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Users of Compiz, a window manager that provides pretty visual effects, know that a lot of those effects are just for fun. Things like drawing fire on the screen or folding up windows like a paper airplane to close them look cool but have little real value. Personally, I am most concerned with the Compiz plugins that add functionality to my desktop. There are plenty of those too. I am going to outline some of my favorites and most useful.

LXer Feature: 03-Aug-2008

This week we have Linus Torvalds on Linux Distributions, A Quick Look at OpenOffice.org Writer 3.0, It's not a clone, but it can run Mac OS X, Insanely Securing Your Unix or Linux Systems and several articles on KDE 4.1.

The 10th annual LinuxWorld Conference & Expo and its partner Next Generation Data Center Conference kick off today at the Moscone Center in San Francisco, where the open-source operating system will be the center of attention for enterprise users, vendors and IT enthusiasts.

I tested quite a few versions of Puppy Linux in recent days on my 1999-era Compaq Armada 7770dmt. The bad news is that version 3.01 wouldn't configure X properly. Any attempts to do so and then start X crashed the box. The other bad news is that while Puppy 4.00 loads fine and runs fine, for some reason the load time for Abiword went from 8 to 10 seconds in previous Puppy builds to 30 seconds. That's quite a rollback. On a more positive note, start times for Seamonkey were about the same.

A rage against MS, followed by some sysadmin humor.

The "kill" command can be an invaluable tool for stopping runaway services. Here's a plain-English guide to how it works.

Untangle, Canonical and Intel all are taking steps to get Linux installed on low-cost computers for school kids. But can Ubuntu Linux really close the digital divide? Before you answer, here's some perspective from The VAR Guy.

Nginx (pronounced â??engine xâ??) is a free, open-source, high-performance HTTP server and reverse proxy, as well as an IMAP/POP3 proxy server. Written by Igor Sysoev in 2005, Nginx now hosts between 1% and 4% of all domains worldwide. Although still in beta, Nginx is known for its stability, rich feature set, simple configuration, and low resource consumption.

Sun Microsystems last week said it will soon open source the core components of Sun Java System Web Proxy and Sun Java System Web Server 7.0 under the Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD) license....Jim Jagielski, co-founder, member and director of the Apache Software Foundation, said he thinks Sun's release of the Web and Proxy server code is"proof of their involvement and commitment to open source," according to a prepared statement. ...BSD-style licenses are"unrestricted," meaning they allow anyone to do anything with the code, including putting it into a proprietary product, without contributing anything back to the community.

We have been covering the Linux benchmarking scene since 2004, but one area we have never really been satisfied with have been the OpenGL tests that are available. There are now plenty of free software games that are available for benchmarking, but with most of them being based around the open-source Quake 3 engine, they aren't that demanding upon the graphics processor. The ones generally good with stressing the graphics capabilities of the system are the id Software games (Doom 3, Quake 4, and Enemy Territory: Quake Wars) with native Linux clients. Under the workstation umbrella, there is just SPECViewPerf. On the Windows side though there are a number of OpenGL and DirectX games, tech demos, and other benchmarks. Thanks in part to the Phoronix Test Suite, however, we are starting to see a new era of OpenGL benchmarking that are able to stress the graphics card and are visually pleasing.

Avant Window Navigator (Awn) is a dock-like bar which sits at the bottom of the screen on your Linux Distriution. It has support for launchers, task lists, and third party applets. The dock at the bottom of the screen gives a nice apple Mac like look for your openSUSE. There are a lot of Themes Plugins and Applets that can be added onto the dock.

Linux is beginning to find its legs as the foundation in many different technologies and in the process is fueling a feedback loop that is helping accelerate the operating system's popularity. As more and more people contribute from areas such as mobile, data center power management, and real-time technologies, innovations are coming rapid fire and when folded into the Linux kernel provide benefits across a wide spectrum.

Last week iTWire reported how HP, Intel and Yahoo! are joining forces to spearhead a global and open source test bed for the advancement of cloud computing. Now IBM has thrown a few hundred million into the technology as well. It would appear that IBM has its head in the clouds, along with its wallet. The company has announced it has plans to build a $360 million state-of-the-art cloud computing data centre in the Research Triangle Park facility, North Carolina.

After writing close to a thousand of these weekly essays, I won't bury the lead on this one: It's my last column forThe Sun. There. It was hard to say that out loud, and I spent two nights on a half-dozen elegant openings before I decided to get right to the point. Now I can talk about how much fun it's been, and how much I'll miss all of you.

I have been running with a MySQL backend for virtual hosting for some time, but when I discovered Phamm and the added FTP feature I decided to switch to LDAP as backend for Postfix with virtual hosting. In view of the fact that the installation and configuration guide of Phamm is lacking some basic information it took me quite some time to put it all together and get it working. Piecing it all together was not simple so I would like to share how I configured it and got it all working toghether.

gDesklets is another great tool like Google Gadgets for bringing mini programs called desklets such as weather forecasts, news tickers, system information displays, or music player controls, onto your desktop, where they are sitting there in a symbiotic relationship of eye candy and usefulness. The possibilities are really endless and they are always there to serve you whenever you need them, just one key-press away. The system is not restricted to one desktop environment, but currently works on most of the modern Unix desktops (including GNOME, KDE, Xfce).

If you ever: needed to access your ext3, reiserfs or XFS partitions from Windows, wanted to use one of your favorite file systems via FUSE, or had an idea to mount an image of your hard drive, then this article is for you. This is a how-to, describing what to do, if you want Windows to handle file systems in a similar way as Linux does.

Some days ago, I wrote a post about 30 gnome themes to enhance your Ubuntu desktop. In order to make one more step in Linux desktop customization, here is a list of 10 very cool icons sets for your Linux desktop.

Several open-source providers are in the running for a new Becta framework covering the supply of software licences to the education sector. Novell, Sirius Corporation and LinuxIT are thought to be among 21 firms invited to tender for the approved supplier catalogue, worth a potential £80m over four years. Submissions for the final round have to be in before 13 August. The final list of up to 10 suppliers will be unveiled in October. It is the first time education technology agency Becta has broadened its list of approved suppliers to include open-source specialists, as it moves to put pressure on Microsoft.

In a recent article, Ryan Cartwright argued that free software isn't playing the "same game" as proprietary software is. He's right--but that begs the question: what game is GNU/Linux playing? Thirty years of proprietary software thinking have conditioned us to think that marketshare is a critical measure of success, and so we've convinced ourselves that we have to "win" against Windows in order to "succeed". But this is simply not true. GNU/Linux can be a very great success even if it never achieves more than 1% of the installations in the world. The reason is the difference between "power" and "freedom".