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Perl comes with a ready-made module for talking to mailservers, making it very easy to get your scripts to send out email alerts and other messages. This tutorial explains how to use the Net::SMTP module, and gives some examples of it in action

I’m not particularly fond of backing up my data. I know I should do it and I feel pretty smug when it is done, but it is a time-consuming and frustrating process. Mainly because it requires a whole lot of thinking on my part: which files do I want to back up? where should I store them? What format? And to date I haven’t really found the one tool that makes baking up truly simple.

Open sourcing Windows is more hassle than it's worth and Microsoft sees little gain in releasing code, according to the man leading Microsoft's server marketing and platform strategy. Microsoft general manager Bill Hilf has said the Windows source code is "irrelevant for what people want".

Welcome to this year's 10th issue of DistroWatch Weekly! This week belongs to the fans of GNOME. The brand new version 2.22 of the popular desktop environment is scheduled for release on Wednesday and everything suggests that we can expect another great set of improvements that will grace the upcoming releases of all major distributions. In the news section, we'll take a quick look at the new features and applications in Mandriva Linux 2008.1, follow the development of the Xfce spin of Fedora 9, pass on a request from Theo de Raadt to test the upcoming OpenBSD 4.3, and link to the freely downloadable DVD images of Yellow Dog Linux 6.0. Finally, while we all impatiently await the first beta release of Gentoo Linux 2008.0, we take a look at some of the exciting new features in the upcoming release of the Gentoo-based Sabayon Linux 3.5. Happy reading!

Over the last few years, OpenOffice.org has started to develop a respectable number of extensions, mostly for Writer and Calc, the two most widely used applications. The OpenOffice.org Extensions site lists only a handful that are unique to Impress. The recently released eVoice, which records sounds for direct insertion into a slide, is one of them. Once configured, eVoice is straightforward to learn, and becomes even more useful when you're working with other Impress features.

The European Union' 899-million-euro antitrust fine is the result of a continuous effort by the European Commission dating back to 2000. Carlo Piana, a partner at the Milan law firm Studio Legale Tamos Piana & Partners, represented the Free Software Foundation Europe and the Samba project in the case.

As hardware gets smaller and cheaper, we can expect to see Linux in more and more unexpected places. Why is this, and how does this benefit open-source developers?

Free software Flash replacement, Gnash, has just released a beta version. Gnash, for those not in the know, is a GPL-licensed SWF movie player and browser plugin for Firefox, Mozilla, and Konqueror. Gnash supports many SWF v7 features and ActionScript 2 classes. with growing support for SWF v8 and v9.

Yet, when it comes down to it...CompUSA is gone. I personally will shed no tears. I am convinced that their blindness to consumer needs played some part in their demise if not a large one, whether it was Linux or any other non-microsoft product that caused it, well...maybe. You want to argue it? Look at this first.

On an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation, Chief Engineer Geordi LaForge tries to get the Enterprise out of an energy-draining booby trap by creating a simulation of the original Galaxy class starship propulsion design from the Utopia Planitia shipyard on Mars on the holodeck. Ultimately, he is successful with the help of a holodeck simulation of one of the original warp engine designers and thus, the ship is saved. Oddly enough, this is the kind of approach author John Day has taken to describe network architecture fundamentals to the audience of this book.

Ubuntu coverage in a major U.S. newspaper shows that Ubuntu’s early adopters aren’t necessarily geeks. More and more of those Ubuntu users apparently live on Main Street U.S.A., according to The VAR Guy. Details here.

The OpenOffice.org project has announced that it will release future releases of the open source office suite under the LGPL3 licence, starting with the beta for OpenOffice.org 3.0.

In the wake of the ISO rejecting Microsoft's OOXML document format as an international standard, Microsoft has launched its Document Interoperability Initiative pledging to work with industry to ensure its document formats remain interchangeable with industry standards.

The Mint Linux team made a final release this week for its community edition distribution, while Mythbuntu and Ubuntu both added new alphas in on the way to Hardy Heron’s release in April.

LXer Feature: 9-Mar-2008

This week in the LXer Weekly Roundup we have, a Linux Powered Mini PC, What is your favorite scripting language?, The latest Mandriva release, Red Hat calls strike one against Microsoft, WaSP gives browsers "fail" grade and How to create a Linux box for your Mom. Plus,Amazon's Linux answer to iTunes is a winner, Linux clocks double-digit growth and real results on the power of the OLPC computers in Astounded in Arahuay

This document describes how to set up a Postfix mail server that is based on virtual users and domains on CentOS 5.1 so that it works with MailScanner and Mailwatch. The resulting system provides a web interface (Mailwatch) where you can manage quarantined emails, train SpamAssassin, edit the white- and blacklist, view configuration files and the detailed MySQL database status.

Just days after the Ballot Resolution meeting in Geneva to decide on Office Open XML as a standard, Microsoft has come out with another interoperability promise. In an ongoing effort to prove to the world that it is serious about interoperability, Microsoft this weekend announced its Document Interoperability Initiative.

Some changes are being made to THE *NIXED REPORT website. The front page is being changed into a portal with four main links. Read on for more details...

  Originally called portkeeper the pkr utility does rudimentry packet sniffing and will alarm on certain packet errors. It is known to work on the following systems and distributions:

Think you know about all the Linux UMPCs? Can you name all the Linux-based UMPC in this list?