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Playing around with radio-frequency transmission and reception used to be restricted to those of us with hardware skills. That has been changing for some years, though, as processors get faster and software techniques advance; now, many radio transmitters and receivers are built with simple (but flexible) hardware. The hard work of generating the signal to be transmitted is done in software. Some wireless network adapters work that way now, as do a number of other devices. There is a well-advanced project - GNU Radio - which enables experimenters to do amazing things with software defined radio (SDR) systems.

The alpha 1 development release of Damn Small Linux (DSL) 4.0, which hit the Net on Tuesday, is "a very different version" that includes a number of features requested by users on the DSL forums.

Acronis, Inc. announced it is a Silver Technology Partner with Novell and is committed to the development and delivery of technology solutions, services and offerings that support SUSE Linux Enterprise from Novell. Acronis will create new storage management solutions for SUSE’s Linux Enterprise customers and provide advanced disaster recovery, backup and restore, partitioning and data migration solutions including centrally managed online server backup, server disk imaging, and bare-metal restore solutions for SUSE.

After years of sticking with Windows, once I discovered that you could download an ISO file, burn it to a bootable CD and run a whole new operating system, easy as that, I've been distro hopping. It all began with Knoppix, went from Puppy and Damn Small Linux, through Ubuntu to Debian, with many a stop in between. Over the 300 or so entries of this blog, I've run probably 15 to 20 different distributions of Linux and tried unsuccessfully to run maybe another 20. I might be exaggerating, but not by much.

Subscription-based computers have never proved very popular but now a California-based outfit has come up with a new twist: a subscription-based environmentally friendly computer that will cut electricity bills. CNet reports reports that the Zonbu will sell for $99 with a $12.95/month subscription charge. The company say that the deal is better than it looks because the 15-watt PC can save up to $10 a month in electricity compared with a standard 200-watt PC.

Capetonian Ian Gilfillan is the author of Mastering MySQL 4 and an authority on database management. But, as Vincent Maher found out, he also has a philosophical side that helps rather than hinders him. Vincent first met Ian at the Digital Citizens Indaba last year where they co-presented a panel with Mike Stopforth. Last week he interviewed him for Tectonic.co.za.

In a continued thread about how the recently mergedCompletely Fair Scheduler affects the nice command, Ingo Molnar offered a history of nice levels in the Linux kernel. He began by describing the three most frequent complaints he has received.Ingo then noted,"CFS addresses all three types of complaints".

Ready to try Linux but want some hand-holding when you do? Here are three videos that walk you through the process of installing Kubuntu, the KDE-based version of Ubuntu. These little Linux.com video distro tours are not intended to be comprehensive tutorials. They're here to give you an idea of the look and feel of various popular Linux distributions to help you select the one you like best. They are available in Flash video and Ogg Theora.

This document describes how to install a PureFTPd server that uses virtual users from a MySQL database instead of real system users. This is much more performant and allows to have thousands of ftp users on a single machine. In addition to that I will show the use of quota and upload/download bandwidth limits with this setup. Passwords will be stored encrypted as MD5 strings in the database.

With lots of changes here at the Los Angeles Daily News, I find myself in a good position to put Ubuntu 7.04 Feisty to work posting Web content via the Clickability publishing system and for the more mundane tasks of writing memos and reports, reading e-mail and the like. So get ready for my latest dip into the Ubuntu pool, plus some Red Hat/Fedora-based Live CDs and a little bit on my long-delayed Puppy 2.16 review and a detour through Sabayon and Gentoo to Simply Mepis.

A few years ago, the idea that savvy developers and IT professionals would need to know anything about intellectual property law would have been dismissed as a bad joke. Oh, certainly, there were arguments from time to time over fine points in the GPL Version 2, but for the most part, it didn't matter.

A petition that has been created is "essentially proposing that GPL v3 software in the UK be granted immunity from patent infringement - therefore requiring an alteration of the Copyright, Designs and Patents act. The petition will run until 10 November 2007 and can be signed by persons who hold British citizenships, or by persons residing in the UK."

In response to another merge request, Andrew Morton retorted, "argh. I have a backlog of maybe 300 patches here which I am cheerfully ignoring while concentrating on preventing 2.6.23 from being less of a disaster than it has already been." He noted that he was not planning to merge any new code into his -mm tree for 2.6.23 inclusion, "the door for new 2.6.23 material shut two weeks ago. Here, at least."

In a recent interview with Microsoft's COO Kevin Turner, the executive was asked about the future of Windows. In response, Turner had this to say: "Certainly, this last year has been an unprecedented year for Vista and Office and the launch," Turner said. "And we are still committed to the desktop. There will be another release and launch of a Vista-type operating system. [And] there will be another release of Office."

The majority of Linux users have gotten used to keeping more than one operating system on their hard disks. Most frequently the second system is a version of Microsoft Windows needed for running some application WINE refuses to start. Constant switching is irritating. Fortunately there is another option. Virtualization technology allows us to run several systems on the same computer, at the same time. In the article Paulina Budzoń introduces you to virtualization basing on the Vmware Server Console v. 1.0.3

HP and the MIT Libraries today announced the formation of the DSpace Foundation, a non-profit organization that will provide support to the growing community of institutions that use DSpace, an open source software solution for accessing, managing and preserving scholarly works in a digital archive.

The progress of a technical specification from development to adoption has a certain, often-lamented glacial quality to it, due to the consensus process involved. But while that process may be slow, it is not inexorable, and that which starts does not always finish.

LXer Feature: 19-Jul-2007

A few days ago Rob Enderle proclaimed that Open Source and Linux are losing momentum, without any evidence to back this up and despite that IDC and Gartner are saying the exact opposite. The FOSS community responded with rebuttals after which Rob posted a follow-up in which he makes some particularly nasty accusations. However, trying to follow Rob's logic in the original article quickly showed that it was not about a loss in momentum at all. That was just a framework on which to hang a different tale, one that gives us some insight in how he sees the world of software development.

When it comes to binary display drivers under Linux, NVIDIA is generally known as the company that's able to offer drivers that are on par with their Windows driver. Unlike the known performance issues with the ATI/AMD fglrx driver where it's not uncommon for the driver to be 50% slower than the Windows Catalyst equivalent, the NVIDIA Linux driver has performed roughly the same if not faster in some cases. This has also been true for the NVIDIA Solaris driver as the performance bastion can largely be attributed to the shared driver code-base between all NVIDIA-supported platforms (Windows, Linux, Solaris, and FreeBSD).

Red Hat today announced that SAP AG, the largest provider of business software solutions in the world, has certified the SAP NetWeaver platform on Red Hat Enterprise Linux Advanced Platform. The certification includes the virtualization technology embedded in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 for use with SAP applications.