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A dock is a graphical user interface element that allows the user to have one-click access to frequently used applications. This type of utility also enables users to switch quickly between applications, as well as to monitor programs. This type of application is an excellent way of extending the functionality and usefulness of the desktop. In recent times, the popularity of the dock has been enhanced by the Mac OS X operating system.

"I'm about ready to throw in the towel on Android tablets out of sheer frustration. As a Linux user and Android fan, I've been patiently waiting for a decent iPad competitor to hit U.S. shores. The Galaxy Tab looked promising, until Verizon and Samsung stuck a $600 price tag on the tablet," Brockmeier writes. If you want to buy an Android tablet, and buy it this holiday season, you are stuck with choices that are always hobbled, disappointing or way too expensive like the Tab. Why aren't the Android vendors taking this more seriously?

Microsoft has officially ended a half-decade flirtation with building its own .NETized scripting languages, and it lost a languages guru to Google in the process. The company has handed code and project responsibility for IronRuby and IronPython to "the community," six years after it started the projects and then stuck them in limbo. The IronPython project will be coordinated by Miguel de Icaza, Michael Foord, Jeff Hardy and Jimmy Schementi, with de Icaza and Schementi also co-ordinating IronRuby. Schementi quit Microsoft in August, having complained about a "serious lack of commitment" to IronRuby and dynamic languages in general on .NET by the giant.

"The Bare Metal Engine is a container that is assigned to a specific core and it's configured such that the engine will get 99.9999 percent of the core's processing power," Dan Cauchy, vice president of marketing and business development at MontaVista told InternetNews.com. "It's not bothered by any of the administrative overhead of a regular Linux kernel."

When I searched around for how to install the 2.6.35 kernel on 10.04 I found lots of guides on compiling it from source, but nothing on easily installing it. If you just want a generic 2.6.35 kernel on your 10.04 system there is no reason to go through all that headache.

Every Linux user has been new at some point, and unless you’ve got a history of UNIX administration, the transition was likely a bit daunting. Many people began learning Linux before sites like Google and StackExchange made it easy to find answers, and ended up having to figure everything out in their own. While inconvenient, this approach can force you to challenge yourself and learn things about the system that you might otherwise never find out. Usually here at MakeTechEasier, we focus on specific topics for our tutorials. This time we’re taking a different approach, and providing a high-level overview of series of steps designed to hone the skills of a Linux beginner, and turn them into the kind of geek who compiles a new kernel for fun.

There has been a lot of commentary in recent days about the OpenOffice.org community council decision to ask people who have aligned themselves with The Document Foundation (TDF) to resign their seats on the council. So, of course, what we need is a little bit more commentary. First, when reading the minutes, it’s worth noting that this was not a voted decision. At 21:50, Louis Suarez-Potts proposed “that the TDF members of the CC consider the points those of us who have not joined TDF have made about conflict of interest and confusion [and] resign their offices, so as to remove the apparent conflict of interest their current representational roles produce”. He then proposed a deadline of Tuesday “to deal with this” – by emergency meeting of the council. So there was no decision to expel anyone, Louis made a proposal which did not obtain a consensus decision. That said, reading the minutes, there is clear alignment between supporters of TDF on one side and the rest of the council on the other side. And “the rest of the council” is Louis Suarez-Potts, Andreas Bartel, Eike Rathke, Juergen Schmidt, Matthias Huetsch and Martin Hollmichel on behalf of Stefan Taxhet – all Oracle employees.

After years of being outside of the mainline, the AppArmor security system is now finally part of the main Linux kernel. Linux founder Linus Torvalds formally released the 2.6.36 kernel this week nearly three months after the release of the 2.6.35 kernel. AppArmor has been in use by Linux distributions since at least 2006 when Novell first open sourced the code as a rival option to SELinux which has been championed by Red Hat. Ubuntu picked up AppArmor in 2007 with the 7.10 Gutsy Gibbon release.

I've been using Rhythmbox to drop stuff on the iPod, and I put a few albums encoded in the freedom-loving ogg format. I didn't expect them to play, but they do. I Googled for iPod and ogg, and this doesn't seem possible. So I dug a little deeper and started poking around the iPod's filesystem. You can do that sort of thing with an iPod in Linux.

