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Rob Reilly introduces us to the revolutionary and accessible new world of inexpensive microcontrollers, open hardware, and development environments that run on Linux. Unleash your inner mad scientist with these inexpensive yet sophisticated tools.

In order to graph the traffic from Akamai, I used to use MRTG calling a PERL/SOAP script which retrieved and combined the data from multiple cpcodes. This proved to be quite inefficient as each combination meant a separate SOAP call. I had thought about injecting the data into Zenoss, but the nature of that project dealt more with SNMP and simple commands and was not the ideal recipient of a multi-faceted SOAP retrieval mechanism. I finally got a chance to rewrite it this year as a perl script which connects to Akamai, acquires ALL the cpcodes for a particular login and, based on the cpcode name prefix, organizes the data by creating/updating RRD files and graphing them as PNG images (as well as creating MRTG-like HTML files).

Expanding Linux adoption beyond key vertical markets is an important driver for Red Hat's growth, which remains steady even as one of its strongest customer sectors, financial services, is getting hit hard by the U.S. crisis, the company's CEO, Jim Whitehurst, said Tuesday. At a Red Hat analyst event in New York, which was available via webcast, Whitehurst said that while Red Hat does well with "companies that use technology for competitive advantage," mainstream companies that don't care about being on the leading edge of technology adoption are still largely an untapped market for the vendor.

The first essays of the school year are coming due, and with the essays comes the need to outline and plan. GNU/Linux users are fortunate to have a number of outlining applications from which to choose. True, some outliners have become obsolete, and you will be lucky to get programs like GNOME-Think or the once-popular KnowIt to run on a modern distribution. But you can still choose among OpenOffice.org, TuxCards, NoteCase, Emacs, and VimOutliner for doing your planning.

Google has released a new Linux version of the popular beginner-level photography program, Picasa. Picasa 3.0 for Linux (beta) adds an improved collage tool, red-eye-out, watermark support, a retouch tool, and enhanced integration with Picasa Web Albums, says the company.

Laptop Magazine talked to MSI's Director of US Sales, Andy Tung about the future of netbooks. Tung discussed future netbook sales and releases -- and presented the statistic that Linux-based netbooks are four times more likely to be returned. jkOnTheRun reasons that this isn't terribly surprising. Considering the low price of Linux netbooks, and their rarity at larger retailers that might allow new users to "kick the tires," it seems that many new users leap, then look.

The wave of cheap netbooks, mini laptops, or ultra-mobile PCs has crested with the cheapest yet, the NPX-9000 from Carapelli. Though it was announced in July with great fanfare at a price of £65 (or $110), it has yet to appear on the vendor's Web site. But we got our hands on one of the first units to escape from the factory and put it through its paces. We found that you get what you pay for -- if that. The low price for the NPX-9000 is a bit of a tease. That's actually the price for each of 100 units delivered to a plane or ship in China. If you buy it from an importer you'll see the added effect of shipping costs, import duties, and, in the EU, value-added tax (VAT), so the retail price might be almost double what was announced last summer.

Mono ’s 2.0 grand release has finally arrived. For this release you must use Firebird DotNet Provider 2.5 with Firebird 2.1 . Here are my notes on Ubuntu Intrepid but could be applied to any Mono 2.0 install (on Hardy or any other distro )

Know someone in your community—an individual, government official, NGO or other entity—who has significantly advanced the cause of document freedom, yet whose actions have not received the public recognition they deserve?

Let’s set the record straight: The OOXML saga has been corrupt from start to finish. Will anyone try to challenge the strong and extensive evidence? Good luck with all that. As a matter of fact, even the man on top of the process has already admitted that it had gone awry.

Back in March we looked at the AMD Radeon HD 3200 graphics with AMD's 780G Chipset and found it to be a reputable performer. Its performance was almost identical to that of the discrete Radeon HD 2400PRO graphics card and was capable of running some Linux games at a playable frame-rate. Now though AMD's top-end IGP is 790GX Chipset with Radeon HD 3300 graphics. We have been testing an AMD 790GX motherboard from Elitegroup Computer Systems for the past several weeks and today we are delivering our Linux benchmarks of this newest AMD integrated graphics processor.

For quite a while Ubuntu had been including example-content packages with its releases that contained the same content: some audio and video data to test the playback, including a video of Nelson Mandela. Ubuntu contributor Jono Bacon had been calling for renewed content and announced a competition that ended September 4. The competition is now over and Bacon presents the winners.

It didn't take long for NetSuite to cozy up to Google. Shortly after the Web conglomerate rolled out its open source browser Chrome last month, the SaaS suite provider announced its support. Support for Chrome may prove especially intriguing for its customer base -- primarily because it is so Ajax-friendly.

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 an Ubuntu 8.04 desktop.

FreeBSD is a Unix-like open source operating system that can trace its ancestry back to the original Unix. It's well known and well respected in the server marketplace, but until recently FreeBSD lacked an easy-to-use desktop version. In 2005 the PC-BSD project was started to provide just that. This month PC-BSD version 7 was released. I downloaded and installed it to see how it squares up to user-friendly Linux distributions like Ubuntu. I came away a little disappointed. PC-BSD offers the stability and security of FreeBSD but pitches itself as "a complete desktop operating system, which has been designed with the 'casual' computer user in mind," so from the start my expectations were high. I downloaded the CD ISOs (three in total; a single DVD version is also available) and booted a test machine. The installation is straightforward and the PC-BSD guide gives detailed installation instructions if you get stuck anywhere.

Know someone in your community—an individual, government official, NGO or other entity—who has significantly advanced the cause of document freedom, yet whose actions have not received the public recognition they deserve? Thanks to the efforts of its supporters worldwide, ODF has become the format of the future, a truly open standard that has achieved growing popularity and support in a variety of software products, bringing to an end the era of closed formats that have kept users tied to a single vendor’s products.

The Mono Project, which develops an open source implementation of the .Net Framework, released the long-awaited 2.0 version on Monday. Mono 2.0 offers complete API compatibility with ASP.Net and Windows Forms applications, and is compatible with desktop and server components of Microsoft’s 2.0 version of its .Net Framework. Mono 2.0 lets users develop and run .Net client and server applications on Linux and other operating systems. It also features the Mono Migration Analyzer, which helps determine changes applications need for .NET-to-Linux migrations, if any.

Over the past couple of days the online media has been full of stories of dissatisfied Linux netbook users returning their computers. Bloggers and journalists quickly picked up on the fact that return rates for Linux-based netbooks were apparently much higher than for Windows-based machines. It seems the origin of the story is an interview with Laptop magazine in which MSI’s Andy Tung said that the “return rate is at least four times higher for Linux netbooks that Windows XP netbooks”. MSI is the maker of the Wind netbook.

Dojo, one of the leading open-source libraries and widget sets for JavaScript programming, released its latest version (1.2) yesterday. Dojo, which is developed by the Dojo Foundation and released under both the BSD License and Academic Free License, is officially integrated with a number of Web development frameworks, such as Django and the Zend Framework, and by vendors such as IBM and Sun Microsystems.

I've got several machines downstairs in my basement office, of course, but in our family the others have computers too. we've set some basic rules for it. Notably, they can't just play all those flash games all the time. And sometimes, if they don't do their homework, we disallow it entirely, or - happily more commonly - we give extra time for good behaviour or for some homework that needs more googling. But I'm a geek, and I'm not at all interested in trying to do any of this manually. So I wrote a simple internet usage tracker for them, which allows me to set usage limits per kid, and which tracks how much time they use online, and forcibly logs them off if they go over the limits.