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You probably know the open source 3-D modeler Blender for its animation tools, which have brought audiences short films Elephants Dream and Big Buck Bunny. But Blender can create realistic 3-D models for any purpose, as Allan Brito's Blender 3D: Architecture, Buildings, and Scenery (Packt Publishing, $45) presents. This book approaches Blender as an architecture visualization tool, detailing the features built in to the editor and the techniques that make architectural modeling differ from crafting game or video effects.

You may find this useful to rename MP3 or image files in a directory, so they will all look the same. The following script will work on directories with less than 100 files of the same type, and will rename all of them to file01, file02, file03, ... and so on.

Sometimes, you can learn things by watching your Linux system perform an update. A few weeks ago, I was updating one of my Ubuntu systems, when I saw that "lshw" was one of the items that was getting updated. So, I pulled up its man page to see what it's about.

Gary Richmond at Freesoftware Magazine looks at Acers' Aspire One, the leatest ultra portable laptop computer to feature GNU/Linus. It runs Linpus Linux Lite (a hacked version of Fedora 8) and so at last we have a version of Linux not tainted with kernel source code issues and GPL violations which characterised Xandros on the Asus EeePC. Read the full story at http://www.freesoftwaremagazine.com/columns/acers_linpus_lin...">FSM

The Gentoo Linux project team today announced the availability of its "2008.0" release of Gentoo. New features of the developer-oriented Linux distribution include an updated installer, improved hardware support, reworked profiles, and a switch from Gnome to Xfce for its LiveCD, says the team.

HP's entry into the sub-Mini-Notebook arena comes in the form of the HP 2133, a sleek-looking, brushed aluminum finished, lightweight but well built beauty. You can see the attention to detail in the engineering when you first open it up. From the sturdy hinge to the scratch resistant display and connectivity options you'll find just about everything you would expect in an ultra-mobile laptop.

Security vendor AVG has issued an updated version of its AVG 8 anti-virus software that fixes the fake traffic issue that has caused a huge online backlash amongst web masters the world over...

Open source technology luminary Stormy Peters has been appointed executive director of the GNOME Foundation, effective immediately. The GNOME Foundation is committed to the task of advancing the GNOME desktop for Linux and other Unix-based operating systems. As executive director, Peters will be responsible for marketing GNOME to the public and attracting new corporate sponsors and developers to the GNOME community. Peters says she brings the strength of her relationships with businesses and community members to her new job. "I've worked a lot in the past explaining how the community works to enterprises, explaining how enterprises work to community members and helping them work effectively together."

As Xandros digests Linspire, what does the deal mean to Linux market leaders like Red Hat, Novell and Ubuntu â?? and would-be Linux customers? Here are some clues from The VAR Guy.

Back in April we had looked at the ECS A780GM-A, which was a nice low-cost motherboard and had worked well under Linux with the newer desktop distributions. This motherboard had integrated Radeon HD 3200 graphics, which we had found to perform well and equivalent to a Radeon HD 2400PRO discrete graphics card. However, for those interested in NVIDIA graphics, there is the GeForce 8200 IGP that also performs well on Linux. If you are interested in the GeForce 8200 chipset, today we are looking at two of the cost-effective motherboards deploying this chipset: the ECS GF8200A Black and ASRock K10N78FullHD-hSLI.

Alternative Find and Replace for Writer (AltSearch) has the ambitious goal of replacing and enhancing one of the most basic pieces of OpenOffice.org functionality. It's undermined by a chaotic interface, but if you have the patience to continue past first impressions, you will find AltSearch comes far closer to fulfilling its promise than you might initially imagine.

Well, July 4th may have come and gone, but another independence recently came to pass that could be almost as historic. That's Microsoft's independence from Bill Gates, of course, and it was a hot topic last week as bloggers at ZDNet and elsewhere wondered if the change might bring about a Redmond that's kinder and gentler to the open source world.

Today's ISP environment requires authenticated SMTP to be able to send emails. As a policy, authenticated SMTP helps cut down on folks sending SPAM and allows the ISP to track which account is sending what type of email content for further demographic study. While authenticated SMTP is good for the ISP, it is not a configuration supported out of the box by most Linux distributions. This means that all those system emails and log reports emailed by root never make it anywhere anymore.

Apple and Adobe have both gotten some press lately for going to the trademark police after a couple of small business people had the audacity to publicize their products by including corporate trademarks in their business name.

The call - both for the presentations to the main conference and for mini-conferences - went out on Friday, July 4, just five months after the 2008 event concluded. This will be the 10th LCA and the first to be held in Hobart, the capital of Tasmania. The first conference, held in Melbourne in 1999, went under the name Conference of Australian Linux Users; there was no conference in the year 2000.

A small tutorial on how to use sed to double, triple, quadruple, etc, your space between lines. Also looks at the "r"ead and "w"rite operators.

Leave it to the Business Software Alliance (BSA) to distort the definition of"open standard" in order to serve the interests of Microsoft and its other members. The BSA doesn't like the European Commission's increasing interest in open source and open standards to deliver software interoperability.

The secure design, modular construction and ease of use have made Postfix an increasingly popular mail server. This tutorial will show you how to configure a basic Postfix Mail server for CentOS, OpenSuse and Ubuntu.

Two evaluators recently returned to OLE Nepal's office after two weeks at Nepal's pilot schools. They are working on an early qualitative evaluation based on interviews with teachers, parents, and kids participating in the pilots. I have found the insights and feedback they brought back incredibly useful. This article will focus on one particularly consistent piece of feedback from the teachers: They want built-in lesson plans for activities on the XO and they want it explicitly defined in the lesson plans which learning objectives in Nepal's National Curriculum the activities satisfy.

LXer Feature: 06-Jul-2008

The big news this week was Xandros buying Linspire with all the respective fallout included, a review of 11 video players for, Linux's dirty little secret, Glyn Moody's "Sir Bill and Sir Tim: A Tale of Two Knights", Which Linux Distributions Are Dying?, Beyond the desktop with KDE4 and Carla Schroder's Sidux review.