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As I was perusing the Linux forums this morning, I found a thread that was started by someone who was interested in learning about Linux server administration. He mentioned a (ahem!) certain commercial website that specializes in selling Linux training courses. His basic questions were, "Does anyone know anything about this outfit?", and "Are their training courses worth the price?" A few people answered positively, but a few others, who hadn't had any experience with this site, answered with "Why spend the money, when there are lots of free training courses on the Web?"

Fifteen years in the making, everyone's favorite software to run Windows programs on Linux and Unix, Wine, is almost ready for its 1.0 release. If all goes well, Alexandre Julliard, Wine's lead developer, says that Wine 1.0 should appear on June 20, two weeks after the program's fifteenth birthday. While at this point there are about 1,300 Windows applications that will install and run on Wine to some degree, only four sets of Windows applications -- Photoshop CS2, PowerPoint Viewer 97 and 2003, Word Viewer 97 and 2003, and Excel Viewer 97 and 2003 -- are considered critical for the 1.0 release.

Rickford Grant has revised his book, Ubuntu for Non-Geeks, to cover Ubuntu 8.04, Hardy Heron. Published by No Starch Press, which is offering a free sample chapter, the third edition counsels beginners on topics ranging from working with removable storage to interfacing with iPods.

Laptop installation has traditionally been one of the biggest challenges faced by Linux users. These systems come with no end of special-purpose hardware, and they bring particular needs of their own. More recently, getting a laptop into a basic, working state has become less of a challenge - at least, for carefully-chosen systems. Life has gotten much easier in this area.

One of the most often mentioned concerns at the KDE booth at LinuxTag was the question if Plasma would force the user to have a black panel. While we did have a second machine showing another theme to resolve all doubts it showed that not all users now yet the power of Plasma theming.

Most open source luminaries are known for their code, their successful startup successes or even their outspokenness. Andre Boisvert comes to open source from a different angle. Having worked for two billionaire programmers, Larry Ellison and Jim Goodnight, Andre’s transition from proprietary software to open source software has been an interesting journey. Andre started out his career at IBM where he spent 3 years. At Big Blue he was fast tracked through various positions in sales, marketing and R&D as part of their executive program. He then left for a turn around at Cognos (now owned by IBM). He’s been the President and COO of the world’s largest private software company, SAS Institute Inc. and has been the SVP of Marketing at Oracle. After working for some of the largest proprietary software companies, Andre now works primarily advising open source startups using his experience in order to help them better compete with some of his former employers. Though he keeps a relatively low profile in the open source community though he’s definitely a mover and a shaker.

Pardus is an independently developed system with notable visions/history. The first version was released during the end of 2006. The initial version had many promising features like a new package management system, control center, installer and init system. Pardus 2007 also had one of the best looking KDE customizations.

I have a constantly running server that would be a perfect on which to run torrent downloads. The only catch is that the server is headless -- it has no monitor or keyboard. To overcome this obstacle, I use rTorrent as my torrent client, and GNU Screen so that I can disconnect my terminal session and leave rTorrent running. rTorrent is a full-featured BitTorrent client that was built to run on a terminal. It uses ncurses as an interface layer and libTorrent under the hood. rTorrent is in the package repositories for most major distributions. If it is not available on your system you can download and install from source.

Hitachi was the first company to release a one terabyte hard drive, and they've sent us the DeskStar 7K1000 model for review. Our benchmarks show it performing better in Linux than Windows!

This tutorial shows how to set up a two-node Apache web server cluster that provides high-availability. In front of the Apache cluster we create a load balancer that splits up incoming requests between the two Apache nodes. Because we do not want the load balancer to become another "Single Point Of Failure", we must provide high-availability for the load balancer, too. Therefore our load balancer will in fact consist out of two load balancer nodes that monitor each other using heartbeat, and if one load balancer fails, the other takes over silently.

MySQL Workbench is a visual database design tool recently released by MySQL AB. The tool is specifically for designing MySQL database. MySQL Workbench has many functions and features; this article by Djoni Darmawikarta shows some of them by way of an example. We’ll build a physical data model for an order system where an order can be a sale order or a purchase order, and then, forward-engineer our model into an MySQL database.

The Banshee Project has achieved the first major, stable release of its eponymous music jukebox application. Banshee 1.0 features faster searching, browsing, and management functions, along with improved memory usage, faster start-up, and a more responsive interface better supporting large collections, project leaders say.

How to use chkconfig to manage Linux services and work with the run levels you need them turned on and off for.

A third release candidate of Mozilla Firefox 3 has been issued with a workaround for a bug introduced in the latest 10.5.3 update of Mac OS X. The problem causes the operating system to hang on shutdown if an application tries to open the VerifiedDownloadPlugin.plugin file, which is a browser plugin included in OS X and accessed by Firefox under certain circumstances.

Last week we learned how to make simple video screencasts on Linux with recordMyDesktop. Today we're going to record audio from a microphone, get acquainted with JACK, and convert MyDesktop's Ogg files into AVI formats. Even the most low-budget onboard sound chip should have a microphone input. Plug in your mic, and then make sure it is enabled in your mixer. If your system has only a single sound card, enter hw:0,0 as the recording device in your recordMyDesktop configuration. And that's all you need to do.

I have recently bought a Huawei E220 HSDPA access device (or a so-called “3G modem”) from Three UK. In this article I’ll share with you my experiences of using Three 3G modem in Ubuntu Linux distribution. And don’t worry, it works just fine.

After pretty much a full year of Debian (first Etch, mostly Lenny), also great but not as great as this new version of Ubuntu, so many things are working so well that I'm reluctant to do anything but keep using this long-term support version of Ubuntu. Fedora 9, Mandriva 2008, PCLinuxOS 2007, OpenSuse 10.3 -- nothing has been able to handle this particular collection of hardware better than Ubuntu 8.04.

Discover Database Connectivity, a JavaScript API and implementation that enables Web clients to use an Ajax style of programming to directly access server-side relational data without compromising enterprise security. Also, learn how Web 2.0 applications can use this middleware to access relational data as a first-class construct instead of through ad hoc protocols.

Co-founders Jake St. Peter and Thomas Ingham started Coalmarch, a Web applications development company, in 2004 after "about 10 years' background in Web development" for other companies, St. Peters says. After working for a company called gotickets.com, he and his partner decided to launch their own business, providing content management systems and shopping carts. They use open source software, but with it they built a proprietary package -- because, St. Peter says, that's what customers want.

Since our article yesterday entitled X Server 1.4.1 Is Released, No Joke where we shared that the X.Org server update -- a critical part of the Linux desktop -- was released albeit significantly late and the blocker bug list wasn't even cleared, it's sparked discussions on our forums and other online communities on how the X.Org release management can be improved and how new developers can become involved. One of the most common recommendations has been to get more software (distribution) vendors involved, seeing as they are the ones shipping X.Org to many of the desktop users around the world. However, as there hasn't been a list (or at least not in some time) that looks at each of the commits to the X server in regards to each of the companies and the developers involved, we've provided one in this article that covers all X Server activity going back nine years.