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There was once a time when the now-defunct Open Source Development Labs, then the employer of Linus Torvalds, used to style itself as the centre of gravity of Linux. Not long after, the edifice toppled under its own weight - probably the force of gravity shifted. Or maybe the restructuring it had to undergo in 2005 and 2006 was the cause. No matter the reasons, the OSDL then merged with the Free Standards Group at the beginning of 2007 to form the Linux Foundation. Now, 18 months on, it appears that an organisation is no longer the centre of gravity for the Linux kernel - no, that role has apparently been taken on by the shiny, new head of the Foundation, Jim Zemlin.

SMPlayer gained a lot of popularity lately due to its rich features and the ability to remember settings and time it was stopped for each movie/video file individualy. So you can close it while watching a movie, and next time you open that movie with SMPlayer it will continue from the time you closed it. SMPlayer is built using the Qt4 libraries.

Today, we're putting out a little Perl script to deal with the obscure. Now, I realize that my view is biased heavily by living on American soil, but I can't remember, for the life of me, the last time I came across a Hebrew web page. And by Hebrew, I mean the whole reading from right to left thing. I probably wouldn't even understand it if I recognized it when I saw it ;) It did remind me however, that HTML 4.0 introduced a tag to deal with just that sort of translation. Come to think of it, when applied more liberally it would be a great translation tool for Japanese comic books that read from right to left and from back to front. Anyway, all this talk of forward and backward, left and right... just add up and down and I'll be running to the drug store for some Dramamine ;)

A stompbox claiming to be "the world's first open source digital guitar effects pedal" is now shipping, after over a year of development. The pedal, the OpenStomp Coyote-1, allows users to create their own effects by writing programs for the pedal's operating system, and uploading them to the device via USB. Writing open source programs means that rather than sticking to the familiar chorus, distortion and so on, users can create entirely new effects, much in the same way that Max/MSP can be used to make synths and effects from scratch. Unlike Max/MSP, however, users are able to run programs solely from the device – without a computer in sight.

Have you ever heard of the Fiduciary Licence Agreement - the FLA? No, it's not an alterative to other free and open source license agreements that you're probably already familiar with, like the GPL, Mozilla License, and BSD License. Rather, it's an adjunct to any copyleft license, designed to help ensure the long-term survivability of free software projects. With the announcement last week that KDE has adopted an FLA, this notion may take on new prominence.

The very heart of the Linux operating system is the kernel, the piece of software which makes programs run and work with hardware. It's possibly the largest and most geographical spread open source project in the world. With software projects failing daily how can such a task actually work? It’s well known that Linux Torvalds originated the kernel which he dubbed Linux way back in 1991. Yet, by the release of version 2.6.24 in January this year, Torvalds was responsible for a tiny 0.6% of the changes. This isn’t to say Torvald’s work is insignificant by any means, but rather to emphasise how Linux has evolved from the creative work of a sole developer into a massive project spanning almost 1,000 developers representing over 100 corporations.

Not all user-friendly desktop operating systems are based on Linux; as demonstrated by PC-BSD, it is entirely feasible to turn a "geek" project into a piece of software that can be installed and used by even less technical computer users. In this issue, we talk to Kris Moore, PC-BSD lead developer, about his love affair with FreeBSD and the upcoming PC-BSD 7.0. In the news section, Fedora admits that some of its servers have been compromised, Novell signs a new, US$100 million "interoperability" deal with Microsoft, openSUSE ads SELinux support as an alternative security framework, and gNewSense celebrates its second birthday with an updated release of the "freest" Linux distribution. Finally, FreeBSD announces tentative release dates for its upcoming versions 6.4 and 7.1.

Version 1.2.0 of yPlot has been released. This is a scientific graphics plotting package implemented as a Yorick interface to PLplot.

This article summarizes the experiences of one small- to medium-sized enterprise (SME) using a heterogeneous mix of Linux and Windows XP systems. Written by the founder of an international PC distributor, it compares and contrasts various Linux-based distributions, and assesses their suitability for business use.

