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About 30 years ago, we Earthlings sent a probe to check out Mercury, the tiny planet closest to the sun, and concluded that it was just a big hot rock. But after poking around on the moon and Mars for a few decades, we decided to take another look at Mercury.

Support for transparent decompression of files on optical media has been part of the Linux kernel since version 2.4.14. Here's how you can take advantage of this support when you burn your own optical media by using the mkzftree tool and the -z option to genisoimage. These commands compress files using zlib, which uses the same algorithm as gzip. Using the transparent compression Rock Ridge extension can allow you to fit much more data onto a DVD.

The Bash shell is famous for having more great features and shortcuts than we can ever learn. Juliet Kemp shares some shortcuts to speed up common tasks.

If you want to keep tabs on your deadlines, you don't need a fancy project management application -- often, a simple spreadsheet can do the job. To see how, let's create a spreadsheet that tracks task deadlines, shows the current status of each task, and highlights scheduling conflicts. In the process we'll learn a few useful Calc techniques.

News emerged recently that Qt Software (formerly Trolltech) were working on their first IDE for Qt, code named Project Greenhouse. Today saw the release of the first technical preview under the name Qt Creator. The initial release is binary only, and under the terms of the Qt preview license, but the final release will be released with source code under a GPL compatible license. The initial release is available for Linux, Mac OS X and MS Windows. Read on for a users review.

Intrepid Ibex, the codename for Ubuntu 8.10, has today finally reached the pinnacle, without hesitation. Although the new version of the popular Linux distribution hasn't won any new altitude records, it still brings along a number of interesting features to make life easier for users and administrators. High among these features are some rejuvenated programs.

Sun Microsystems came in just under the wire with its Solaris 10 10/08 update, squeezing it out on the last day of the month. The company had intended to do the launch a few days ago, but pushed it out to the other side of its Q1 financial results. The 10/08 update is not a major release, something that Sun has not put into the field since Solaris 10 came out in January 2005. Now that the OpenSolaris development edition of Sun's Unix is out, after a few releases of this development code, Sun is expected to take an OpenSolaris snapshot and take it inside the corporate firewall and harden it and test the living daylights out of it to make what Sun calls "Solaris Next."

To load Ubuntu Intrepid Server PV DomU via serial console "pvops" kernel and ramdisk usually gets copied to Xen 3.3 Dom0. Parameters specifying root file system at image device and hvc0 console are also supposed to be included into startup profile at Dom0. At the same time all mentioned parameters may be specified via new entry into /boot/grub/menu.lst located at DomU, been placed into corresponding entry kernel line of grub configuration file at DomU. File /etc/event.d/tty1 at DomU should be also modified to work for xen console instead of vfb. All written above is not CentOS 5.2 specific, because pygrub comes to the system with Xen 3.3 port , no matter is it Debian or Gentoo

After 2 years of operation, FSFE's Shane Couglan has built a network of 145 experts, organised Europe's first conference on free software legal issues, helped enforce the GPL, and published docs

In 2002, when Ron Huber Jr. and Chris Fuller joined Achieve Internet, a fledgling startup Huber's father launched a few years earlier to build Web sites, the pair was confident their previous business experience would be an asset in understanding other firms' needs and goals.

Today the new Ubuntu 8.10 (Intrepid Ibex) has been released. This guide shows how you can upgrade your Ubuntu 8.04 desktop and server installations to Ubuntu 8.10.

In the early days of desktop virtualization, there were few low-priced alternatives to VMware Workstation that didn't involve a steep learning curve. Even the freely available VirtualBox didn't affect Workstation's market domination and instead faced competition from the newly rebranded VMware GSX server, which was offered for free as VMware Server. Despite being an entry-level server virtualization product, many people used VMware Server on the desktop. Taking that into consideration, you have to look at the recently released VMware Server 2, from two angles -- as an entry-level server virtualization platform and as an alternative to desktop virtualization products like VirtualBox. With its performance and other improvements, it does enough to keep existing customers happy, but probably not enough to get others to switch.

Upgrade Ubuntu 8.04 (Hardy Heron) to Ubuntu 8.10 (Intrepid Ibix). This tutorial will explain how to Upgrade Ubuntu 8.04 (Hardy Heron) to Ubuntu 8.10 (Intrepid Ibix) released on the 30th of October 2008.By default Ubuntu 8.04 LTS will not offer a upgrade to 8.10. This is because the 8.04 LTS version is a long term support release and 8.10 is a regular release. Upgrades from 8.04 LTS to 8.10 are fully supported, of course, and easy to enable.

Earlier this week we published benchmarks of all Ubuntu releases from 7.04 to the release candidate and had found the performance degraded with time, at least with the test system we used. As part of our testing to explore this issue, we had repeated many of the same tests on Fedora with all of their releases going back to Fedora 7. Has Fedora's desktop performance degraded too?

Curiosity about computing’s future can be found in its past: The mighty Mainframe (MF) lives again.

The Dutch Ministry of Finance organized an architecture competition for which a selected group of architectural offices (unstudio, nox, ...) and artists were invited, including myself. The goal of the competition was not to design a building, but the new 5 euro commemorative coin with the theme 'Netherlands and Architecture'. The winner will be rewarded with a nice price, but most of all with the honor: his design will be realized and will be a legal coin within the Netherlands.

Ubuntu, the most popular distribution, is using by default Gnome 2.24 as its Desktop Environment (DE). However this isn't the only DE available for Linux. Another very popular DE used by many Linux users is KDE (K Desktop Environment). Recently KDE has reached version 4.1.2. KDE4 is based on Qt4. The centerpiece is a redesigned desktop and panels collectively called Plasma which replaces Kicker, KDesktop, and SuperKaramba by integrating their functionality into one piece of technology.

More ways to recover your Linux or Unix terminal session, with reader contributions! If you're one of the many readers who submit a comment now and again (and even if you aren't ;), today's post is an homage to your helpful and insightful suggestions and tips. Some of you reading this right now may have emailed me with something that deserves to be posted as a comment to another post, and I can say, with great confidence, that it eventually will.

Upon seeing 17 software updates waiting for me on my Debian Etch box this morning, I hurried over to the Debian security site and learned that the Debian security team issued a flurry of patches on Oct. 29, 2008, for all versions of OpenOffice. On my system, this is a relatively huge 101 MB download.

You might the recall the ongoing uproar over the BBC's dissing of its non-Windows-using viewers, its defective math on how many Linux users were among their viewers, the nasty DRM-encumbered iPlayer, and their general bad attitude about being willing to buy into DRM-restricted streaming media, even though they are a publicly-funded broadcaster...But thanks to FOSS (as always) there is a silver ray in the gloom-- Ubuntu 8.10 includes the Totem BBC Plugin: