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The Ruby on Rails community embraces testing like the USA embraces American Idol. They watch their test case results roll by with great regularity. Ruby developers talk about testing; they blog about it; they even participate behind the scenes, not with cell phone votes but by contributing open source frameworks.

In a surprising move, Microsoft and Linux distributor Xandros announced on Aug. 15 a messaging protocol license and collaboration agreement that will allow Scalix e-mail servers interoperability with Microsoft mobile- and PC-based e-mail applications.

The Linux Foundation has set up of the Linux Weather Forecast to monitor progress on Linux kernel projects.

Traditionally, the Linux operating system (OS) has been viewed as being too big, too slow, and without the real-time capabilities needed for mobile devices. But as 20 million Linux-based mobile handsets have shipped over the last two years it's difficult to ignore the fact that the Linux OS has quickly taken its place among the top four OS's for high-end "Smartphone" devices.

A corporation is not the person the legal fiction makes it so much as a collection of different interests. I was reminded of this fact a couple of weeks ago when I went shopping for a laptop. Remembering that Hewlett-Packard almost singlehandedly solved the basic problem of laser printer support for GNU/Linux, I ended up buying one of the company's laptops. Consumer reports, price, and HP's listing as one of the greener hardware manufacturers according toGreenpeace also affected my decision, but my impression of HP as a free software friendly company was a large criteria.

The Red Hat Crash Utility is a kernel-specific debugger. It is usually used for performing postmortem system analysis when the system panicked, locked up, or appears unresponsive. In this short article, Eugene Teo will give a quick overview of how you can install crash and how you can use it to get important information from the crash dump files for debugging and root-cause analysis purposes.

IBM's customer training and support group SHARE is holding a week-long seminar and conference at the Manchester Grand Hyatt here this week. SHARE dates back to 1955, and the folks gathered in San Diego include programmers, sysadmins, and IT directors who have spent decades running mainframe systems for the world's largest companies and governments. Most of the classes and labs focus on"big iron" products like the mainframe operating system MVS and the CICS transaction server, but Linux is getting strong promotion as well. IBM champions Linux for its zSeries mainframes as the industrial-strength virtualization platform, and judging by the turnout at the Linux and VM program sessions, interest is high.

This month's Open Tuesday took place last night with guest speaker Anton de Wet giving an informative talk offering tips on how to start up and succeed with an open source business, peppered with entertaining anecdotes.

Jeff Campbell (aka "Mr. Zonbu") has updated the blog chronicling his experiences with Zonbu, a mini-sized Linux-powered network computer for home users. The latest posting, based on two weeks with the device, finds Campbell happy but still full of suggestions.

The first beta of KDE 4.0 was released earlier this month and Warren Woodford of the MEPIS project has now built a version of SimplyMEPIS 7 that is based upon Debian Etch with the 32-bit and 64-bit KDE 4.0 Beta 1 packages. With some great work going into version 4 of the K Desktop Environment, we've enclosed some screenshots from this MEPIS testing build.

The miracle of near-native virtualization technologies has saved professionals countless hours of OS thrashing. Excluding 3D graphics, systems administrators can accomplish nearly any task requiring a multitude of platforms within the comfort of the Linux workstation.

Here you can see a comparison side-by-side of the installation steps of XP, Vista and Feisty, see how Ubuntu is easier to install from scratch that Windows.

Thanks to recent commits in the RandR 1.2 branch for the open-source X.Org Radeon driver, it's now possible to use S-Video and composite TV output on your ATI graphics card without any patches. This is not limited to the R200 series but will also work with the R300 series and theoretically any graphics card supported by the xf86-video-ati driver. In this guide have outlined the instructions for enabling TV output support from the Radeon driver git code as well as some of the current limitations.

In this tutorial, we will use an online bookstore as our model website, but the techniques we cook up can be applied to a wide variety of other sites as well, from weblogs to portfolios, from market-facing business sites to corporate intranets.

Microsoft and Xandros announced a messaging protocol license and collaboration agreement that will enhance the interoperability of Scalix email servers with various mobile and personal computer-based email applications that utilize Microsoft email protocols. This agreement expands on the ongoing Microsoft-Xandros collaboration.

Managing one site on a Web server can be tough enough, and the job is even harder if you have to host multiple client sites on a badly configured setup.

Right away, as the hype and hot air came oozing off this distro, I could not believe my eyes. On a machine that I have run no less than 13 distributions on, for the first time, I'm looking at what appears to be 640x400 resolution. This is inexcusable, considering no other distro has ever had this problem before.

System administrators need to secure their systems while avoiding locking them down so strictly that they become useless. Bastille is a software tool that eases the process of hardening a Linux system, giving you the choice of what to lock down and what not to, depending on your security requirements. It bundles many of the tasks routinely done to securely configure a Linux system into one package.

Antonio Diaz Diaz, the developer behind GNU DDRescue, took the time to answer a few questions for Blue GNU regarding the GNU data recovery utility and how it compares to other projects.

A misleading article appeared Monday on an anti-SCO Web site called Groklaw run by a blogger who calls him or herself 'Pamela Jones.' Jones tried to pick apart a story I wrote about SCO v. Novell. I need to set the record straight because virtually everything 'PJ' said about my article is wrong. 'PJ', or whatever this person's real name is, claimed that a number of specific points I made in the 565-word story were inaccurate, and spent more than 3,000 words trying to prove it. But 'PJ' is wrong on every count except for one, minor numerical detail that I'll get to later.

[This is Paul's response to this Groklaw story, which in turn was a rebuttal of Paul's earlier story on SCO-Novell.—Sander]