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A more complicated and feature-rich version of last week's localtv script. For this week's Monday Linux/Unix bash shell script, we're following up on what turned out to be a fairly popular script from last week that made it so you could get your local tv listings from the command line with bash.

The news that Wikipedia was in the process of switching away from Red Hat and Fedora—and to Ubuntu—has stirred up some Fedora folks. The relatively short, 13 month support cycle for Fedora releases was fingered as a major part of the problem in a gigantic thread on the fedora-devel mailing list. Some would like to see Fedora be supported for longer, so that it could be used in production environments, but that is a fundamental misunderstanding of what Fedora has set out to do. The idea of supporting Fedora beyond the standard "two releases plus one month", which should generally yield 13 months, is not new. It was, after all, the idea behind the Fedora Legacy project. Unfortunately, Fedora Legacy ceased operations at the end of 2006, largely due to a lack of interested package maintainers. So, calls for a "long term support" (LTS) version of Fedora are met with a fair amount of skepticism.

News from the weekend: Theo de Raadt of the OpenBSD project announced the version 4.4 of the free OpenBSD operating system, including a new song.

The New York Times is running an interesting piece from IDG News on how administrators and IT chiefs for higher educational institutions are at odds over whether it makes sense to deploy open source software instead of proprietary products. The flap went on this week at the Educause conference in Florida. Within the argument that's going on, a number of surprising fallacies about open source are apparently cropping up. Here are the details.

LXer Feature: 02-Nov-2008

In this week's Roundup we have a slew of articles about Ubuntu and Canonical, Linus learns to take personally, our own Sander Marechal reports on T-DOSE 2008, PC makers move closer to a post-Windows world and Carla Schroder asks if Linux does enough for small business.

Emulation refers to the duplication of functions of one system using a different system. Specifically, an emulator is software specifically written to emulate aspects of the original console or computer, primarily the CPU, I/O and memory system.

All last week, Microsoft was trying desperately to shift the spotlight from Vista, the OS that has become a major liability for the software giant. To that end, Microsoft made a flurry of announcements including Azure, the newly announced cloud platform, the Windows 7 Alpha and a preliminary view of the web-based version of Microsoft Office.

My former colleague, Joe Wilcox, observes that he doesn't think it's a big deal that Microsoft handed out laptops to bloggers, analysts and reviewers loaded with the Windows 7 alpha. He adds that "All week, I have watched for someone to raise a fuss and hoped that no one would." Wilcox then added that, last time around when Microsoft did this with Vista, that Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols "joined the chorus of critics calling the laptops bribes," while he had defended Microsoft's practice.

South African Internet billionaire Mark Shuttleworth has enough cash to pump into his software company, Canonical, saying he is being careful with his pennies but is willing to continue supporting a good investment. Shuttleworth founded Canonical in 2004 to develop free software for companies and private users around the world.

Yesterday evening, while I was at home in Freising, my brother called. He had some problems installing Ubuntu on our aunt’s computer, and asked for help. In the end, it was a success story. But it’s a quite lengthy one; it actually started years ago. Read on for more details…

Greg Kroah-Hartman is a longtime developer of the Linux kernel, known for his work maintaining USB drivers as well as for packaging the SUSE kernel at Novell. O'Reilly Media recently interviewed Greg about his claim that the Linux kernel now supports more devices than any other operating system ever has, as well as why binary-only drivers are illegal, and how the kernel development process works.

This tutorial shows how to set up an Ubuntu Intrepid Ibex (Ubuntu 8.10) server that offers all services needed by ISPs and hosters: Apache web server (SSL-capable), Postfix mail server with SMTP-AUTH and TLS, BIND DNS server, Proftpd FTP server, MySQL server, Courier POP3/IMAP, Quota, Firewall, etc.

On October 25, 2008, the Linux Hater's Blog reached the "eof", or end of file. But if you've been hassled endlessly by Linux lovers and are sick to death of Linux this and Linux that, fear not - the Linux Hater's Redux is born, with plenty of eye-opening news on problems with Linux.

Since today is Halloween, I thought that an article discussing some of the scary things in the FOSS world would be a nice touch. Now obviously I don't celebrate Halloween myself, but I know a lot of people who do, so this article is right in keeping with the holiday. So the question boils down to this. What are the scariest things in Open Source? In a sort of tongue in cheek way, the scariest thing to Linux and FOSS users is proprietary software. Or at least that's what you'd think given the response from most of them. I for one am in that camp, as the more I've learned about proprietary software, the less I've found it desirable to use.

Linux has been making inroads into PC sales lately because it runs so well on lightweight netbooks with limited RAM and processing power. Windows 7, though, appears to run well on lightweight hardware as well, which could mean that it's Microsoft's Linux killer. At the recent PDC, where Windows 7 was unveiled, Windows and Windows Live senior vice president Steve Sinofsky claimed that Windows 7 used less than half of the 1 GB of RAM on his Lenovo S10 netbook. Making the new operating system lightweight has clearly been Microsoft's goal. In addition to light RAM use, Windows also strips out a variety of applications, including Windows Mail, among others.

I tested OpenSolaris earlier this year shortly after the developers announced the project's first official release. Although I was impressed with the ease of installation and several other aspects of the user experience, I also pointed out several areas where there was room for improvement. In order to compete with Linux on the desktop, I argued, OpenSolaris has to make its innovative features more accessible to regular end users. One particularly impressive enhancement that helps achieve that goal is the new ZFS snapshot visualization functionality that will be included in the next major release of OpenSolaris.

The Foreign Ministry is migrating all of its 11.000 desktops to GNU/Linux and other Open source applications. According to Schuster, this has drastically reduced maintenance costs in comparison with other ministries. "The Foreign Ministry is running desktops in many far away and some very difficult locations. Yet we invest only one thousand euro per desktop per year. That is far lower than other ministries, that on average invest more than 3000 euro per desktop per year."

DigiKam is an application to manage your digital photos professionally, with a claim of: “Manage your photographs like a professional, with the power of Open Source”. We'll check what's new in the KDE4 version of the program.

Thank God these folks had a place to vent ;) This end-of-the-weekend humor comes in the form of some funny (I'm hoping "intentionally funny" ;) bug reports that get out there into the mainstream. I'm sure the open source community (especially for successful and/or widely-used projects) can't be on top of everything all the time, and this is, in no way, a poke at them (they may, very well, be responsible for it. Just a bit of levity to help pass the time on a Sunday and (maybe, just maybe) make you forget that another work week is just around the corner.

This is WFTL Bytes!, your occasiodaily FOSS and Linux news show for Friday, October 31, 2008, with your host, Marcel Gagné. Today's scary stories include an Intrepid IBEX from Ubuntu, a netbook from HP, Canonical's finances, fast loading PCs courtesy of Linux, a Miro channel guide, and a DRM-free zone over at the BBC.