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Like many others who are part of some camp or the other, people who are part of the free and open source software community often tend to fall into the mistake of circling the wagons and not admitting to essential truths, even when these become self-evident. If we do happen to ventilate - and I'm often "guilty" of that cardinal "sin" - then the rest of the righteous crowd shouts us down.

A new stable kernel is out. Three months in the making, Linux 2.6.26 boasts read-only bind mounts, "big-iron" KVM ports, USB webcam support, 802.11s mesh WiFi, built-in support for remote kernel debugging, and a host of embedded architecture improvements, among other enhancements.

I, as well as my 4 year old son, have always had an interest in Astronomy. My son puts planet puzzles together and looks at picture books. I'm proud to say that he can name all the planets in order, and astonished to realize that he knows that Pluto isn't considered a planet anymore. I've read books on Astronomy; I've been to planetariums and observatories.

New kernel editions are normally adopted as rapidly as possible into mainstream Linux operating system distributions, bringing the new features directly into use on production systems. The new kernel appears three months after version 2.6.25, a longer-than-usual release cycle, Linux creator Linus Torvalds said in an e-mail announcing the release.

An enterprising group has taken on a radical approach in attracting users to Linux: switch a whole town! Dubbed "Lindependence 2008" (a.k.a. LIN08), this event strives to switch citizens in Felton, Calif., for at least a week from Microsoft Windows to Linux. The initiative, loosely led by Ken Starks in Austin, Texas, and Larry Cafiero in Felton, has taken the idea of introducing normal computer users to Linux to screaming heights. By July 28, those in Felton who decide to take the plunge will go Microsoft-free for a week or more.

For many years, each Linux kernel release was assigned a series of three numbers, X.Y.Z, with an even Y indicating a "stable" release, and an odd Y indicating an "unstable" development release. Z was incremented for each individual kernel release. The "stable" 1.0.0 Linux kernel was released in March of 1994. New development was then continued in the "unstable" 1.1.z branch, until the "stable" 1.2.0 Linux kernel was release in March of 1995. Major improvements in the kernel lead to X being incremented to 2, and a "stable" 2.0 kernel was released in June of 1996. Active development then continued in the "unstable" 2.1 tree. This process continued with "stable" 2.2, 2.4 and 2.6 kernel trees, and each stable tree gained an official maintainer while Linux creator Linus Torvalds focused on newer features in the next "unstable" tree. Development in these "unstable" trees could go on for periods of multiple years before a "stable" tree was branched.

Myah OS is a desktop-oriented distribution built from the ground up around a custom package manager. When things go right, it has the potential to be an easy to use, simplistic deskop operating system. As you will see, however, not everything always goes right.

Near-Time is making collaboration easier, one wiki and widget at a time. The company recently teamed up with the Institute for Open Economic Networks to develop workforce partnerships through the creation of the Open Source Workforce Development initiative. The new initiative is paving the way for regional business leaders to collaborate on building a workforce with 21st century skills.

The loss of critical data can prove devastating. If you use Linux, you already have access to extremely powerful tools for creating custom backup solutions. The solutions in this article can help you perform simple to more advanced and secure network backups using open source tools that are part of nearly every Linux distribution.

When KDE 4.0 was released in January, it was supposed to be the foundation for a new era of desktop development. But as 4.x versions began finding their way into distributions, negative reactions began to obscure other ones. With the upcoming 4.1 release due at the end of this month, it's hard to avoid wondering: what happened? To a degree, the answer seems to implicate everybody involved, from KDE and the distributions that ship it to the free software media and users. In doing so, the answer highlights some of the changing relationships in the free and open source software (FOSS) community.

A few weeks ago I felt a little like a proud pappa, well maybe more like an uncle since I can't claim to have been present for the conception. NetDirector, an open source configuration management tool that I helped get off the ground NetDirectorhas finally been released under the GNU Public License making it a bona fide open source application (it was previously licensed under the NetDirector Public license, the Mozilla Public License with an attribution clause). NetDirector is a web-based Unix system administration tool that provides the ability to centrally manage services. The thing that's makes NetDirector unique is it's ability to simultaneously manage multiple servers at once from a graphical interface. In comparison to the very popular Webmin which can configure many different services and server attributes but maintains a one-to-one ratio.

In recent times, the xorg.conf file once used for configuring all static X-related server options has been shrinking in size. Thanks to more reliable EDID (Extended Display Identification Data) on LCD panels, it's generally no longer needed to manually specify mode-lines within this X.Org configuration file. With improvements for auto-detection, in many circumstances it's no longer even needed to manually specify your graphics driver and other options. However, the X Server currently lacks an infrastructure for supporting persistent device properties.

Once again we look at the same critical error that is detected at the menu page start up. However, this time "Local" means no redirection to an external error page. The process is similar with a good portion of the code unaltered. Nonetheless, there are several significant differences, the reporting of the exception is immediate and the message is placed on the running web page template. Regarding the latter, the message resides where the menu listing would have appeared. This results in a smoother execution with less likelihood of confusion.

When it comes to hosted email, why zig when you can zag? That explains the strategy at EtomicMail, a managed service provider thatâ??s hosting Zimbra â?? the open source email platform â?? rather than Microsoft Exchange. Here's a look at EtomicMail's strategy and the growing popularity of Zimbra.

File managers for Linux: Konqueror, Nautilus, Thunar, Krusader, Dolphin, Xfe, ROX-Filer, PCManFM, Midnight Commander.

The OpenOffice.org development team has released the second beta of the forthcoming OpenOffice.org 3.0 office suite. The latest beta includes a number of new features that will make the wait for 3.0 worth it. The final version of OpenOffice.org 3.0 is expected to be released in September.

There is a sizeable amount of free video software available on the Linux platform which is both fully featured and mature. Become a digital video editing master, turn your Linux machine into a Home Theatre box are two avenues that are explored in this article.

Want to get an idea of what speed advantage adding an expensive hardware RAID card to your new server is likely to give you? You can benchmark the performance difference between running a RAID using the Linux kernel software RAID and a hardware RAID card. My own tests of the two alternatives yielded some interesting results. In testing both software and hardware RAID performance I employed six 750GB Samsung SATA drives in three RAID configurations -- 5, 6, and 10. I measured performance using both Bonnie++ and IOzone benchmarks. I ran the benchmarks using various chunk sizes to see if that had an effect on either hardware or software configurations.

Your YouTube viewing history is safe from the prying eyes of Viacom and the other companies suing Google, at least for now. Despite a recent court order backing a Viacom demand for YouTube to hand over complete user viewing history records, Viacom and its confederates have partially backed off.

Red Hat VP and Assistant General Counsel Rob Tiller has publicly posted the terms of the patent agreement he helped to negotiate last month with Firestar Software, Inc. and DataTern Inc. The general idea behind Tiller's post is to be transparent about the deal - the only problem in my simplistic view is that it's missing some very key information about money.