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Joel Cohen is an Emmy award-winning writer and associate producer of The Simpsons. He’s also a keynote speaker at the Red Hat Summit this June. Enjoy this sneak preview of Joel, and then join us in Boston to hear more from him about The Simpsons and keeping innovation alive for 420 episodes over two decades.

Unbound is a validating, recursive, and caching DNS resolver, released under a BSD license. Version 1.0.0 was released on May 20, 2008. This tutorial explains how to install and use it on Debian Etch, including the creation of zones for your own domains.

GNU autoconf and automake are possibly two of the most cryptic and complex beasts around. They have a very steep learning curve, but due to their widespread use, it's almost essential to be familiar with them if you want to code on much of the free software available today. This tutorial provides a gentle introduction to these tools, by example.

A Microsoft job ad for Senior Marketing Manager – Open Source Community, spells out the company's plans: a concerted attack on GNU/Linux. Once use of the leading open source program has been reduced, Microsoft can then easily dispose of the now-dependent open source app vendors, assuming they are foolish enough to fall for this trick.

CrossFire isn't yet supported in Linux, but will a pair of CrossFire-certified DDR2 RAM benefit a Linux system in gaming or multimedia use? BIOSLEVEL.com benchmarks the RAM and delivers their opinion.

Microsoft is clearly worried about Google as a competitive threat. But the bigger worry continues to be open source, according to Chief Software Architect Ray Ozzie. Ozzie, speaking at Sanford C. Bernstein Strategic Decisions Conference in New York on Wednesday, said that while Google is a "tremendously strong competitor... open source was much more potentially disruptive" to Microsoft's business model.

Gavin Baker at Freesoftware Magazine examines the implications for free software and the GPL in the face of the social, web 2.0 world sites like Facebook, Google Apps and Flickr. In particular, the reciprocity clause in the GPL can become an unintended loophole as web-based services can incorporate free software code which is not shared or redistributed. You can read the whole article at the FSM website

How to inventory your filesystem using a simple shell one-liner in Linux and Unix, for all shells from ash to zsh.

I wasn't able to boot Damn Small Linux 4.4 RC1 on the machine I really need it to run on — the $15 Laptop (aka Compaq Armada 7770dmt) — so I booted it on my VIA C3 Samuel test box, the machine that ran my two Puppy Linux torture tests. I've already written about how the inclusion of Firefox 2 (renamed Bon Echo) in DSL 4.3 has breathed new life into the live-CD distribution as far as I'm concerned.

From my conversations and my own personal perspective I include a list of the top five ways not to evangelize Linux, or perhaps restated, how not to screw up a good thing:

Some search engine optimization (SEO) experts say sitemaps are important tools for promoting your site, because when a search engine picks up your sitemap, it automatically picks up a link to every page in your site. Not only does the spider crawl those pages, but the sitemap page shows up in search results for keywords on your blog. Sitemaps also make it easier for visitors to your blog to find what they're looking for, faster. Here's a look at three sitemap generators for WordPress and my experience with them.

Microsoft's controversial OOXML document format is not going anywhere, observes Jason Brooks in a blog posting at eWEEK. Brooks points to discrepancies between the ISO-approved version of the format and that used in Office 97 in suggesting that OOXML hardly measures up with ODF (Open Document Format).

Hothead Games together with Penny Arcade released a very interesting game called “Penny Arcade Adventures: On the Rain-Slick Precipice of Darkness”. It can be purchased at $20 in Greenhouse Internet store, which is a counterpart of more known Steam Games. Nothing peculiar, you say? And you’d be right if not for one small detail: the game is available also for GNU/Linux. PolishLinux has a short review with screenshots.

When The VAR Guy wants to see the future, he heads back to college. There, he often spots hot trends in IT. The latest involves 18 universities embracing GroundWork Monitor, an open source alternative to traditional network and systems management platforms. Here's the scoop.

A summit on the next version of Eclipse platform - E4 - has exposed fundamental disagreements between those who want to update the platform and those wanting to continue support for "old" Java. The dispute is over whether to focus on Java 5 or to continue supporting its aging predecessor Java 1.4. Eclipse projects currently embrace several versions of Java ranging from 1.4, released six years ago, to the latest Java 6.

Every so often, you read on Slashdot, Digg, or some other techie news site that Linux is finally ready for the desktop. It's finally to the point that any end user could sit down at a computer and happily compute away. The applications are sufficiently sanitized and Windows-like that even Grandma can use them. I think it's fair to say that most of our previous conceptions of "ready for the desktop" are moot points.

Parastal CSIR, South Africa’s national science and technology research organisation, is readying to switch most of its more than 2300 staff to using Ubuntu Linux as their default desktop.

Taking a page from the doctors at Moses Taylor Hospital, IT staff at the Scranton, Pa., facility last year diagnosed their messaging system and came up with an effective treatment that's turned out to be a life saver. The patient in this case was an aging Microsoft Exchange 5.5 environment that couldn't support increased message loads and was going to cost a bundle to upgrade.

In previous installments of the crash course, you've learned how to build a simple basket tool, a task manager, and even a word game. This time, let's take a look at how you can use the skills you picked up from those exercises to create a simple application launcher, which will allow you to start virtually any application without leaving the convenience of OpenOffice.org. While working on this project, you'll learn how to create and use functions, handle errors, and how to populate list boxes using records from a database table.

Elonex is taking orders for a sub-$200 Linux-based laptop aimed at the British educational market. Based on a 300MHz processor, likely ARM-based, the Elonex One includes WiFi, Ethernet, Flash storage, USB, and a 7-inch, 800 x 480 detachable touch display.