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"When times are good, people aren't as critical of their applications and they tend to overpay," Mark Hinkle, vice president of community at Zenoss argued. "The economic slowdown has helped to illustrate the value of open source. When times are tough, you start re- evaluating how you do business."

In this article, discover how the Action Web Service module implements Web services functionality in Ruby on Rails. Action Web Service creates server-side support for SOAP and XML-RPC Web service protocols. You can declare and publish APIs using Action Web Service.

If your music library is tied to your CD collection or MP3 player, you can still hit the road without losing access to your tunes. Subsonic is a free, Web-based media streamer that lets you -- and your friends -- access your music collection over the Internet. Subsonic can handle large music collections, running into the thousands of CDs. It also works with video; in fact, it can let you remotely access any format that can be streamed over a standard HTTP connection. If needed, Subsonic will convert your collection to a streaming format on the fly, taking into account the available bandwidth. You can use any browser and media player combination to listen to your music; I went for Firefox and RealPlayer, but other combinations are equally valid.

Untangle and other open source software providers are moving into the fast-growing market for managed services. But many IT consultants and managed service providers have yet to discover the power and flexibility of open source. Will the situation change anytime soon? Here are some thoughts from MSPmentor, which covers managed services and SaaS.

I have an old noname cheapo webcam, that I dusted out of my junk (why? More on that in a post coming soon). I hoped that it would work in my Ubuntu setup out of the box like most of my other hardware. I connected it to my laptop's usb port. dmesg gave the following output:

This tutorial shows how you can enable Compiz Fusion on an Ubuntu 8.10 (Intrepid Ibex) desktop (the system must have a 3D-capable graphics card - I am using an NVIDIA GeForce FX 5200 here). With Compiz Fusion you can use beautiful 3D effects like wobbly windows or a desktop cube on your desktop.

Simplify. That, at its heart, is the purpose of XBRL -- extensible business reporting language. XBRL employs a common set of tags for financial terms, making reports more searchable and transparent to everyone who uses them. Designed to provide information to investors and anyone else researching financial markets, it is an open standard that is operating system agnostic.

A little while ago, while talking in the #drupal mailing list, I showed my latest creation to one of the core developers there. His reaction was “Wow, I am always surprised what people use Drupal for”. His surprise is somehow justified: I did create a site for a bunch of strippers in Perth. Yes, I would classify the link quite work-safe. After talking about it for a while, I decided that it would be a good idea to write a short case study about how I created the site. So, here we go. Read the full article at Freesoftware Magazine.

Ubuntu 8.10 (Intrepid Ibex) LAMP Server Setup. In around 15 minutes, the time it takes to install Ubuntu Server Edition, you can have a LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP) server up and ready to go. This feature, exclusive to Ubuntu Server Edition, is available at the time of installation.

The lightweight Dillo Web browser, in development for eight years, has always been a contender for the fastest browser available on GNU/Linux -- so much so that the Google's Chrome will have to be pretty nimble to outpace it. With last month's release of version 2.0, Dillo is faster than ever. If performance is your main priority, you might find Dillo's minimalistic tools and functional limitations an acceptable tradeoff -- but probably not.

It finally happened: Ubuntu 8.10 (aka Intrepid Ibex) has uprooted Kubuntu 8.04 from the Black Tower. Although I've been a staunch KDE advocate for many years, this exceptional new distribution has unexpectedly converted me into a GNOME user.

A number of different ways to determine if memory is the issue when your Linux box hits a brick wall. Today we’re going to take a look at a few (well, maybe more than a few) ways to check your Linux box to find out if the reason it’s beginning to perform poorly is related to memory or memory-management issues. For today’s examples, in particular, we’ll be using SUSE Linux 9.x, but most of these examples translate just as easily to RedHat, Ubuntu and other widely-used distro’s, with some minor modifications.

A Harvard law professor has opened a new front in the battle between the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) and alleged music pirates by challenging the constitutionality of a statute being used by the industry group to bring lawsuits against alleged copyright violators.

Take a free online training course for Suse 11.x with illustrations, movies, and quizzes. This course is designed for new Linux users to help them learn how to use Linux.

This is one of several things you can do to increase the usefulness of an expensive and slow Internet link.

We've made the point before that as good as Google's Chrome browser is, many users will still want to stick with Firefox because of how incredibly useful Firefox extensions are. In fact, at this point, I see the new beta version 3.1 of Firefox as the most useful browser available. I'm still using Chrome, though, and expect big things going forward from it, including a mobile version from Google. For now, though, as developers work on variants of and extensions for Chrome, it's worth being careful.

LinuxCertified Inc, a leading provider of Linux training and services, today announced its next Linux Device Driver Development Course class to be held in South Bay, CA from November 17th to November 19th.

At first glance, the PC market is pretty darn mature. But walk into a Target retail store in New York or visit a computer retailer in Melbourne, Australia and you’ll see the start of a new revolution — driven by Asustek Computer (a.k.a. Asus). This is more than an Eee PC Netbook story folks. Asus is driving real industry change. Here's the proof.

Curved Infinity Games, through the MirthKit game platform, is proud to present the first ever commercial game to be released with full source code included with every purchase. Finity Flight: Fight Back, the expansion to Curved Infinity Games’ August release, Finity Flight, is the first direct hybridization of commercialism and open source philosophy. When a customer buys Fight Back for $11.99, they automatically download all of the game’s source and assets.

Linux Magazine is broadcasting a live stream from ApacheCon US 2008, LA, New Orleans (November 5 through 7). The keynotes and lunch presentations from the developer conference are available free of charge.