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With Labour Day past, we back in the season of slide shows -- million of them daily in both academia and business. For over a decade now, slide shows have become an accepted prop for public speaking, regardless of whether they are useful or well-designed, and the trend shows no sign of slowing. You can, of course, just acquiesce and accept that as soon as you click to the first slide, most of your audience will sigh deeply and sit back low in their chairs. But, if you really want to make slide shows work for you, you'll think before opening up the Impress wizard.

Barton George, one of the best-known open source evangelists at Sun Microsystems, has left the company. Here's why Ubuntu Linux fans (in particular) should care, according to The VAR Guy.

I recently sat down with my 12-year-old son Ian, who agreed to sit still long enough to try a few typing teacher applications on Ubuntu Hardy Heron. Ian has a lot of experience on the computer but, until now, he has subscribed to the hunt and peck typing philosophy. Fortunately, we found a number of open source typing tutorial programs to download and test. Ian and I looked at three GPL-licensed apps: Klavaro, TuxTyping, and KTouch.

Red Hat, which bills itself as the world’s leading open-source solutions provider, has managed to make free software pay by gathering, extending and packaging Linux and complementary open-source components into certified and supported products that are ready for enterprise consumption. As the focus of IT attention shifts to new platforms, including virtualized environments, Red Hat has turned to an IT industry newcomer, former Delta Airlines Chief Operating Officer Jim Whitehurst, to guide the open-source leader.

A local AM Radio show that I have been a guest on several times interviewed Richard Stallman on their most recent show. Over 40 minutes of Mike Cady and the guys talking to Richard, good stuff. - Scott

Wireless management on Linux is a bit of a hodge-podge, especially for roaming users. NetworkManager, KWifiManager, and various other utilities that have come and gone all attempt to make managing different network connections easy. wicd (pronounced "wicked"), the wireless interface connection daemon, tries to do the job better, so we're going to give it a test drive.

Microsoft and Novell are set to further their bi-directional virtualization efforts at VMworld. Here’s the scoop, from The VAR Guy.

The new generation of inexpensive netbooks may be wonderful, but for my main desktop I want a real machine -- something I can open up, clean, and add to. So I was extremely tickled recently to trade for a new LinPC, an economical personal computer that features PCLinuxOS MiniMe 2008 preinstalled and ready to go. The LinPC's motherboard is an MSI K9N6SGM-V V2 in a Micro-ATX form factor. An AMD Athlon 64 X2 4800+ dual-core processor powers the system, aided by a gigabyte of RAM. It has a 1GHz front side bus and supports up to 2GB of DDR2 533/667/800 RAM. Included is a Realtek RTL8201CL Ethernet chip and Realtek ALC888 7.1 High Definition Audio. It has the standard ports, including four USB ports and six-port audio. The Nvidia MCP61P GPU is equivalent to an Nvidia 6100. Expansion slots are one PCI Express x16, one PCI Express x1, and two PCI (all open upon delivery). There are two memory slots, with one open.

This True IT Tale of Horror takes place in an American public school district. It is my hope that this reassures parents everywhere that their precious future generations are being well-prepared for life by the finest and most dedicated minds in education. Dedicated to what, you ask? Well...um...

OpenICE.org, a community of engineers, hackers, and users, launches today going up against two giants in the mobile computing industry, Microsoft, with its Sync product and Intel with their moblin based car infotainment platform.

For years, Xen and VMware have been the virtualization technologies of choice for open source operating systems vendors. With Red Hat's acquisition of Qumranet yesterday and its competing Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) open source hypervisor the winds of change may be blowing, or not. While Red Hat is now betting at least $107 million that KVM is the future of virtualization, other vendors in the open source virtualization space aren't so sure.

Wireless management on Linux is a bit of a hodge-podge, especially for roaming users. NetworkManager, KWifiManager, and various other utilities that have come and gone all attempt to make managing different network connections easy. wicd (pronounced "wicked"), the wireless interface connection daemon, tries to do the job better, so we're going to give it a test drive.

Chinese PC manufacturing giant Lenovo, which years ago purchased IBM's personal computer business, appears to have quietly stopped offering Linux as a pre-installation option. None of the company's 49 ThinkPad and IdeaPad notebook models -- nor its many ThinkCenter and IdeaCenter desktops -- can currently be ordered with Linux.

News Items that were on the OpenSourceToday site were mostly rewrites of official company [1.] press releases. These Items were by their nature were highly volatile (read as rapidly prone to rot), hence, were inappropriate for longer term retention. Moreover, whatever marginal gain they offered meant prompt display was a necessity. Therefore, rapid, dynamic updating of the News page was an inherently sensible. I describe here one way to meet those needs.

Invented by American computer scientists during the 1970s, the Internet has been embraced around the globe. During the network's first three decades, most Internet traffic flowed through the United States. In many cases, data sent between two locations within a given country also passed through the United States. Engineers who help run the Internet said that it would have been impossible for the United States to maintain its hegemony over the long run because of the very nature of the Internet; it has no central point of control.

I've wanted to write this article for quite a while. Over the years I've noted thatJava-based music and sound applications have increased in number and quality, yet no comprehensive list or summaries have covered these advances. And so at long last I present this survey of music and sound applications that require Java. The presentation follows no particular order, but in this first part I'll begin by questioning the use of Java in sound and music applications development, followed by a brief look at Java's internal audio and MIDI capabilities.

Google's Chrome browser appears to be doing more damage to Firefox and Opera's market share, leaving Internet Explorer sitting pretty.

Download management is one of the larger categories on the Firefox Add-ons site, but while hundreds of extensions fall under this category, they are a mixed lot at best. Many have yet to release versions compatible with Firefox 3.0, and others are designed to work with Windows programs. However, with patience, you can find some programs worth exploring -- and even a few small treasures -- in this category.

Well it was a comparatively quiet week on the Linux blogs last week, due at least in part, no doubt, to the Labor Day holiday. Gustav could have been a factor too -- dampening, so to speak, those conversational fires -- but we here at LinuxInsider also have another small theory to explain some of the relative lack of discussion.

This article shows how you can do port-forwarding with rinetd on Debian Etch. rinetd allows you to forward ports from one system to another. This useful if you have moved your web sites to a new server with a different IP address. Of course, you have modified your DNS records, but it can take a few days until DNS changes become effective, and that is where rinetd comes into play. If clients still use the old DNS records, rinetd can redirect them to the new server. With rinetd, you do not have to fiddle with iptables rules.