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I want to bring iTunes-loving Linux users back to reality. As you can see from the following Ubuntu Forums threads, some Ubuntu-ites are deluded about the idea of Apple porting iTunes to Linux:

Andy Updegrove has the news that South Africa has filed an official appeal, protesting the approval of OOXML, and the action means that OOXML is now in limbo until the appeal is decided. I wonder if this is why Microsoft suddenly decided to support ODF, to avoid being shut out completely pending the appeal. Might other national bodies be considering doing the same thing? Stay tuned.

This article approaches the opposite of a double-reverse-lookup (The double-reverse-lookup being IP to Name to IP mapping, with this being Name to IP to Name mapping). Some sites use Double Reverse Lookups as a security measure.

Free Geek Vancouver (FGV) is now certified as the first ethical recycler in western Canada by the Basel Action Network (BAN), and an important part of the certification is the organization's refurbishing of used computers with free and open source software (FOSS).

The last part of this four-parter series on the Asus EeePC deals in detail with all the tips and tricks you can use to conserve battery power, control the webcam and configure Firefox and Opera to maximize all the available screen space. Read the full story

Now Ubuntu dutifully informs me with the Update Notifier that I have packages that need updating. ... And best of all, something somewhere has solved my USB flash drive problem in Ubuntu 8.04. I now can plug in a flash drive and read and write to it with no problem whatsoever.

This is a 3 part posting that covers how you can setup 2-way Nagios alerting via SMS.

The series is broken down as such:

1. Part 1: Background and Requirements
2. Part 2: Sending SMS messages from Nagios
3. Part 3: Acknowledging SMS messages

For those that wish to setup simple, inexpensive monitoring you will find that it is simpler than first thought. Feel free to grab the code-snippets provided over the series and make use of it in your own environment.

The Nagios SMS alert system has been running here now in production for approximately 6 months and works extremely well.

Sometimes all it takes to foment innovation may be an idea that sounds cool. When Romanian developer Bogdan Radulescu first ran into what would eventually be known as NimbleX, a mini-live CD project designed to be fast, light, and functional for everyday use. Radulescu recieved his first computer from his parents in the fifth grade. Little did he realize that computers would consume most of his time in the future. "I think my first contact with open source was actually with Linux in the late '99. I had only a [Red Hat 6] CD that I managed to install on my computer. I didn't actually know how to do anything because it was only the CD.

After being assured that my test on the Dell Optiplex GX520 didn't work because 512 MB of RAM is usually enough but not always, I tried to boot OpenSolaris 2008.05 on my Gateway Solo 1450 -- featuring a 1.3 GHz Celeron M processor and a whopping 1 GB of RAM. I got to the console, but no GUI, no matter how hard I tried.

It’s a big question: how trustworthy is the software I use on my computer? When it comes to open source, can you trust the quality of programmers who work for free? You can, according to a new report out this week – which also proves major open source offerings to be especially well written. It equally shows up the projects which are slow to respond to vulnerabilities.

Following on from my recommendation for [apt-buglist][]—where you can see the reported bugs on a package before installing it—I thought it might be useful to look at the other side of the coin, reporting bugs in Debian. The best way to do this is with the dedicated tool: reportbug. http://www.freesoftwaremagazine.com/columns/reporting_bugs_d...">Full story

Google Notebook is a free service that allows users to save and share notes and Web clippings in an online journal. A REST-based API allows developers to build PHP applications around this service using SimpleXML. In this article, you will learn how to use the API, with examples of reading notebooks and notebook contents using PHP.

The Debian GNU/Linux project has just endured what is probably its worst week on the security front in the 15 years of its existence following the disclosure on May 13 of a serious vulnerability in the distribution's OpenSSL package.

It was just over a year ago that Microsoft Corp. dropped a bombshell of a claim: users of Linux and open-source software were unwittingly violating as many as 235 Microsoft software patents. "This is not a case of some accidental, unknowing infringement," Horacio Gutierrez, Microsoft's vice president of intellectual property and licensing, told Fortune magazine at the time. "There is an overwhelming number of patents being infringed."

[Maybe someone needs to look at our list of Patents that Microsoft might be infringing upon. - Scott]

in 2007 we set-up a computer, running Ubuntu, for guests to use to access the Internet at our bed and breakfast. We also switched the office computer to Ubuntu as we had had many problems with viruses/spyware/malware using Windows. Since switching we have had no problems with viruses etc, and have had lots of positive comments from guests about the Ubuntu machine in the breakfast room.

Mitch Meyran is your guide over at Freesoftware Magazine helping you to navigate the moral maze to decide if Microsoft's "adoption" of ODF is a Pauline conversion or just another example of "embrace and extinguish". Read the full story and decide.

Open-source software helped London's Oyster card system move past a proprietary roadblock, an open-source conference in London was told last week. The Oyster contactless card system, which handles payments for travel on London's buses and Tube system, suffered from lock-in to proprietary systems, which hindered developments to the online payment systems, said Michael Robinson, a senior consultant with Deloitte, at the Open Source Forum event in London. "The hosting was on a proprietary system, centred on one application," he said. "It demanded certain hardware, and was locked into one design of infrastructure."

The Equinox Desktop Environment is a small memory footprint desktop environment built on top of the extended FLTK toolkit ('Fast Light Tool Kit'). EDE features a desktop, a Windows-like panel with 'start' menu, taskbar, and system tray, support for theming, and graphical front-ends for software installation, xscreensaver configuration, and much more. Linux.com took a look at EDE version 1.2.

I just committed a change to the default desktop containment that removes desktop icon support. Yes, it has finally happened ... no more splattering icons from the "desktop" folder across the screen. Buh-bye. Let me pause while some of you get all worked up and ready to punch the "Add comment" link to flame me to kingdom come.

Last month, Daryl Lee gave us a taste of the language Scheme in the article It's time to learn Scheme with a C++ code generator. This time we will be looking at some practical examples written with Scheme Shell (SCSH): finding and replacing text in a bunch of files, sorting files in two different ways, and converting data from a CSV file to an HTML file. SCSH is a scripting language based on the programming language Scheme. It was created by Olin Shivers to replace long sh or bash scripts and extends the Scheme language to make it far more suited for shell scripting.