The new kernel version is notable because it hasn't grown in size – yet it contains hundreds of advancements which will be obvious to end users, who don't often notice changes in their Linux distribution's kernel.

The Apple iPad is without question a wildly successful product in a market space that's seen many false starts. It seems like the iPad was at the right place at the right time to scratch an itch we didn't know we had. Many wrote it off early on as just an expensive ebook reader with too many limitations to replace your netbook, much less a full-fledged business laptop.

Being developed since 2007 and integrated in Ubuntu since 2008 with their Ubuntu 8.04 LTS release has been Wubi, the Windows-based Ubuntu Installer. While most Linux users tend to install Ubuntu using the LiveCD or the alternate CD installer, by using Wubi you can setup a full desktop from within Microsoft Windows. Wubi places Ubuntu into a disk image still residing on the Windows partition, thereby making it easy to install and remove without risking any problems of messing up your drive's partitions. While Wubi may lower the barrier for entry to trying out an Ubuntu Linux desktop, it does not come without some performance penalties associated to using the loop-mounted device stored on the Microsoft file-system.

Digging into the underlying operating system internals, Western Digital doesn't detail much in the user manual, but does give us a hint with a sentence that notes that the device includes open source software. The company also provides a link to its GPL code download location. Code licensed under the GPL is open source code that requires vendors to make it available to all users. A quick look at the WD's GPL code reveals that the WD TV Live Plus runs a Linux 2.6.22.19 kernel as the underlying embedded operating system.

(London, UK and Sacramento, CA, USA: October 21, 2010) The Linux Professional Institute (LPI), the world's premier Linux certification organization (http://www.lpi.org), announced that the LPIC-1 certification program for Linux professionals has been accepted as a nationally recognized IT accreditation for college students at secondary schools and technical colleges in England, Wales and Northern Ireland. LPI's affiliate, LPI-UK (http://www.lpi-uk.org/) worked in co-operation with e-skills UK (http://www.e-skills.com/) to ensure this initiative. In addition, the two organizations are working in partnership with the Scottish Qualifications Authority (http://www.sqa.org.uk) to recognize LPIC-1 as a nationally accepted award and SCQF Credit within Scotland as well.

This tutorial shows how to prepare a Debian Lenny (Debian 5.0) server for the installation of ISPConfig 3, and how to install ISPConfig 3. ISPConfig 3 is a webhosting control panel that allows you to configure the following services through a web browser: Apache web server, Postfix mail server, MySQL, BIND nameserver, PureFTPd, SpamAssassin, ClamAV, and many more. This tutorials differs from "The Perfect Server - Debian Lenny (Debian 5.0) With MyDNS & Courier [ISPConfig 3]" in that I use BIND and Dovecot here instead of MyDNS and Courier (of course, the other two variants - BIND & Courier or MyDNS & Dovecot are possible as well).

I have tried to collect in one page some tips, tricks and links useful to print many OpenDocument files, or to convert them to any format for which OpenOffice (or LibreOffice, for that matter) have an output filter. Suggestions and comments are very welcome!

Steve Jobs released a firestorm of reaction when he went after Android at Monday's earning call, but he also started an interesting debate on what constitutes open source software.

With just a few mouse clicks you can support people around the world downloading Ubuntu via Bittorrent. Like donating blood, you'll feel good about doing it. Who do you know that would like to do so, too?

Recently, the SOGo (http://www.sogo.nu) developers at Inverse developed together with the OpenChange (http://www.openchange.org) team a storage provider that reuses much of the SOGo code. This means Microsoft Outlook can talk to SOGo just like if it was an Exchange server. This is a major step in the FOSS groupware world as costly MAPI connectors can now be avoided for Microsoft Outlook users and they can benefit from a modern groupware server to handle all their needs. A video demonstrating Outlook connected to SOGo through OpenChange server is available from the SOGo website. And yes, everything is available under the GNU GPL and is under active development.

The Linux Foundation has announced that this year, Linux creator Linus Torvalds is one of three recipients of the prestigious C&C Prize. According to the NEC C&C Foundation which awarded the prize, Torvalds is being recognised for his "contributions to the advancement of the information technology industry, education, research, and the improvement of our lives".