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A newly published and quite intriguing Patent application from Microsoft describes technology for hand-activating page turning of Microsoft documents.

M-Audio has supplied hardware and software to computer-based musicians for 20 years. Its new "make-music-now" line of products, aimed at musicians just getting into computers or PC users with an interest in music, includes a microphone, speakers, drum machine, and DJ mixer deck. Unfortunately, its bundled software, called Session, is for Windows only. Our challenge was to try out this hardware -- specifically the KeyStudio MIDI keyboard and Fast Track audio interface -- with Linux applications. We were half successful.

Parted Magic 2.0 is a 42MB Live CD/USB/PXE with the main goal of providing disk drive partitioning software. This new edition of Parted Magic 2.0 is designed for use on x86 hardwares and was released two days before this year's Valentine's Day. This GPLed specialized Linux distro is currently ranked at number 60 at DistroWatch.com. It originates from the U.S. and it is based on the Linux From Scratch. The easily noticeable new features, besides the new Linux kernel 2.6.23.13, Xfce 4.4.2, X.Org 7.3 and various other software updates , are the availability of Firefox 2.0.0.4 and the simple but capable Start Network tool.

SOA usually implies heavyweight technology for large enterprises, but the advantages of the SOA architectural pattern also apply to smaller environments. This article describes how to follow SOA principles using lightweight principles like REST, rather than all the overhead that is used in larger environments.

Linux Journal recently caught up with Intel's Arjan van de Ven. Van de Ven leads Intel's green Lesswatts.org initiative and is the developer of PowerTOP, one of the most acclaimed power management tools on the Linux platform.

You've probably seen them: black and white checkerboard-patterned matrices printed on labels and other real-world objects that you can optically scan with a cameraphone or other handheld device to extract an encoded message. But although 2-D barcodes (as they are known) are getting more common, working with them is still a bumpy road for the Linux and free software crowd. Fortunately, several options exist for reading and generating them with open source software.

OpenBSD doesn't use the CUPS printing system by default, and while I've been successful in using Apsfilter in Damn Small Linux (but not in Debian), now that I've figured out all the quirks in CUPS and my office network-printing situation, I prefer to use CUPS to manage the many network printers at my disposal.

One thing I noticed this week is that the mono group has been able to encumber a growing number of Ubuntu (not Kubuntu) applications with proprietary Microsoft technology. However, the documentation and program descriptions do not warn of this (of course they want to keep it under the radar).

I use, on a daily basis, three different Linux distributions: MEPIS 6.5 and 7, OpenSUSE 10.3, and SLED 10 SP1. So, when I saw that Frank Ohlhorst, my colleague over at The Channel Insider, had gotten his hands on a ThinkPad T61 with SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop 10 Service Pack 1, I was interested in what he would find.

Well it seems that SCO has more lives than Jason. cha cha cha cha hah hah hah hah... Un freaken believable! So to be a balanced LXer news spotter sort of bloke, It is my solemn duty to follow up to my post sometime ago about SCO's inspiration. Yet again torn from the unofficial Holy Grail script... clop clop, clop clop, clop clop, clop clop....

One of the great features included in Linux is the IPtables firewall. Unfortunately, its command-line use is rather complex, and it can be intimidating for even experienced Linux users to configure it. Firestarter is a friendly graphical interface that allows you to configure a software firewall in Linux using the built-in IPtables/IPchains utilities.

A few days ago a story was posted to FSDaily with the assuming title of "Can we please stop fighting FUD with FUD?"The gist of the article is the author's opinion that some, especially new, free software users have a habit of spreading FUD (Fear Uncertainty & Doubt) when comparing it to proprietary software.

With MySQLfs you can store a filesystem inside a MySQL relational database. MySQLfs breaks up the byte content of files that you store in its filesystem into tuples in the database, which allows you to store large files in the filesystem without requiring the database to support extremely large BLOB fields. With MySQLfs you can throw a filesystem into a MySQL database and take advantage of whatever database backup, clustering, and replication setup you have to protect your MySQLfs filesystem.

The /proc directory is a strange beast. It doesn't really exist, yet you can explore it. Its zero-length files are neither binary nor text, yet you can examine and display them. This special directory holds all the details about your Linux system, including its kernel, processes, and configuration parameters. By studying the /proc directory, you can learn how Linux commands work, and you can even do some administrative tasks.

The open source community is literally rocking the world and so is India’s largest Linux and Open Source convention and expo. The community is now being supported by Microsoft, long considered to be the 'opposing side'. Open Source India Week (OSIW) 2008 kicked off yesterday in Delhi after completing the Bengalure and Mumbai editions. At the occasion, Radhesh Balakrishnan, director, platform strategy, Microsoft, could be seen wooing the open source community, holding an olive branch in the form of promoting interoperability between the two systems.

Writing a custom app that could use a community bb, developer stumbles upon a ton more functionality added to his app after integrating it with phpBB than expected.

If you've always been itching to launch a startup but just couldn't come up with a killer idea, well, your ship is about to come in. No, it won't be quite as good as the Internet Bubble years, when any fool could raise a few million (hell, $30 or $40 million) to sell dog food online - no, really - but not bad, either.

SCO Group, which for years has claimed that Linux infringes on its Unix intellectual property, has received new funding and seems set to continue its battle against the open source operating system. Stephen Norris & Co. Capital Partners said Thursday it and unnamed Middle Eastern partners will fund The SCO Group with up to US$100 million to take over the financially beleaguered Unix company, move it out of bankruptcy protection, complete its controversial and unsuccessful Linux litigation, and take it private.

Just one year after Dell launched the IdeaStorm website where users can submit and vote on ideas for Dell to improve, the list of changes Dell has made is impressive, including launching their first Linux PCs.

On Monday, the LiMo Foundation, an industry consortium that wants to put Linux technology onto mobile handsets, announced the first release of its shared platform. The foundation also announced the immediate availability of the application programming interface (API) set for the platform. Prior to the announcements, ZDNet UK spoke with LiMo's executive director, Morgan Gillis, to discuss the platform, LiMo's rivals, and Nokia's entry into the organization.