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The longer I program, the more structured my programming methods have become. Currently I am busy playing with generated documentation and unit testing. Generated documentation is an all round great idea, but it has a drawback: You need to generate it all the time. So I set out to use Subversion’s post-commit hook to generate fresh documentation for my PHP projects using phpDocumentor. I have written a little Python script that you can call from Subversion’s post commit hook. This script scans your subversion project for files that have the phpdoc property set. If any of these have changed, then it regenerates your documentation using phpDocumentor. It can also deal with files that are not kept in your Subversion repository and supports anything also supported by phpDocumentor.

The Angolan government, which is firmly in favour of open source software (OSS) solutions, has implemented an OSS enterprise content management system.

For the most part, I have been fairly content with the release of Flash 9 for Linux, with the possible exception of occasional Flash-related browser crashes. Even with this bug, just the move from Flash 7 to Flash 9 has made the usability of any modern browsing experience a lot more attractive, especially when watching Flash video.

The Federal Open Source Alliance has released the results of a study into the adoption of open source software OSS by the US' various federal departments, the Federal Open Source Referendum. The findings show that both open source uptake and appetite are progressing, with 71 percent of respondents having noted that their agency could benefit from open source.

Welcome to this year's 45th issue of DistroWatch Weekly! An excellent week for open source software enthusiasts as it finally brought the first public preview of the OpenSolaris-based Indiana, a new operating system trying to take over our desktops. Will it succeed? Although the release was marred by controversies and heated discussions on the project's mailing list, the first reviews indicate that Indiana is on the right track. In other news, a new distribution called gOS gets bundled with a US$199 Linux computer, Mandriva's François Bancilhon writes an angry open letter to Microsoft, Debian introduces a new KDE4 live CD, Fedora prepares for a big release day, and Kubuntu developers ponder the future of the project. Finally, don't miss the featured article which looks at the recently released Ubuntu Studio 7.10. Happy reading!

Starting with Solaris Express build 75(75a) xVM/Xen are included as a standard part of Solaris Express for x86/x64. Oracle's installation procedure seems to be a kind of evaluation performance and reliability for next generation Solaris Xen Drops running as DomUs on top of Linux Dom 0. Preferably CentOS 5 (RHEL 5) or Debian Etch 4.X .

Last week saw a slew of articles suggesting that Ubuntu Linux was damaging hard disks. The truth is a little more complicated than that but just in case, try this trick for monitoring the state of your hard disk load/unload cycles before you make any rash decisions.

An illusion in the minds of many is that Center for Certification of Health Information Technology (CCHIT) certified EHR systems are interoperable. The reality is that this is something that CCHIT does not currently test for but will ostensibly test in the future. This CCHITannouncement is interesting in that CCHIT will"...begin building a testing resource to evaluate compliance of electronic health records (EHR) and networks with certification criteria for interoperability. This new initiative will make it easier for health information technology companies to add standards-based information exchange capabilities to their products and prepare those products for certification. The testing software will be developed under an open source license so that it is free and publicly available, and the Certification Commission will use the software running on a secure platform during its inspection of a product's compliance..."

Have a CD collection sitting around waiting to find its place in your new Ubuntu lifestyle? Maybe you have existing non-DRM protected MP3s on Ubuntu and are looking for way to listen to them on Ubuntu without resorting to using MP3 considering its gray area of use.

I suppose you could call this a "specialty" book. I mean, most people "add" Ajax to their web applications when they initially develop their web applications. On the other hand, most people who have pre-existing web applications without Ajax and who think Ajax would add something, either re-develop the entire application or figure it's not worth the effort. Wouldn't it be great to be able to add Ajax to a pre-existing site and make it more interactive without having to take the whole thing apart and reconstruct it? According to author Shelley Powers, now you can.

The OpenDocument Foundation has announced its plans to sever itself from participation in or further advocacy of its namesake office document format in favor of the World Wide Web Consortium's XHTML (Extensible HTML)-based Compound Document Format. Although the OpenDocument Foundation is a fairly small organization, the group sports a certain cachet that stems from the ODF-to-MS Office plug-in that the group announced--but did not release publicly--about a year and a half ago.

Connecting OpenOffice.org to MySQL has been well-documented for some time. For those who use PostgreSQL, however, finding good documentation on using OpenOffice.org with it has been like finding a needle in a haystack. Fortunately, it's much easier now.

"I will be continuing to commit bits and pieces of HAMMER, but note that it will probably not even begin to work for quite some time," Matthew Dillon reported on the new clustering filesystem he's developing for DragonFlyBSD. He noted, "I am still on track for it to make it into the end-of-year release."

LXer Feature: 04-Nov-2007

I have a slew of great articles for you in this week's Roundup starting with a trick most FOSS users already know of, how to crack Windows passwords with Linux. Plus Andy Updegrove sets the Record Straight on (Non)Voting in SC 34, Phoronix reviews ATI: Linux vs. Windows Vista, François Bancilhon of Mandriva writes an open letter to Steve Ballmer, new Asus laptop and Everex desktop offerings, an interview with Pamela Jones of Groklaw, Carla Schroder's Tutorial: Linux Backups For Real People, Part 1 and an Italian Judge Tells HP To Refund Pre-Installed XP.

This guide shows how to install the Songbird media player (0.3 Developer Pre-Release) on an Ubuntu 7.10 (Gutsy Gibbon) desktop. Songbird is a free software audio player with media database capabilities written using XUL and VLC, with an interface similar to Apple's iTunes. From the Songbird web site: "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."

This past Friday we had delivered benchmarks comparing the performance of the open-source Radeon driver against the new closed-source fglrx driver from AMD. These benchmarks had just looked at the AIGLX performance when using Compiz on an Ubuntu 7.10 desktop. In all of the benchmarks except one, the fglrx driver had carried a staggering lead over the open-source competition. In addition to these Compiz benchmarks, on the same system we had also ran some additional benchmarks to see for gaming and 2D rendering how the two ATI Linux drivers compare.

How many Linux users does the BBC website get, out of the 17 million who visit? You would not think that was too difficult a question for the director of technology at the BBC to answer, would you?

In a recent article on Desktoplinux.com, Kevin Carmony, former CEO of Linspire, reported that he has switched to Ubuntu. In the same article he also said that as Linux becomes more mainstream there would be a consolidation of Linux on the desktop. By this, I presume he meant that only a few of the big Linux distributors would be vying for the desktop space through OEM deals. This makes a lot of sense as consumers would be confused by the offering of literally hundreds of distros on various models of computers. But it also raises questions about what consolidation would mean to Linux in the future.

[An excellent article submitted to LXer by one of our readers - Scott]

The recent decision by the Open Document Foundation to substitute the World Wide Web Consortium's Compound Document Format in place of the format it was set up to promote, the Open Document Format, has sparked a contentious debate over what shape the format should take. Open document advocates are debating fundamental questions about whether there should be a single document format or multiple formats that interoperate, and the relative importance of format and applications.

Looking Glass is another 3D Windows manager for Linux, it comes from SUN and it is based on Java, here is how to install it on Debian Etch, the same apply for Ubuntu.