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Sooner or later, we all end up installing new software on our computers. Whether it's a new version of Firefox, or a cool game, or a video editing package, there comes a time when you want to make your system do more than it can do now. Under Linux, installing new applications isn't a particularly hard task, but installations do come in several different varieties, so it's worth understanding the differences and what you'll need to know to make them work.

This tutorial provides step-by-step instructions on how to install VMware Server 2 on an Ubuntu 8.04 desktop system. With VMware Server you can create and run guest operating systems (virtual machines) such as Linux, Windows, FreeBSD, etc. under a host operating system. This has the benefit that you can run multiple operating systems on the same hardware which saves a lot of money, and you can move virtual machines from one VMware Server to the next one (or to a system that has the VMware Player which is also free).

Today I got an e-mail from the author of Nathive, which is a fairly new linux image editor. I encourage people to try it out and give feedback to the author to help him improve it. Nathive is a libre software image editor, focusing on usability, logic and provide a smooth learning curve for everyone. The project runs over Gnome desktop and everyone can collaborate in it with code, translations or ideas.

Unboxing pictures of the Dell XPS M1530 pre-installed with Ubuntu. I just recieved my new laptop: a Dell XPS M1530 pre-installed with Ubuntu. I plan on doing 7 posts related to the M1530. I will not, however, be doing them all in a row, so don’t worry. Anyway, today I have some unboxing pictures for you.

After holding an invitation-only conference for key open-source developers and community members in each of the past two years, the Linux Foundation is expanding its events schedule to add a conference focused on a broader attendee base. In an announcement today, the San Francisco-based consortium, which sets Linux standards and works to promote the use of the open-source operating system, said it will hold an event called LinuxCon next September that will be open to anyone who wants to attend.

Web-based programs like Google's Gmail will force people to buy into locked, proprietary systems that will cost more and more over time, according to the free software campaigner The concept of using web-based programs like Google's Gmail is "worse than stupidity", according to a leading advocate of free software.

The Red Hat community engineer behind the Fedora Games and Fedora Xfce media spins, Rahul Sundaram, had announced the release of Omega 10 Beta this past weekend. Omega is a desktop/mobile Linux distribution that is based upon Fedora but includes packages from the Livna RPM repository. The Omega 10 Beta release is roughly equivalent to the Fedora 10 Beta to be released tomorrow, but integrates multimedia support not found in Fedora along with delivering other added functionality.

With this installment I complete my survey of Java-based sound and music applications that run under Linux. Again I've focused mainly on production software.

Concern over the original distribution plan was what got me writing for OLPCNews.com. The belligerent anti-pilot-project attitude, the requirement to buy the laptops in lots of 1million units, and the hushed discussions about the costs beyond the "$100" laptop. Rapid, bulk deployment is not a good model to introduce technology, particularly in a resource-constrained environment. If you look at case studies of technology diffusion or successful ICT4D deployments (the Grameen Bank Village Pay Phone Project for example), you see the very social process of technology adoption, as people judge their usage of a new technology based not only on features and promises, but about lived experiences of their friends and networks.

LiquidTV offers most of the features of a standard TiVo DVR: online scheduling with the integrated Electronic Programming Guide, recording of up to two shows simultaneously to the hard drive, HD and standard image quality, and support for as many as four tuners.... Unlike the standard DVR, however, content navigation is not limited to remote control, and unique mouse and keyboard commands have been added. Also, the software has the ability to export recorded media to portable devices supporting .tivo, MPEG-2, MPEG-4 (H.263 + H.264), AVI, and WMV files, or burn-to-DVD.

Nearly a week after T-Mobile, HTC and Google unveiled the G1, the first handset running the open source Android mobile platform, another handset maker is reportedly preparing a large push to incorporate the nascent mobile software system into its upcoming devices. A report Sunday stated that Motorola is boosting the size of its Android development team from 50 to 350.

