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My dirty walk-through to setting up an external modem in Linux using wvdial to dial into an ISP connection. I had some trouble finding a single place with a good write-up for doing such a task when I was setting up a Linux box for someone that had previously been using Windows and a little OS X. Finding dialing info, modem configuration, or slight troubleshooting, alone wasn't too difficult, but finding them in one place in a concise manner was. So I have attempted to compile what I have found, my tweaks and adjustments, and other hints that enabled me to setup a Linux box to use a dial up connection via external modem.

Is the real challenge for PR just "influence"? Or is it something bigger than that? If so, are there ways we can help PR move past its history of spinnage and into a future of usefulness? Those are the questions raised for me by "Distributed influence: quantifying the impact of social media", an Edelman paper posted several days ago by Jonny Bentwood on his blog. It's a worthy effort, with good people involved. It is also a work in progress.

I half-expected today's massive Debian Lenny update to solve my Nautilus-crashes-when-I-try-to-get-the-properties-of-a-file bug. It did not, but I'm not disappointed. I went back to the original bug report, which was filed with GNOME, not Debian, but is clearly a Debian-only bug. I saw the "solution," but didn't understand it until now. I still don't know how to actually "do" the solution, and for now I'm content to let it ride and see if Debian Testing catches up.

XMPP is an open technology for instant messaging and presence information. It provides the opportunity to build an open source and free messaging server to handle many applications in varied environments. We are going to setup a XMPP server on a LAN to handle communications between LAN and WAN contacts. By running our own server we can gain some insight into how XMPP and Jabber work, create an efficient and easy to use internal communications setup, connect our server to other servers and services including WAN communications, and last, but not least, we can have our own private communications using SSL. Read on for more on XMPP and how we actually set it all up.

With today's release of Zend Studio for Eclipse, Zend has made Zend Studio, which we reviewed last year, even better. This release of Zend Studio introduces a number of terrific features and as a whole provides you with the most feature-rich release of Zend Studio to date. One of the notable features is Zend's use of the Eclipse as the base platform. Eclipse is by default a Java IDE, but should be looked at more like a platform or framework.

Earlier this month, the Open Source Applications Foundation (OSAF) announced a major staff reorganization, which included the departure of founder Mitch Kapor as head of the OSAF's flagship project, Chandler. After almost seven years of effort there is finally a release remotely resembling something a casual user might consider giving a try.

"The following patches have been in the -mm tree for a while, and I plan to push them to Linus when the 2.6.25 merge window opens," began Theodore Ts'o, offering the patches for review before they are merged. "With this patch series, it is expected that [the] ext4 format should be settling down. We still have delayed allocation and online defrag which aren't quite ready to merge, but those shouldn't affect the on-disk format.

Bazaar is a distributed version control system (VCS) available under the GPL; it is similar to Subversion (svn). Bazaar is sponsored by Canonical, Ltd., the company that develops the Ubuntu Linux distribution, and therefore the Ubuntu project is the most prominent user of Bazaar. This article explains how to set up and use Bazaar on a Debian Etch system, and how to configure an SFTP-/HTTP server to host your Bazaar repository.

The 2.6 Linux kernel comes with a very flexible and powerful auditing subsystem called auditd. auditd is composed of two parts. The main work is done in kernel-space. In user-land, auditd is listening for generated audit events. auditd is able to log file-watches as well as syscalls. All LSM-based subsystems–for example, SELinux–are logging via auditd as well.

The One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project has been in the news a lot in recent months. Reports last fall that Uruguay purchased 100,000 XO laptops and soon US consumers could do the same via a special campaign soon gave way to news items about a patent lawsuit and Intel's abrupt departure from OLPC's board. Walter Bender, OLPC's president of software/content and COO, says those developments are nothing more than a bump in the road.

Skip the table of contents unless you want to go blind. Sorry, it's just the formatting of the TOC seems to run all the chapters and topics together and at least in my case, makes me work extra hard to get my visual markers and make sense of the content. I had a much better time in the "How is this Book Organized" section, though it didn't let me take in the different topics in the book at a glance. This is how I first approach a book to try and understand in brief, what's inside and if I'm interested. So far, if I'd come across this book in a bookstore or library, I might have passed it by. That would have been a mistake on my part.

When I'm in a Linux terminal, I often find myself typing date just to see the time. To make life a bit easier, I wrote a script to always display a clock in the top right corner of the screen. The script saves the current cursor position with an ANSI escape sequence instruction. Then, using the tput command, the cursor is sent to row 0 (the top of the screen) and the last column minus 19 characters (19 is the length of HH:MM:SS YYYY-MM-DD). The formatted date command is displayed in green inverted color. The cursor is then sent back to its original position with another ANSI sequence that restores the original saved position.

Crispin Cowan, the Linux security expert behind StackGard, the Immunix Linux distro and AppArmor, has joined the Windows security team. Howard adds that Crispin will join the team that worked on User Account Control. Given the criticism that UAC has received hopefully Crispin can inject a little more pragmatism into the effort.

As I'm sure you are aware, we have started our own Folding at Home (FAH) team here at Mutaku. We have been working on getting some more of our old hardware, that had been collecting dust on a shelf, back to work folding proteins. One goal in mind was to try and minimize the amount of power that each machine would require, as well as attempt to cut down on unnecessary heat and noise. The end result is today's guide. We will go through a brief HOW-TO on setting up a "thin" client running a Linux live-cd to add to our collection of boxes running the FAH command line interface (CLI) client.

It was all hookers and balloons at Sun Microsystems when the company first found out that Apple would pick up its well-regarded DTrace analysis tool for use with Mac OS X. Now, however, one of the lead DTrace developers has expressed some regrets after Apple "broke" his software in an apparent bid to protect big media and ISVs.

[No really FOSS related, but "interesting" nonetheless. - Sander]

IBM has confirmed that it will ignore a second petition to open source the OS/2 operating system. OS/2 community site OS2World.com organized the second petition in an attempt to reverse a 2005 decision by IBM not to open source the operating system.

Remember when Lotus Notes was tightly tied to Windows? Those days are over. IBM has announced a series of major initiatives involving long-time partner Red Hat and even Canonical, backer of Ubuntu Linux. Here are the top six highlights from this week's Lotusphere, many of which involve open source.

Over the past weekend, I spent most of my time playing around with OpenSUSE and Ubuntu in an attempt to reintroduce myself into the wide world of Linux. And while I could have been a bit happier with the support and Linux does take some getting used to after immersing yourself in a Mac and Windows world every day, it's still an ideal platform for the advanced techie who doesn't want to waste his time with things that "just work."

The Ubuntu team yesterday released Ubuntu 6.06.2 LTS, the second maintenance release of Dapper Drake. Ubuntu 6.06.2 is a version of Ubuntu Linux that will be supported until June 2009 on desktops and June 2011 on servers and is ideal for enterprise systems looking for a solid OS with long term support.

GNU/Linux inherits a tradition of small programs that do one thing very well. A modern example of this tradition is Alexandria, a dedicated book cataloger for GNOME. Although a few workarounds would make it almost as useful as KDE's Tellico for other collections, especially music, Alexandria's focus remains squarely on books and their organization by library, status, and ratings. Perhaps its closest analogy is the online LibraryThing, although Alexandria actually predates LibraryThing and is designed for private, desktop use.