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I've been using KMail for several years, but I get in ruts and don't notice new features until I trip over them by accident. One such feature is Templates, which has become one of my biggest time-savers.

One brake on the GIMP's popularity is that, while it boasts dozens of filters, a rival like Photoshop boasts thousands. You may only occasionally need a special effect that imitates a pencil sketch or a famous style of painting such as Impressionism or Cubism, but, when you do, having a filter to create the effect instantly saves serious amount of time. To help bridge this divide, the GIMP is reviving the User Filter from its 1.x releases. This filter is a kind of meta-plugin that allows users to import and manage Photoship filters or, if they have the knowledge, to write their own. The GIMP User Filter is available from the project's SourceForge.net site as source code or as a Debian package that may or may not work on Ubuntu, to judge from mailing list chatter. Once you install it, you will find it under Filter - > Generic -> User Filter.

Storage is the Achilles' heel of virtualization projects, said LeftHand Networks Inc. as it announced a new version of its iSCSI SAN software, which it claimed could ease the task of rolling out virtual desktop infrastructures (VDI). The company said that the Linux-based software, called SAN/iQ Version 8, runs on an x86 server -- or preferably a pair of them, for redundancy -- and uses storage virtualization technology to turn a bunch of disk arrays into a powerful but relatively cheap SAN in a box. LeftHand said that new features in Version 8 -- including SmartClone volumes, an integrated performance manager, a virtual connection manager and application programming interfaces (API) for links to other management consoles -- would make it easier to manage virtualized environments and cut storage costs.

Designing and building Web sites can be a maze of tasks these days. One tool that can simplify the task is the well-known Firebug extension, which lets you edit and debug HTML, CSS, and JavaScript from within Firefox. As useful as Firebug is on its own, it can actually be extended past its initial setup with additional extensions that can make your work as a developer or designer even easier.

Faithful readers of this column may remember news we reported back in early April that the next Ubuntu release had been cunningly named"Jabbering Jackass." The news came from a memo that got leaked to the Linux Loop, the story went, and it was, of course, an April Fools' Day joke -- which we knew all along.

In spite of its best efforts, Microsoft remains a company back on its heels flailing wildly at the market forces changing the software business. Seinfeld isn't going to change that and neither is a PR blitz. While Microsoft remains a business force, it needs to change fundamentally the way it does business to maintain its industry position moving forward.

MIME HTML or MHT is a standard way to combine the external resources, like images or sound files, that in normal browsing situation are linked externally (downloaded), into the same file as the HTML code, using MIME.

Late last month we published our preview of the ASUS Eee PC 901 and we shared our plans for a number of benchmarks using this netbook with Intel's Atom processor. Following our Linux desktop encryption benchmarks of the ASUS Eee PC 901 and Intel Atom N270 CPU we have a performance comparison of Xandros, Fedora, Ubuntu, and Mandriva on this low-cost netbook PC.

I find myself removing packages that I do not need, especially if the packages belong to processes that are using processor resources. There is a way to start from the ground up, you can have a minimal system and just add what you need. This has the added benefit of extra security, your system does not have services running that you do not use. You will not use a Ubuntu Server CD, but the Desktop Live CD.

The U.S. Department of Homeland Security has not met requirements to provide "open source" intelligence--that is, publicly available information--for state and local law enforcement, a new report shows. The House Committee on Homeland Security released a report Friday criticizing the department after interviewing more than 350 state, local, and tribal law enforcement officials about the DHS's open source intelligence efforts.

Javier Colado, Novell’s new channel chief, faces some clear challenges. Many pundits say Colado has to strengthen Novell’s SUSE Linux partner ranks. But in reality, The VAR Guy believes, Colado has to build a bridge between vastly different software islands. Here's why.

NOTICE: The script in this post is terrible on purpose!

LXer Feature: 14-Sept-2008

This week's LXer Roundup is full of all kinds of good stuff, but not if your Microsoft. HP is attempting to work around the Vista GUI, an ad campaign that doesn't seem to be about anything and to top it off The London Stock Exchange went down because of a .NET crash. Also, Mark Shuttleworth says that the Linux Desktop needs a facelift, a very funny article on why you should switch from Linux to Vista. Did you know that the largest and most complex scientific instrument ever built, called the "Large Hadron Collider", which when powered up could theoretically create a black hole and suck the entire Earth into it? It runs Linux.

A neat script that notifies you when upstream Debian repository has changed, in real-time! So you can upgrade your Linux right away!

Firefox, what's not to love about this open-source web browser? Well, a number of users following the development work on Ubuntu 8.10 (the Intrepid Ibex) are feeling rather outraged over Mozilla Firefox 3.0.2 and later. In the latest Ubuntu packages, Firefox requires an EULA (End-User License Agreement) be accepted the first time you launch the browser. The EULA mostly deals with agreeing to Mozilla's trademark policies for Firefox.

You know a science story is big when an experiment gets first or second billing on the main evening news—and it’s not even a slow news day. The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is up and running as I write and as far as I can tell I’m still here, so it looks like the doomsayers were a little premature. Unless I’m writing this piece from the far side of the singularity of a black hole in a parallel universe. The LHC is an huge experiment (a snip at $10 billion) to explore the very small and very energetic sub-atomic world to verify, amongst other things, if the Higgs Boson really exists. That will be a monumental triumph for science and the human spirit. I have always been fascinated by particle physics, despite by academic background in the Humanities and I will be following the progress at CERN with great interest. I am particularly pleased too because free software will be at the heart of this colossal human endeavour. GNU/Linux has been, is and will continue to power CERN’s efforts. This is a wonderful opportunity to tell the world that Windows doesn’t rule the roost. Read the full story at Freesoftware Magazine.

Linux is a very strong platform for budding artists, photographers, animators, and designers. With inexpensive hardware, free software, and a modicum of talent and inspiration, anyone can create professional-looking computer graphics.

Recently, I collected some data from Sourceforge, hoping to find evidence for the importance of copyleft. But I found something surprising: although there’s plenty of evidence that many developers believe in the power of copyleft, the one measure I could derive of how much copyleft actually works showed that copyleft made no difference whatsoever! If true, this means a lot of free software’s social theory is wrong and many things will have to be re-thought. Terry Hancock at Freesoftware Magazine has a left-field take on copyleft. It's not all it seems apparently. Read the full article at FSM

Richard Stallman wants to popularise the term GNU/Linux instead of using the currently popular term Linux. He correctly states that the term Linux, besides being thoroughly inaccurate, totally fails to introduce new users to the legal and philosophical concepts that underlie the basis of the GNU/Linux OS; but is it feasible to make such a change at this late stage? Some weeks ago, trolling through prospective articles for Free Software Daily, I encountered a blog, describing the evolution of “Linux”. It was aimed at Newbies. The blog correctly described Linus Torvalds as the creator of the Linux kernel and a few more recent developments, but that was it. No mention was made that Richard Stallman actually created much of what is now called “Linux”, no mention of the GPL, or how it works, no mention of the copyleft legal concept and no mention of other responsibilities placed on users and developers. All of Richard Stallman’s worst fears confirmed in one blog. Read the full story at Freesoftware Magazine.

In his screencast, Douglas Napoleone programs a simple music database by using the Python Django framework. In its now available second version, Napoleone demonstrates how it works in the roughly two hours of the video.