How minor device numbers can affect disk sharing within a Veritas Cluster! Today we're going to look at an issue that, while it doesn't happen all that often, happens just enough to make it post-worthy. I've only seen it a few times in my "career," but I don't always have access to the fancy software, so this problem may be more widespread than I've been lead to believe ;) The issue we'll deal with today is: What do you do when disk groups, within a cluster, conflict with one another? Or, more correctly, what do you do when disk groups within a cluster conflict with one another even though all the disk is being shared by every node in the cluster?

InformationWeek details the conception of House Resolution 6898. The bill's name is more cryptic than the shorthand on a prescription order, but could bolster both the US Health Care system, and perceptions of open source in both public and private sectors. The Health-e Information Technology Act of 2008 offers incentives for health care providers to move to an open, shared platform for health records.

I still might be in a position to heap praise upon Ubuntu 8.04 for its performance on the $0 Laptop (Gateway Solo 1450) since I reinstalled it a couple of weeks ago with a separate /home partition and a not-screwed-up UUID scenario. But I keep getting these freezes in which ctrl-alt-backspace or ctrl-alt-delete won't save me. I have to do a hard reset with the power button. Now this could be due to the shaky nature of my power connection (the power jack from the laptop's brick doesn't quite meet up with the hacked power plug I installed to make this laptop work after I first acquired it). Having a dead battery doesn't help.

We have already discussed how to use UFW from command line. Gufw is an easy to use Ubuntu / Linux firewall, powered by ufw. Gufw is an easy, intuitive, way to manage your Linux firewall. It supports common tasks such as allowing or blocking pre-configured, common p2p, or individual ports port(s), and many others! Gufw is powered by ufw, runs on Ubuntu, and anywhere else Python, GTK, and Ufw are available.

Last week was so ugly the economic conditions had me up on YouTube looking for things to put a smile on my face, and I found two -- one that has the"Pimp My Ride" folks pimping an IT shop with an Xbox -- not some marketing group's best moment -- and an HP ad spoof that has Steve Jobs selling HP computers.

Over the last decade, vector graphics have gone from being a revolutionary format to a standard method of rendering computer images -- so much so that they are standard in the KDE 4 desktops. This popularity is based on the fact that, because they represent images as mathematical equations -- usually in SVG format -- vector graphics open faster, render better on screen, and can be resized more readily than raster graphics, in which an image is created pixel by pixel. Free software includes a number of options for working with vector graphics, including several simple ones: OpenOffice.org's Draw, KOffice's Karbon14, and Inkscape, which is currently the premier vector graphic editor in free software.

Not only will you not have to open the window, now you don't even have to open the browser window to find out the weather ;) Today's Linux/Unix bash shell script is probably not the last follow up to the growing stable of scripts we've written to mine the knowledge on tap online. Today's info is grabbed from WeatherBug.com. If you missed any of the others scripts we've jammed out, you can still find them in our older bash script posts to spew out famous quotations on pretty much any subject, do encylopedia lookups, access the online Thesaurus, translate between different languages and, of course, the use the online dictionary.

A mail transport agent (MTA) provides the "plumbing" for your email system by taking mail from a client application such as Evolution or Mozilla Thunderbird and routing it to the correct location on the right machine. There are plenty of good MTAs, such as Postfix, Sendmail, and qmail, but these popular mail servers require a large amount of configuration, and may be overkill for users who merely want to set up an MTA to test a Web development project or need to move mail around locally. Smail is a better alternative for these scenarios because it generally requires no configuration, and its memory footprint is less than the more fully featured MTAs.

Legal news wire service Courthouse News reported recently that Reuters was suing the Commonwealth of Virginia because George Mason University was "handing out its proprietary software." Nothing is ever that simple, is it? George Mason University's Center for History and New Media distributes Zotero, an open source Firefox extension that helps users collect and manage citations found on the web. It performs a similar function as Thomson Reuter's EndNote software. The lawsuit is based on the premise that Zotero's newest beta is able to convert the proprietary EndNote format to the open CSL (Citation Style Language) format.