 15 you take a few minutes to vote in the 2008 Linux graphics survey.

Sometimes it's nice to know the company you keep ;) Today we're going to shoot out a quick one liner script that can come in handy from time to time. It doesn't fall under the "necessary" category (or, maybe not even the "useful" one ;), but it's nice to have for those times when you just don't feel like doing any extra typing or expending the effort required to separate the wheat from the chaff on a screen full of garbage output. That is, as I've always understood, one of the main reasons to script things out in the first place.

There are many options available for Linux distros, over 500. Most of you can make into a server. However, if you are looking for the professional level server that, in my opinion, leads all other distros in functioning as a server then you need to investigate CentOS. Here is a list of the reasons that CentOS is top on my list for a server.

It's a small wonder that the Linux operating system remains vibrant in multiple industries and is poised to make a dash for more consumers' desktops, considering how often misunderstandings get in the way of its advancement. For instance, Linux was not immediately recognized as a real OS in the way that consumers and business owners viewed the Apple computer or IBM PC in the early days of computing.

Gone are the heady days of early Ubuntu releases when everything seemed new and fresh. Now you have to look a little deeper than the desktop wallpaper to see the changes Ubuntu is making.

I admit it, before hearing his name in connection with OLPC's G1G1 campaign and looking it up on Wikipedia I had no idea who that Tom Brady fellow was. But I now understand he's some kind of soccer American football player or something. ;-)

I have just finished a new book about free software. Excerpt: Given the technology that's already available, we should have cars that drive us around, in absolute safety, while we lounge in the back and sip champagne. All we need is a video camera on the roof, plugged into a PC, right? We have all the necessary hardware, and have had it for years, but don't yet have robot-driven cars because we don't have the software. This book explains how we can build better software and all get our own high-tech chauffeur.

I must say Linux Mint seems to always impress me with every new release. In this release Linux Mint has brought to us a new software manager called MintInstall, which allows you to browse the Mint Software portal offline, see screenshots that are available per package, and much more. Linux Mint has also brought you MintNanny, which allows you to control what domains are blocked.

The FreeBSD jail mechanism is an implementation of operating system-level virtualization that allows administrators to partition a FreeBSD-based computer system into several independent mini-systems called jails. FreeBSD jails offer security, ease of delegation and os level virtualization. This article explains how to upgrade FreeBSD jails using 'make world'.

Failure to virt-install F10 PV DomU and repeated issue with CentOS 5.2 in stub domain after same port via http://gitco.de ( upgrading only hypervisor to keep virt-install alive at Dom0 ) brought me to idea just go through traditional “hg” cloning mercurial repository at http://bits.xensource.com and build local Xen with 2.6.18.8-xen kernel

One of the more bizarre accusations flung by Microsoft at GNU/Linux over the years is that it doesn't scale. This is part of a larger campaign to portray it as a kind of “toy” operating system – fine for low-end stuff, but nothing you'd want to run your enterprise on. Sadly, that narrative has been rather undermined by the independent Top500 supercomputing sites ranking. Five years ago, the GNU/Linux family ran 36.80% of the top 500 supercomputers; worse, Windows ran on precisely one supercomputer.