Open source software company Red Hat warned of a network intrusion that compromised some of the company's servers. Though Red Hat considered the advisory critical and issued updated versions of affected packages, it said that a worst-case scenario -- a hacker accessing servers used to sign Fedora or Red Hat applications distributed through their auto-update process -- did not come to pass.

Computerworld Australia is undertaking a series of investigations into the most widely used programming languages. Previously we have spoken to Alfred v. Aho of [AWK fame, S. Tucker Taft on the Ada 1995 and 2005 revisions, Microsoft about its server-side script engine ASP, Chet Ramey about his experiences maintaining Bash, Bjarne Stroustrup of C++ fame and Charles H. Moore about the design and development of Forth. We've also had a chat with the irreverent Don Woods about the development and uses of INTERCAL, as well as Stephen C. Johnson on YACC, Luca Cardelli on Modula-3, Walter Bright on D, and most recently, Brendan Eich on JavaScript.

When it comes to open source unified communications and VoIP, Digium grabs headlines. But don't overlook four other key players in the market, reports The VAR Guy.

My exhaustive (and exhausting) eight-part series on what OS to run on the $15 Laptop (Compaq Armada 7770dmt, 233 MHz Pentium II MMX, 144 MB RAM, 3 GB hard drive) spent a good deal of time on how Puppy Linux represented the best combination of quickness and out-of-the-box features of any operating system for this old, underpowered hardware. I based all of that on running Puppy 2.13. I managed to boot Puppy 4, but the relative slowness of Abiword to start had me pausing about an upgrade from 2.13. However, I discovered something about the Geany text editor that could prompt me to use word processing apps even less than I already do.

Dynamically linked shared libraries are an important aspect of GNU/Linux. They allow executables to dynamically access external functionality at run time and thereby reduce their overall memory footprint. This article investigates the process of creating and using dynamic libraries, provides details on the various tools for exploring them, and explores how these libraries work under the hood.

GlassFish is an app server project for the Java Enterprise Edition (Java EE) platform, and is based on source code donated by Sun and Oracle. Its servlet container employs a derivative of Apache Tomcat. We checked in with Ken Drachnik, marketing manager for open source software infrastructure products at Sun, about GlassFish and open source issues.

Flock Web browser is a new kid in the block of browsers built on the codebase of Mozilla Codebase, Needless to say, this project is powered by Mozilla. Flock web browser is built in Web2.0 and social networking as the core theme of the browser supporting Social networking, Photosharing, Bloggin, syndications.

My "first" Linux box, which spawned dozens of distro reviews and many hundreds of blog posts, was a Maxspeed Maxterm thin client that worked so well as a stand-alone PC because it was basically a mini-ITX motherboard and small power supply crammed into a thin box. I daisy-chained a few IDE data and power cables through a hole in the back of the thin client so I could hook up a CD-ROM and hard drive outside the small box. Adding a keyboard, mouse, monitor and 256MB stick of PC-133 RAM, I was ready to go.

The Kindle, Amazon’s Linux-powered electronic paper book will have at least one new version out for the 2008 holiday season. The new Kindle, however, may be marketed more for college students returning to school in January rather than for finding a place under the Christmas tree. According to a report by Andreas James, Amazon will be marketing the revised “e-book reader to college students.”

If you've read through Part I and Part II of this tutorial series, you ought to have plenty of templates and clip art for OpenOffice.org (OOo), be typing grammatically-correct papers, and know a few more tips and tricks to ease your transition from Microsoft (MS) Office. Now this part will help you perform a few tasks in OOo that were available in MS Office, just harder to figure out due to the different interface. You'll find out you can still insert WordArt (actually called Fontwork), diagrams, and page numbering in OOo documents.

This year's Google Summer of Code is drawing inexorably to its close: the first indication that season of mists and mellow fruitfulness is indeed upon us. The KOffice students are busy tying up the last threads, adding the last flourish of polish that makes all the difference before they will slake the satisfied sigh that goes with work well-done. So - what did we achieve this year? In our very best tradition, read on for an overview!