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The HP Media Vault 5150 is a Linux-based network-attached storage (NAS) device that aims to be the end-all-be-all for home and small-office network file management and media service. It boasts not only a large capacity (700GB or 1.4TB depending on how you allocate it), it also has a hardware RAID-1 option and USB ports for attaching additional storage. Its internal drive bays use SATA drives, and the internal capacity theoretically is upgradable to the limit of SATA drive technology, and it hooks into your network through Gigabit Ethernet. Running out of bandwidth, therefore, is not in the cards.

Today Linux Magazine, the Linux Foundation, and CeBIT organizers announced that they are taking applications for a limited number of free booths at the CeBIT 2009 conference. The global IT tradeshow, taking place March 3-8, 2009, in Hannover, Germany, will focus on open source software as a central theme for the first time.

13 members of the TC in Norway has left their Standards Body in protest. They say that the Standards Body has lost its credibility in the IT area. Remember that Standards Norway was voting Yes with the support of only 2 companies (Microsoft and Statoil), and against the will of the rest of the technical committee (read our previous article "Norway: 21 "No", 2 "Yes" and Microsoft still gets its way?"). Here is a rough google translation of the letter sent by the 13

Foxmail is a compact, yet very powerful email program with many useful features and a pleasant interface. Foxmail supports POP3 accounts as well as Hotmail accounts and offers support for HTML email, mailbox encryption, multiple accounts and more. Foxmail also comes with a WYSIWIG tool to compose nice looking HTML emails from templates or scratch.

These packages contain Broadcom's IEEE 802.11a/b/g/n hybrid Linux® device driver for use with Broadcom's BCM4311-, BCM4312-, BCM4321-, and BCM4322-based hardware

Collabtive is a modern Web application that allows teams to collaborate on projects, manage tasks, milestones, and files, and send instant messages to each other. Collabtive is licensed under the GPL, but it is not packaged for Fedora, openSUSE, or Ubuntu. I'll build from source using the latest version 0.4.8 of Collabtive on a 64-bit Fedora 9 machine. A warning up front: the Collabtive tarball does not expand into a subdirectory, so you will want to create and change into a new directory before you expand it. Collabtive requires PHP 5.1 or later and MySQL 4 or later. On the browser side, it optionally uses Flash for diagrams and sound playback.

If you use bash you already know what Parameter Expansion is, although you may have used it without knowing its name. Anytime you use a dollar sign followed by a variable name you're doing what bash calls Parameter expansion, eg echo $a or a=$b. But parameter expansion has numerous other forms which allow you to expand a parameter and modify the value or substitute other values in the expansion process.

After much teeth-gnashing from the developer community, Apple has finally dropped its draconian and restrictive non-disclosure agreement (NDA) on the iPhone software development kit (SDK). In the seven months since the SDK showed up, Apple has taken much heat from developers and iPhone users alike over its lack of platfrom openness. The platform still isn't open, but it is a step in the right direction for Apple to eliminate this NDA. Here's what this means for the open source phones that will be competing with the iPhone.

Did you ever notice that sometimes things are just slightly to the left of where they're supposed to be? If you're a regular reader ( or even a slightly irregular reader ) of this blog, you may have noted that from time to time I'll, tongue in cheek, make reference to, one day, eventually writing a post that basically says nothing, goes nowhere and ends flat, leaving you feeling like you bought another pet rock.

Adding a second (or third or more!) hard drive to your computer is a great way to, well, give your computer more disk space. Ok, the concept is pretty logical but the process to make it work needs some explanation. Here’s what to do, plus one thing the Linux filesystem does brilliantly which Windows can’t do at all.

"Put a price tag on the Freedomware experience. Brand it in various interesting ways and market it in such a way for it to appear as a clear answer to the questions they actually ARE asking, the things that they actually ARE looking for."

Some pundits say Oracle could go shopping for Red Hat because Red Hat shares are trading near a 52-week low. But The VAR Guy hopes it doesn't happen. Here's why.

Like files, processes are fundamental to any UNIX® operating system. Processes are live entities executing the instructions of an executable file. Apart from executing its instructions, a process might be engaged in managing open files, processor context, address space, and data related to the program, among other things. The Linux kernel keeps complete information about a process in a process descriptor defined as struct task_struct. You can see the various fields of struct task_struct in the Linux kernel source file include/linux/sched.h.

We've written about GIMP, the outstanding open source graphics program originally developed at U.C. Berkeley, several times before. The application has had a robust community of developers behind it for years, and now a new version 2.6 is downloadable. Here's what's under the hood in the update, including a whole slew of interface enhancements.

An increasing number of computer users are turning to online applications instead of ones on their desktop. It started with webmail and has moved to productivity/office tools. With the emergence of online applications that have no desktop equivalent, and mobile devices that are browsers in your pocket, things are looking up. But what about free software? If the software we are using is not run on the computer on our desk/lap/hand what does the licence matter? For some time now I’ve been reading predictions where the browser will be the computer. Does this future have space for free software? Ryan Cartwright raises a very timely question about the significance of software licences in an era of online applications. You can read the full article at Freesoftware Magazine.

Windows, whether XP or Vista, is home to all the major instant messenger (IM) clients, and for things like Skype, unquestionably has the best versions. But if you’re hankering to talk to multiple friends on multiple IM systems at the same time, and you want some open source goodness without having to go through the pain of learning Linux, try Pidgin for Windows instead – the open source program that lets you talk freely.

The computer of the future is almost here. It's a small handheld device with some pretty good built-in muscle and storage, and that depends on the network for most of its functionality. But it won't really be practical until the keyboard goes away and we can talk to our computers.

No Linux distribution can bundle every package that users might want, so most distros host software repositories from which users can download and install additional applications. Since 2006 Slackbuilds.org has served as a high-quality repository for Slackware users, but using it requires several steps and switching between a Web browser and a virtual terminal. Sbopkg is a new ncurses-based utility that helps users build packages from SlackBuilds.org and seamlessly integrates the repository with the operating system. Slackbuilds.org is closest thing available to an official Slackware repository. It is administered by people on the Slackware development team and recommended by Slackware's maintainer, Patrick Volkerding, in the Slackware release notes. Sbopkg automates and streamlines the process of working with Slackbuilds.org to build packages.

A few years ago I stumbled upon the efforts of the Victoria Linux Users Group. They are an active, involved group, but not particularly unlike any other LUG. I was pointed in the direction of their Linux in Victoria brochure. Yes, its date of publication was 1997. What makes this brochure different is that it is open. Perhaps this is less impressive in light of the advent of wikis, but the purpose and intent of the brochure is still remarkable, and well worth expanding upon.

The Linux Foundation (LF) announced a "LinuxCon" conference that will be open to end-users. Set for September 2009 in Portland, Ore., LinuxCon will co-locate with the annual Linux Plumbers Conference (LPC), says the group. The LinuxCon announcement follows up on The LF's first end-user event, which is scheduled to take place on October 13-14 in New York City. This Linux Foundation End User Collaboration Summit offers an opportunity for "sophisticated" end users to "learn and interact with leaders from within the Linux community, including the highest level maintainers and developers," said the non-profit organization.