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While eBay was once seen solely as the world's garage sale, it is evolving into a general commerce marketplace, and that makes auction monitoring applications all the more useful. JBidwatcher, one of the best open source eBay utilities, has just released a major update. Let's take a look. JBidwatcher is the work of Morgan Schweers, who has overseen its development for close to eight years. It hasn't always been easy, though -- JBidwatcher 0.9 was released in 2003, but 1.0 didn't come until 2006. Since that time, only a few minor updates came down the pipe, usually to fix breakages when eBay changed its formatting or URI scheme.

When The Red Hat Summit kicks off June 18 in Boston, The VAR Guy will be watching the event for five key trends. Here's what our resident blogger expects to see -- and hear -- at the conference.

Getting high-performance, three-dimensional graphics working under Linux is quite a challenge even when the fundamental hardware programming information is available. One component of this problem is memory management: a graphics processor (GPU) is, essentially, a computer of its own with a distinct view of memory. Managing the GPU's memory - and its view of system RAM - must be done carefully if the resulting system is intended to work at all, much less with acceptable performance.

If free software development goes by trends, then the current era might be called the Age of Extensions. In the last few years, every application from the Mozilla family to OpenOffice.org to Gedit has created frameworks in which developers can add their own small bits of functionality to an application. In the last 10 months or so, a community has taken this trend directly to the desktop with what it calls "screenlets" -- small applications that are added directly to the desktop. The result is dozens of tools, some new and many old, that are in most cases not only themable, but also heavily customizable.

The intra-governmental aspect of this may spur the network effect. Slovakia has already shown it was fond of ODF some time in the past.

A picture is worth a thousand words, especially when you're teaching someone how to do something on a computer, and recordMyDesktop is a great little Linux application for creating screencasts. YouTube is full of recordMyDesktop screencasts showing all kinds of captures, including Beryl/Compiz in action. Carla Schroder shows you how it's done.

In today’s world, web development is all about turnaround. Businesses want to maximize production outcome while minimizing development and production time. Small, lean development teams are increasingly becoming the normal large development departments. Enter Django: a popular Python web framework that invokes the RWAD (rapid web application development) and DRY (don’t repeat yourself) principles with clean, pragmatic design.

Phoronix Media today released version 1.0 of the Phoronix Test Suite (codenamed "Trondheim"), an extensible open-source platform for conducting Linux-based benchmarking and performance profiling targeted at IHVs, ISVs, and technology hobbyists. The Phoronix Test Suite combines years of Linux testing by Phoronix Media with input from leading technology companies to offer the most comprehensive testing and benchmarking platform available for the Linux Operating System. The Phoronix Test Suite also offers unprecedented capabilities for collaboration via the suite's online component.

The GNU diff and patch utilities let you compare files to generate a patch that describes the changes between files. You can then apply the patch file on that machine or another. You might think to use diff and patch on XML files, since they are just text files -- and depending on your application, diff and patch might serve your needs well. However, as things such as the sequence in which attributes are ordered in an element tag are not important in an XML file, using specific tools that are aware of the XML standard can make seeing differences and sending XML-aware "patch" files much more attractive.

This document describes how to set up Songbird 0.5 on Ubuntu 8.04. Taken from the Songbird page: "Songbird is a desktop media player mashed-up with the Web. Songbird is committed to playing the music you want, from the sites you want, on the devices you want, challenging the conventions of discovery, purchase, consumption and organization of music on the Internet."

Have you ever been in a situation where you realised the frailty of your own existence? It happened to me. I sat thinking this is the end of the line but how little did I realise that I had a saviour alongside me in the form of the free open source operating system called Linux.

Improvements, made by the Linux user community, to the shell one-liner designed to enumerate all files, and their types, within any Linux or Unix directory.

As anyone who’s spent much time around the Mozilla community knows, t-shirts are an incredibly important part of our culture. So, when Mary showed me a stack of classic shirts she’d collected from Mitchell, chofmann, Myk and others, I thought it would be fun to document all the Mozilla t-shirts throughout the years (with a few Netscape ones thrown in for historical context).

Google Desktop has been available for some time now on Windows, Mac and Linux platforms. However, Google Gadgets--mini-applications that can be placed anywhere on the desktop--have, until now, only been available on Windows and Mac. Jim Zhuang, of Google's software engineering team, announced the first Linux version on Tuesday.

In response to our request for users' thoughts on their favorite Linux games, we received, as anticipated, a flood of emails. Hundreds of games were recommended for inclusion in this compilation, with a few people eulogizing at great length why a particular title could not be omitted. To say that strong emotions were stirred by our previous '42 of the Best Linux Games' feature is an understatement!

It was the best of times. It was the worst of times. They say never to begin a novel talking about the weather. I guess nobody told Dickens, but I digress…Today I booted into Windows XP MCE for the first time in 24 days. I would like to share my experience. I kept careful notes because I knew what to expect from past experience and I anticipated some of the problems that I will share.

Over the years, I came to appreciate a number of organizations that although not directly linked to free software and open source are of interest for the FOSS community. Pretty much everybody knows the free software foundation, the software freedom law center, the Linux foundation, The GNU project, the open source initiative, Creative Commons or Groklaw. Here is a list of other extremely interesting (mostly US-born) organizations and/or projects.

Canonical, the company behind the highly popular Ubuntu Linux distribution, unveiled its Ubuntu Netbook Remix yesterday at the Computex show in Taiwan. The Remix is based on Ubuntu Mobile Edition and is designed specifically for mobile computers with a subnotebook form factor.

Server consolidation based on Linux for System z offers advantages, but moving existing applications requires some specialized knowledge. In this article, get general advice on how to organize your porting project, including technical details on mainframe virtualization, byte-ordering, and address calculation specific to System z.

Want a version of Linux for your Intel Atom powered “NetBook” – aka Asus Eee PC type subnotebook? Canonical hopes that Ubuntu Remix will fit the bill for OEMs – and presumably users, too - and has launched it at Computex in Taiwan. Will it?