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The Task Spooler project allows you to queue up tasks from the shell for batch execution. Task Spooler is simple to use and requires no configuration. You can view and edit queued commands, and you can view the output of queued commands at any time.

On Monday at Akademy, KDE's yearly world summit, the KDE e.V. held its general assembly, covering a wide range hot topics, regarding licensing and community scalability. While part of the meeting is dictated by intricacies of German association law, the AGM also provides a way of effectively solving issues arising in the KDE community and deciding on ways to move forward as an organisation. This year's KDE e.V. General Assembly endorsed a Code of Conduct, the Community Working Group and a Fiduciary License Agreement for KDE contributors.

Sun Microsystems, the original advocate of OpenOffice, missed the boat when IBM, Canonical, Red Hat and Novell announced the Microsoft-Free PC initiative. So, has Sun squandered its early lead as an alternative to Microsoft Office? Works With U looks for answers.

Over the years, I've probably created thousands of reports for customers and co-workers. Usually, I have a web-based program that generates reports in either html or comma-separated format. The html format is a lot prettier and usually gives the user what they want. The comma-separated format allows the user to easily import the results into Excel, or into Open Office in the case of my more enlightened users. From there, they add formatting to the raw data and send the resulting report to whereever it's going. All this formating is done manually by customers who tend to want the same report periodically, so this results in a lot of re-work on their part. Most of the time, they're just happy to get the data and don't complain about having to pretty it up a bit. But there is a better way.

During a conversation at LinuxWorld Expo, Canonical VP Malcolm Yates described how mainframes running Ubuntu Linux could drive major software as a service (SaaS) projects forward. Here's the scoop from MSPmentor.

Professionals who work on the basis of billable hours rarely take the time out to write an article for publication unless they have a valid reason for doing so. That's why I'm generally a bit sceptical when lawyers come out with articles that attempt to make a case against the use of free and open source sofware. No lawyer would ever be paid the same rates for a third-rate article about FOSS as he/she is paid for listening to a client - hence my scepticism. But, surprisingly, over the past three months two members of the legal profession have taken the time to pen what they, no doubt, consider to be serious objections to the use of FOSS.

When it comes to virtualising Linux, VMWare has always had the edge of Microsoft’s Virtual PC which has limited video display support. Although these were the best two, there have been other lesser-known options like XENSource. Here’s Sun’s VirtualBox and why it is truly kick-ass. You know what virtualisation is; it lets you run – on one physical computer – multiple, separate, computer environments. Each environment behaves as if it is genuinely running on real hardware directly. Virtualisation lets you run an operating system with all its bits and pieces on top of your existing operating system.

The second Akademy day started a bit later in the morning than the previous one, yet somehow most visitors managed to look much more tired. Maybe the social event (read Nokia sponsored beer) from yesterday has something to do with that. Even tired, people visit the talks and write code, so you can expect more code, discussions and blogs today.

OpenOffice is much more than a simple alternative to Microsoft Office... Here, we’ll show you some simple tips and tricks so that you can use OpenOffice in the easiest and most efficient way possible

Sometimes, you can recover that big oops!

During LinuxWorld Expo, Alfresco leveraged a growing relationship with Canonical to continue its open source war against Microsoft SharePoint. Here's the scoop from The VAR Guy.

Dell is shipping two new laptops with widescreen LCD displays and Ubuntu Hardy Heron (8.04) operating systems with DVD playback. Additionally, the largest U.S. PC maker has started offering Hardy Heron on three models previously available with the earlier Gutsy Gibbon Ubuntu release.

If you run scripts that require a lot of execution time it's a good idea to try to avoid letting them overload your system. You can run them via nice, but if for example your script is sending a bunch of emails your email daemon isn't running via nice and it may itself get out of control. One way to deal with this is by using the values in /proc/loadavg to pause when your system load gets too high.

When Sam Lamonica stepped into the CIO role at Rudolph and Sletten five years ago, he set out to tame an ungainly network by using an orderly open source network monitoring solution. "Basically there was nothing in place," says Lamonica, whose Redwood City, Calif.-based company is a general contractor in the construction industry. "The infrastructure was pretty much a hodge-podge of different, disparate pieces and systems that had been cobbled together by a couple of previous IS directors. So basically it was a swamp.

Tracking security is an ongoing concern in the software industry. Oracle and Cisco use a system called Common Vulnerability Scoring System (CVSS), while Microsoft recently announced its the Exploitability Index project. Both projects rely on evaluating the risk potential from exploitation. Mozilla's security metrics will take a different route. "We did look at exploitability at the very beginning and we decided that was a factor that is hard to capture and not all that useful," Window Snyder said. "We don't have a lot of evidence that Firefox users are being exploited."

From SIGGRAPH 2008, one of the premiere computers graphics conferences, the Khronos Group has announced the release of the OpenGL 3.0 API specification and the GLSL 1.30 shading language specification. This is the first major update to this cross-platform 3D programming API since the OpenGL 2.1 release two years ago. In this article we have a bit of information on these OpenGL and GLSL updates and when we can expect to see the Linux graphics scene moving to this new standard.

Finding a satisfactory way to index a lot of data in Linux is a lot harder than it sounds. The most popular tools like Beagle tend to be limited to single keyword searches, which are a pretty blunt tool when looking through hundreds of gigabytes of files. Some tools are a massive pain to set up, I found htree an example of this. Search tools are also frequently set up to default to running as background daemons. While this gives you instant indexed access to anything that goes into the indexed filesystem, the price you pay are massive computer resource usage, to the point where user processes frequently slow down.

The Free Software Foundation can cross off another item on its high priority list of applications that free software needs in order to compete. Version 0.6 of Marble, which ships with KDE 4.1, may not rival Google Earth just yet, but the underlying engine has the potential to do so in future versions. The main improvements needed to reach this stage are a lower level of detail and some additional views and integration into free online resources. Marble is a new tool from KDE Education, the subproject already known for such educational tools as the annotated periodic table Kalzium and the astronomy program KStars. Like them, Marble is not just educational, but has all the makings of a handy reference utility as well.

Install configure and use LXDE desktop environment in openSUSE. LXDE is a new project aimed to provide a new desktop environment which is lightweight and fast. It’s not designed to be powerful and bloated, but to be usable and slim enough, and keep the resource usage low. Different from other desktop environments, LXDE doesn’t tightly integrate every component. Instead, LXDE makes all components independent, and each of them can be used independently with few dependencies.

So, in a stroke, two security researchers (Mark Dowd of IBM and Alexander Sotirov or VMware) at Black Hat have set browser security back 10 years and rendered Vista’s security next to useless (PDF of paper here - site currently Slashdotted …).