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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]

Columbus, Ohio – The Linux community continues to move in new and diverse directions while building a successful momentum each new year. Credit for some of that momentum goes to those community members that advocate about and to the community. Ohio LinuxFest is proud to recognize two such community members by announcing Joe 'Zonker' Brockmeier and Jono Bacon as keynote speakers for this year's Ohio LinuxFest occurring October 10th - 11th.

As some of you might know, I opened the European ZaReason store this year. ZaReason is a company which is well known in the free software world, at least in the US, because it builds machines and sells them pre-installed with Ubuntu Linux. Now, at LinuxWorld Expo, the Alternageek video-interviewed Earl Malmrose, CTO of ZaReason, Inc.

Ubuntu is well known in user circles as the cool kids' Linux. It's available pre-installed on PCs and laptops from Dell and from numerous smaller computer vendors. What Ubuntu hasn't been known as is a Linux distribution that matters to CIOs and IT managers. Things are changing. Canonical, Ubuntu's parent company, is finally taking serious action on its long-announced plans to become a serious enterprise Linux player. The Isle of Man-based Linux distributor isn't just targeting data center servers, although that's on its list.

"So it's been a week since -rc1, and -rc2 is out there," began Linux creator Linus Torvalds,announcing the 2.6.27-rc2 Linux kernel. He noted,"there's a lot of random changes in there, and I'm hoping we're starting to calm down. The shortlog is still a tad too big to make it on the list (again, as usual - normally I end up posting shortlogs for -rc3 and later when they become more manageable) but let me just say that it isn't really all that interesting. Theres' a lot of small changes here, but nothing that makes you go'Wow!'. Not that there _should_ be anything like that in -rc2, of course, so I'm not complaining."

This guide explains how you can use mod_mysql_vhost to create simple virtual hosts on a lighttpd web server on Debian Etch. With mod_mysql_vhost, lighttpd can read the vhost configuration from a MySQL database. Currently, you can store the domain and the document root in the MySQL database which results in very simple virtual hosts. If you need more directives for your vhosts, you would have to configure them in the global section of lighttpd.conf, which means they would be valid for all vhosts. Therefore, mod_mysql_vhost is ideal if your vhosts differ only in the domain and document root.