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The Torvalds-Simpsons Prize is an experiment to see if the Open-Source community can influence mainstream media to give our hero, the one and only Linus Torvalds, a cameo appearance on a regular episode of The Simpsons.

What would life be without music? Given the proper codecs, in Linux you can play almost any digital audio format. Linux has many graphical applications that can do the job, such as Amarok, Rhythmbox, Audacious, and XMMS, all of which provide an intuitive user interface, playlist sorting, and various other options. But what if you want low resource usage so you can play tunes on aging hardware? Here are some alternative players for the Linux command line.

Reprogramming your personal workflow with a productivity system is a lot like programming computer software: given a stream of incoming information and tasks, you set up holding spaces and logical rules for turning it all into action. Like software that automates activities, good productivity systems take the thinking out of what to do with incoming data, and make it a no-brainer to turn those bits into an accomplishment.

With speculation building that Microsoft will bring Windows 7 forward by a year, ostensibly to staunch the loss of the Vista weary and Vistaphobes to alternative operating systems, now is a good time to look at the state of development tools for Linux. Software developers have got it surprisingly good - unlike, say, creative types who pretty much shy away from Linux on the desktop because of the unavailability (for the foreseeable future) of popular applications such as Adobe Creative Suite in a native version.

Hewlett-Packard unveiled its first new thin clients since acquiring Neoware last fall. Among the new products is a Debian- based "t5735" model featuring a CPU and GPU (graphics processor unit) from AMD, which acquired GPU specialist ATI recently. The announcement is HP's first in the category since it completed its $214 million acquisition of Neoware three months ago. The t5735 is based on an AMD Sempron 2100+ processor clocked at 1GHz. The graphics processor is a Radeon x1250, suggesting that the chipset could be AMD's 690G or 690V; the 690x chipsets are AMD's first to include an IGP (integrated graphics processor), following AMD's acquisition of ATI.

Tabs. Mouse gestures. User-agent switcher. Dedicated transfer window. Pop-up blocking and javascript abuse filtering. Integrated search box. Page zoom. Session saver. Chew on those features. We’ll be coming back to them.

The VAR Guy loves Red Hat, open source and software as a service. But if you think open source and SaaS will quickly kill Microsoft, guess again. It takes Microsoft only 10 hours -- yes, 10 hours -- to equal Red Hat's entire quarterly profit of $20 million. Skeptical? Check out this stunning look at Microsoft's quarterly profits, from The VAR Guy.

In the past week, I've downloaded, burned and tried out a new version of DesktopBSD, and I also received a comment from Gerard van Essen, creator of the great FreeBSD -- The Unknown Giant blog to tell me about its new URL. Sources of news for the BSD distros are few and far between, and I'm grateful to Gerard for all his work in this area.

One thing that did not make it into the Linux Networking Cookbook was a chapter on setting up VLANs (Virtual LANs). VLANs are logical subnetting, rather than being constrained by your physical Ethernet switches. Now that “smart” switches have gotten so inexpensive, VLANs are nice options even for small networks.

The software acquisition bolsters Nokia's perch in the mobile device arena, could further dismantle Motorola, and put pressure on Google At first glance, Nokia's (NOK) Jan. 28 purchase of a small Norwegian open-source software company seems a confusing strategic shift. After all, the world's largest maker of mobile phones has long resisted the idea of using the grassroots Linux operating system in handsets, favoring instead homegrown software in its mass-market models and the Symbian operating system in its top-of-the-line smartphones.

I'm always on the lookout for ultra-small PCs that are also a) fanless and b) not super-expensive. I've found a good candidate, via this link on Linux Devices, called the PicoPC, from Devon, England's Sharp and Tappin Technology. They use the pico-ITX boards from VIA, and they look great, are really small ... and don't cost an arm and a leg. Well, maybe an arm, but you can keep (at least half of) your leg.

The second part of a Ruby on Rails 2.0 tutorial. Ruby on Rails 2.0 changes the way Rails uses scaffolding. This has made many existing Rails tutorials obsolete. This part covers customization of the Model and the View and gets the scaffolded application built in part one looking like something you could present to a client

Bombay, India. While the official name of the city is now "Mumbai", the name "Bombay" is still used by a lot of the inhabitants, and its use draws images of one of the world's largest cities, a gateway to the sub-continent. Therefore an invitation to speak at Techfest 2008 (http://www.techfest.org/), a large student-organized technical showcase, was impossible to turn down. Techfest is a yearly three-day event that encompasses "everything technical". While computer hardware and software had their place, the fest also included demonstrations and competitions centered around alternative energies, clean water production, recycling and included civil and mechanical engineering challenges.

There exists no official flash package available for the 64bit architecture with Ubuntu and Kubuntu. If you click the add plugin button when visiting a page with flash, you are taken to the official Flash site and will soon notice that there are no available 64bit downloads here either. There are some workarounds on ubuntu forums, however, they don't always seem to work and get complicated if you have compiled your own 32bit Firefox. We have been using both the official 64bit Firefox package from the Kubuntu repositories as well as a modified 32bit version I built quite a while ago to get around some stability issues with the 64bit version. So after about a year without flash support, we finally took the plunge and have built a quick and easy solution. Read on to see how you can add Flash and Java support to your 64bit system in under 1 minute. [Update] At the end of the article, you will see how we can install a 32bit version of Firefox.

It's not every day that the entire technical press goes bonkers over news in the open source world, but that's what happened last week, when Sun announced that it was buying MySQL. Doubtless, the pleasant roundness of the sum involved - $1 billion – helped, as did the fact that most of that was cash. But leaving aside the sense of satisfaction that events in the free software world should be suddenly thrust centre-stage, Sun's move does raise a larger question about the fate of all open source start-ups.

Here is a report that analyzes the results of independent tests performed by PC Magazine Romania comparing the AXIGEN Mail Server against two open source alternatives, Sendmail (with Dovecot) and Postfix (with Cyrus).

Enter Audacious, a fork of the similarly-fated Beep Media Player. It works with Winamp Classic skins, satisfying my inner Microsoft fanboy. It can play back MP3 plus a slew of other formats. It's got a little bit of effects processing, some Last.FM support, and a whole lot of visualization plugins (like Paranormal!).

Just as Camino offers Mozilla Web browsing capability tightly integrated with OS X system services, its new sibling, Correo, aims to bridge the same gap for email. The open source email reader is based on Mozilla technology, but unlike Thunderbird it ties in to core Mac OS libraries in order to better the end user experience. Correo 0.3 is the newest release, a 20MB .DMG file available for download from the project page. The application is a universal binary compatible with OS X versions 10.4 and up. Right now, two localizations are available: English and French.

Many companies consider instant messaging to be a distraction, but IM can be an effective communication tool if used properly. OpenFire is an open source enterprise IM server that has lots of features to streamline communication within an enterprise. The server is written in Java and uses Jabber, which is one of the most popular open protocols for real-time communication. In addition to being cross-platform, OpenFire is easy to set up and administer. While the basic version of the OpenFire server is available free of cost, an enterprise version, which costs $15 per user per year, adds features suitable for a large multi-office corporation.

Many moons have risen since I last gushed about Splunk, so what better way to reinvigorate our personal buzz than to install the latest version and write a how-to. After talking about a few neat features, we will briefly discuss how to set up central syslogging and how to install Splunk, before a tangent into "working around the free version's crippled interface."