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I came across this Ubuntu Development Guide by Daniel Holback while looking through Planet Ubuntu. It tells you all the things you need to do technically to get set up for development, as in creation and modification of packages for Ubuntu GNU/Linux.

Every now and then, a question like this pops up on some email server management forum:"I’d like to be able to reject connections from remote IP addresses if they’re from certain countries." I have reformatted some tips on how to do this on this page. Feedback is very welcome.

As a former technical writer and a sometime reviewer of software, I don't need anyone to tell me how important documentation is -- nor how often it is the last part of a project if it is considered at all. But recently, I had a frustrating reminder.

During a keynote presentation at Google's IO developer conference last year, Google VP of engineering Vic Gundotra proclaimed that the search giant created Android in order to bring freedom to the masses and avoid a "draconian future" in which one company controlled the mobile industry. Looking past the self-congratulatory rhetoric, Android's poor track record on openness is becoming harder to ignore.

Announced by the openSUSE project about seventeen months ago, the openSUSE 11.2 operating system will reache end of life (EOL) on May 12th, 2011.

Unlike OpenOffice.org of yore, LibreOffice developers have been pumping out the updates at a rapid pace. Since the inaugural release two months ago, LibreOffice has seen two minor version updates as well as associated developmental releases. The latest, LibreOffice 3.3.2, was released just a couple of days ago.

This tutorial explains how you can configure Lighttpd to set the Expires HTTP header and the max-age directive of the Cache-Control HTTP header of static files (such as images, CSS and Javascript files) to a date in the future so that these files will be cached by your visitors' browsers. This saves bandwidth and makes your web site appear faster (if a user visits your site for a second time, static files will be fetched from the browser cache). This tutorial was written for Debian Squeeze.

First, the obvious: Red Hat has a top-notch legal team, with a lot of GPL experience, so it's a little hard to believe that those lawyers, at least, haven't examined Red Hat's position and believe it is defensible in the unlikely event of a lawsuit. While Red Hat has a legal team, LWN seems to be lacking in the legal budget department, so nothing in this article should be considered legal advice of any sort (I am not a lawyer, nor do I play one anywhere).

Yesterday Linus voiced his anger towards DRM, once again. But not the kind of DRM that is commonly criticized, Digital Rights Management, but rather the Linux kernel's Direct Rendering Manager. With the Linux 2.6.39 kernel it's been another time when Linus has been less than happy with the pull request for this sub-system that handles the open-source graphics drivers. Changes are needed.

In the comments to my article on Debian’s Mozilla team offering newer Iceweasel builds, I eventually wound around to an idea that I believe would provide an enormous benefit to Ubuntu users: There should be an official Ubuntu LTS Backports repository.

FLARE which stands for Free/Libre Action Role Playing Engine is a new game/engine heavily in development. With isometric views and graphics and an action oriented hack 'n' slash gameplay, FLARE very much feels like Diablo series games. FLARE is completely free and open source project and is licensed under GPL v3. Also it uses community contributed and freely licensed Open Game Art for game graphics.

As new release of Ubuntu is coming, is it time to remember what happened about half a year ago, on the 10.10.10? And were there any reasons to update to 10.10?

gImageReader (runs on Linux and Windows) is a GUI for tesseract-ocr, a free software optical character recognition (OCR) engine which you can use to extract text from PDF documents or images.

It is certainly inspiring that a free piece of software gives you so diverse possibilities, comparable to any paid gimp-logosoftware you can get in the market. In this post I have attempted to collect the best tutorials of GIMP, in my view, around the web.

The money just keeps rolling in at Red Hat, and it looks like this year will be even better as the company is poised to become the first open source software company to break through the $1bn mark. In the fourth quarter of fiscal 2011 ended on February 28, the commercial Linux and middleware distributor posted $209.3m in subscription revenues, up 23.7 per cent compared to the year ago quarter. Training and services revenues rose by 32.9 per cent, to $35.5m. Overall sales increased by a flat 25 per cent, hitting $244.8m. (This was better than the $236m at the high end of Red Hat's guidance from three months ago).

The lead developer of Ardour, Paul Davis, has released the first alpha of version 3.0 of the open source audio software. The most important new feature highlighted by the developer is the multi-track recorder's comprehensive MIDI (Musical Instrument Digital Interface) support: Ardour 3 will also work as a MIDI sequencer.

In the beginning, the idea that software should be free was deemed unrealistic and laughable, and then unworkable. Now, for the most part, it is deemed acceptable and desirable – not just as a workable approach to writing software, but as a means of writing better software.

I like the Maemo operating system, the fact that it is a real Linux based operating system on my handset (not some Java based OS) is the reason I ponied up the 500$ about a year ago for the device. I live in the United States, which means that T-Mobile is the only mobile carrier that provides anything faster than 2g speeds on the N900.

LXer Feature: 25-Mar-2011

This is the terrible bargain of free content: in exchange for content we don't have to pay for, everyone pays in crappy content, ads masquerading as news and reviews, and wholesale invasion and exploitation of our privacy and personal business. We already have crappy advertiser-controlled TV and radio, why would anyone want to extend that to movies, books, and music?

I have been reading Linux Shell Scripting Cookbook by Sarath Lakshman, published by Packt, for a while. While most people I know learn shell scripts themselves, I was looking to refresh my concepts a little as well as have a reference lying around on the table for fast access. Since I was asked to review it for someone else, I thought I might as well post the review here.