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Arduino is an inexpensive, easy-to-use electronics platform. The entire platform, both the hardware and the software, is completely open source, and the language is loosely based on C/C++. Arduino was built for makers, tinkerers, and artists who want to take the plunge into creating interactive physical objects. This three-part series starts with basic Arduino hardware and uses it to create an interactive laser game called "'Duino tag," where players can play tag using devices built nearly from scratch.

This morning I went to find the name of a piece of software through Add/Remove programs, only to find that there was only one category (”All”) and there were no applications listed at all. It took me less than 10 minutes to find and implement the solution, but I shouldn’t have to deal with this stuff. Worse, I find that these sorts of little problems are almost common. They don’t take long to fix, but they happen way too often. Not every day by any means, but still often enough to be annoying.

Electronics manufacturer Round Solutions presents the AarLogic C10/3, a breadboard which contains a complete Linux PC on a surface of just 104mm x 63mm. A Quad-band GPRS module and SiRF3 GPS module are also on board, as well as interfaces for USB, RS232 and Ethernet components. An SD-card reader enables the trouble-free expansion of the 4 Mb of RAM which comes as standard.

Intel has announced that the OpenSolaris variant of Unix is now better supported on its Atom processors. The Atom support is being positioned to bring the joys of x64 computing to netbooks and other low-power computing devices, and it offers some of the best performance/watt in processing these days. Sun Microsystems, which largely steers the OpenSolaris effort and will use the distro as the basis of the next generation of Solaris, wants to be among the greenest of IT vendors. It also wants to find a new niche for Solaris, as Linux has done superbly on netbooks this year.

Ext4 is the evolution of the most used Linux filesystem, Ext3. In many ways, Ext4 is a deeper improvement over Ext3 than Ext3 was over Ext2. Ext3 was mostly about adding journaling to Ext2, but Ext4 modifies important data structures of the filesystem such as the ones destined to store the file data. The result is a filesystem with an improved design, better performance, reliability and features .

[I found the link to this article on LWN in the thread talking about the new 2.6.28 kernel that Linus just released. Interesting stuff, 48bit addressing and a maximum filesystem size of 1 EB. 1 Exabyte? Wow! - Scott]

What’s the biggest secret to Red Hat’s success in a down economy? Plenty of pundits think it’s Linux and JBoss open source middleware. But The VAR Guy has another theory: One of Red Hat’s smartest moves is promoting a particularly influential magazine article about the company. No joke. Here's the scoop.

The Ext4 file system leaves its main development phase and will soon be ripe for productive use. Major renovation work on the code for memory and disk management promises GPU speed increases and better scalability. Hundreds of new and revised drivers improve hardware compatibility significantly.

Lanner Electronics has announced a space-saving, "half-rack" network appliance that runs Linux on a Core2Duo or Celeron M chip. Targeting network security and acceleration applications, the FW-7872 has five Ethernet ports, a serial port, two internal SATA ports, and two external SATA connectors, the company says.

Ah 2008, I hardly knew ye. Actually I knew ye quite well because there were certainly some personal Linux milestone moments. Profound? Hardly. Important? Personally, sure. Will they matter to you? Maybe not, but they might, just might, make you ponder your own 2008 Linux moments, compare them, and make you realize how important Linux has become to you. Enough with the intro. Let’s get on with the moments!

In the beginning, free software was an activity conducted on the margins - using spare time on a university's computers, or the result of lonely bedroom hacking. One of the key moments in the evolution of free software was when hackers began to get jobs - often quite remunerative jobs - with one of the new open source companies that sprang up in the late 1990s. For more or less the first time, coders could make a good salary doing what they loved, and businesses could be successful paying them to write code that would be given away.

Usually, when I write articles for Linux Journal, they are of a patently technical nature. This article is going to be quite a bit different. As we head into the Holiday Season and the start of a new year, I've begun to think about what I want to do in the next year, and what I wish I had done with this year. I've come up with a list of three things that I intend to do in the next year. I'm sharing them here in hopes that my list, and the reasoning behind it, will inspire you to make a similar list, and to accomplish great things in 2009. So here we go.

Inkscape is a fun, free and very powerful vector drawing program that runs on all major computer platforms: Linux, Macintosh and Windows. This program can give you endless hours of enjoyment, even if you're not an artist. And if you develop mastery of using Inkscape, someone wants to pay you money to create graphics for them. One of the best ways of introducing youth and adults to Inkscape is via the many excellent screencasts that show and explain how to use Inkscape.

Welcome to the 25th issue of Softpedia Linux Weekly! I would like to start this weekly by wishing Merry Christmas to all our readers, and... below is a nice Christmas gift for you, which I hope you will enjoy. After that, the weekly continues with the usual news released last week. The weekly concludes, as always, with the video clip of the week, the latest Linux distributions released/updated last week and the development releases, at the end of the article!

A chroot on Red Hat / CentOS / Fedora Linux operating changes the apparent disk root directory for the Apache process and its children. Once this is done attacker or other php / perl / python scripts cannot access or name files outside that directory. This is called a "chroot jail" for Apache. You should never ever run a web server without jail. There should be privilege separation between web server and rest of the system.

On December 11, the Free Software Foundation announced the filing of a GPL-infringement lawsuit against Cisco. This action represents another step in a long series of license-compliance issues involving Cisco and its subsidiaries. It may look like just another licensing lawsuit, but it represents an interesting step in the evolution of attitudes toward compliance with the GPL. The eventual outcome is fairly predictable, but the process is still worth watching.

A few Linux distributions emphasize license freedom as a goal, but Tom “Spot” Callaway says that there’s no such thing as a free Linux distro. Callaway, Fedora’s engineering manager, writes that “you’d need to do an incredibly thorough audit of every file in the system to be sure that every single file is under a known license,” and the evidence says that most distros haven’t actually done it.

The first pre-release of Mandriva Linux 2009 Spring is now available. This alpha concentrates on updating to the major desktop components of the distribution, including KDE 4.2 Beta 2, GNOME 2.25.2, Xfce 4.6 Beta 2, X.org server 1.5, and kernel 2.6.28 rc8. It is also the first distribution to introduce the major new Tcl/Tk release, 8.6. The alpha is available only in the DVD Free edition with a traditional installer and no proprietary applications; future pre-releases will add the live CD One edition with proprietary drivers. Please help test this first pre-release and report bugs to Mandriva.

mylvmbackup is a Perl script for quickly creating MySQL backups. It uses LVM's snapshot feature to do so. To perform a backup, mylvmbackup obtains a read lock on all tables and flushes all server caches to disk, creates a snapshot of the volume containing the MySQL data directory, and unlocks the tables again. This article shows how to use it on an Ubuntu 8.10 server.

The concept of an open set-top box is new and a place that Linux has a very favorable opportunity. Unlike the desktop, where compatibility with legacy applications and peripherals is a serious impediment, the set-top box simply has to play today's available content. Help us to make sure that Linux achieves the critical mass it needs to make sure that content producers and hardware makers ensure compatibility with Linux. The bounties range from $500 to $2500.

The 0.10.4 release of Google Gadgets for Linux is out, with optimized performance and memory consumption, as well as many bug fixes. To install or upgrade your copy of Google Gadgets for Linux, just download and install the binaries for your platform. The new release supports more gadgets, including the recently released YouTube, Gmail, and Google Docs gadgets.