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The latest edition of Linux World ground to a halt in San Francisco today. I made it into town just last night for a VIP party hosted by the Linux Foundation where I caught up with lots of the true believer friends (developers, journalists and corporate supporters), and for the Board meeting today. The LF board meeting today was productive, though (a highlight was a walk around the Linux Developers Network Site we brought live today, as well as the new Linux Application Checker that Steven J. Vaughn-Nichols immediately pronounced to be a "killer development tool."

When Jeffrey Spencer prepared for his college exams, he would tape his notes to the handlebars of his bike and ride to school, studying all the while. To him, it made perfect sense."I am a kinetic learner, which means I learn and mentally perform best when I am moving," he says.

The Secure Shell (SSH) and Secure Copy (SCP) make remotely performing system administration and copying files across secure links a painless operation. SSH and SCP use the same SSH protocol to protect network communications, but they rely on users knowing if they want a shell or to copy a file beforehand. You cannot easily use an existing SSH shell connection to a remote machine and just grab one or two files; if you want the files, you'll have to make another SSH connection for the file copy using SCP -- unless you have ssh-xfer.

I recently decided to study for the Cisco CSSP certification. My main concern in the beginning was the fact that most of the lab simulation software that I found out there could only run on Windows, this was a problem for me given the fact that I do not own a Windows computer. After a quick search I found the wonderful Dynamips project that goes beyond what other simulators do by running actual Cisco IOS images, as well as the PEMU project which allows for running of Cisco PIX images. To integrate the various pieces of software and provide an interface for interaction with the devices I used dynagen.

In a bid to speed and simplify server application installations, Canonical is developing so-called virtual Ubuntu Linux Server appliances, The VAR Guy learned at LinuxWorld Expo. Here are the details

Enterprising engineers will soon get the chance to find out how Openmoko's Linux-powered phones work and to modify them. Barely a month after shipping the Neo FreeRunner, Openmoko has said it plans to make the schematics for this - and the Neo 1973 - publicly available under a Creative Commons (CC) license.

Ask any independent software vendor what he hates most about developing for Linux and he'll tell you that it's having to develop for SUSE and for Red Hat and for Ubuntu and ... you get the idea. The Linux Foundation has just released a beta of a new program, Linux Application Checker (AppChecker), that's going to make ISVs and other programmers start to love developing for Linux.

Tap into social software and add value to your application. Social networks are making it easier to take data and mash it up to create innovative new Web applications. In this article, the first of a three-part series, learn how to develop Google App Engine (GAE) applications and use Eclipse to make GAE development even easier.

Michelle Murrain is a great example of what the FOSS community is all about. She's complicated: she calls herself a "scientist turned technologist turned theologian turned writer," all blended into one person. She's also an active supporter of and contributor to open source software projects. She's not a developer, however, and Murrain would really like to see more space for people like her, with different gifts to share, in the open source community.

Xandros, the Linux desktop company that supplies Asus with its UMPC (Ultra Mobile PC) Linux,, announced that the next generation of Xandros community-driven Linux Freespire 5 will be based on the Debian Linux 5"Lenny" release. Lenny is due to arrive in September. Freespire will follow sometime in the fourth quarter of 2008. After the release of Freespire 5, Xandros will release its commercial Linux distribution, Xandros Desktop Professional 5. This will be built on the Freespire 5 code base with additional commercial software. These commercial programs will be be primarily for enterprise customers.

A little more than three months after he became leader of the Debian GNU/Linux project, Steve McIntyre is beginning to realise that it can be a little scary at times. Though he's been with the Debian project a long time and met many of his fellow 1000+ developers, either face-to-face or through online communication, McIntyre still knows that he cannot go out ahead of his troops.

Paul Ferrill agilely leaps over several hurdles in order to install and review Ubuntu Mobile Edition on a Samsung Q1 ultra-mobile PC, tests it for hardware compatibility and usability, and takes a look at Canonical's developer resources for UME.

Motorola has started a public preview of development tools for unreleased Linux mobile phones. The free Eclipse-based tools will help Linux developers create, test and certify native applications for the newest Motorola handsets. Motorola has released a "public preview" of the first-ever native development tools for unreleased models of its Linux-based mobile phones.

Some interesting ways to use grep to shorten your command lines. Not to be confused with efficiency ;)

Forget about the art, what really matters is why some tree roots buried in the ground accurately represent Fedora 10.

TrueCrypt is a free opensource software system for establishing and maintaining an on-the-fly-encrypted volume (data storage device). On-the-fly encryption means that data are automatically encrypted or decrypted right before they are loaded or saved, without any user intervention. No data stored on an encrypted volume can be read (decrypted) without using the correct password/keyfile(s) or correct encryption keys. Entire file system is encrypted (e.g., file names, folder names, contents of every file, free space, meta data, etc).

It would seem, that unless you are not actively involved in the current world (perhaps you are busy studying the galaxy or wondering whether that really is water on Mars), you might have heard something about going green.

Mozilla has launched a prototype messaging Firefox extension that it says could eventually enable users to keep track of all of their electronic communications, including e-mail, RSS, social networks and Web discussions.

When the long-awaited Gentoo 2008.0 release finally hit mirrors last month, the two largest groups of users found themselves out of luck: x86 users discovered that their live CD wouldn't copy the kernel during install, and the AMD64 image wouldn't fit onto a standard CD-ROM. This was not a great start for a distribution whose comeback may rest upon this release. Updated ISOs were released two days later, though, and those work well for getting a quick Gentoo install ready to customize.

In a move that benefits kids, schools and the environment, Untangle and its partners installed Ubuntu Linux on 750 refurbished PCs during LinuxWorld Expo. Here are some key benefits from the Installfest, according to The VAR Guy.

[I helped out with that for several hours on Tuesday and Wednesday, it felt good to know that I was helping to get useful computers to kids who would otherwise not have one at all. I went 0 for 4 on getting Linux installed on Dell machines though - Scott]