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Suppose you have a long-running task (for example, compiling a large program) that you need to run, but you also want to get some other work done. Linux lets you start a task in the background and keep on doing other things from the command prompt. We will see in this article how to send commands in the background, then return them to the foreground, and make sure that also closing the current shell or terminal the process doesn’t remains tied to the session but continue to work. An alternative to these command is using screen, as read in a former article, but now let’s seethe command bg and the spacial character &

To ensure the continuous development of the popular monitoring software Nagios, a group of active, long standing Nagios community supporters have decided to fork Nagios and open its development to a broader base. Unfortunately this had to be done under a new name: Icinga

Sunday is the first KWin Bug Day (10th day of the 10th month 2010 - easy to remember!). KWin is a vital part of the KDE Platform and used by all software running in a Plasma Workspace. However, with the latest influx of bug reports it is becoming increasingly difficult for regular contributors like Martin Grässlin and the KWin team to keep up. This is where you can help with squashing those bugs!

On October first, the open-source movie project of the Blender Foundation released fourth third animated short on YouTube: Sintel. Five days later, the movie had already reached one million views. Previously released only at the Netherlands film festival (on September 27), Sintel’s success is as much due to its quality than it’s open-source nature.

Grub Customizer is a new graphical GRUB2 settings manager. For now, it only allows you to edit the GRUB2 menu entries: reorder, rename or add/remove entries. Since these are actually scripts which generate the boot.cfg file, Grub Customizer changes the actual script order and then generates a new boot.cfg so if you then run "sudo update-grub", your customization won't be overwritten.

You may have read and enjoyed my recent article "C++ Snippets: Converting Hexidecimal Values to Decimal Values." In that article, I briefly discussed a secret project that I have undertaken that will eventually result in my first GUI application for GNU/Linux, Windows, and perhaps even MacOS. At that time, I said that I could not reveal the exact nature of the program. I still cannot reveal the exact nature of the program, but I am releasing more of the source code under the GNU GPL license version 3. If you look at this code, run and compile it, you may glean a few more hints as to what kind of program I am actually aiming to write. in this article, I will reveal a few more details as to how I came up with this program idea.

Ubuntu Linux is my distro of choice for desktop usage and as such I felt it was wrong that there are no recent releases of it that come pre-configured with an Enlightenment desktop. I would like to announce the release of a pet project I have been working on for the last week - Pinguy (Ubuntu 10.04) E17 Remix

Back then utorrent was Windows-only and only ran with WINE in Linux. (...) Now this all changed. (Screenshots inside)

Remember, remember, the fifth of October. It was the day that Microsoft officially lost the plot. It was the day that Scott Charney, the Microsoft Corporate Vice President of Tinfoil Hat Wearing suggested quarantining victims of malware whilst ignoring the distribution medium - erm, that would be Microsoft Windows stuff wouldn't it...

There are rumors about the possible acquisition of Adobe by Microsoft, both company's CEOs have been talking about an alliance to face Apple. ...the NY Times said. " ...The meeting, which lasted more than an hour, covered a number of topics, but one of the main thrusts of the discussion was Apple and its control of the mobile phone market and how the two companies could team up in the battle against Apple. A possible acquisition of Adobe by Microsoft were among the options.... " ....how could this ever affect Linux?

After two years of development, version 3 of the popular Gallery online album software, code named "Santa Fe", has now been completed. Compared with its predecessor, the new version is said to offer improved performance and stability and require fewer resources. The developers have also drastically trimmed down the program package: instead of the previous 14 Mbytes, the standard installation is now only about 4 Mbytes in size.

The Mono project, which produces an open source implementation of the .NET runtime, has released version 2.8. The update brings full support for version 4.0 of the C# programming language, substantial improvements to the optional LLVM-based Mono backend, and a new garbage collection implementation that is more efficient.

Takashi Iwai of Novell/SuSE has just published a series of 18 patches for the X.Org Synaptics input driver that primarily provides multi-touch support. There's also some fixes and other changes to this Synaptics driver for X, but the primary feature is the addition of multi-touch support under Linux (and other X.Org-using operating systems) for supported hardware.

A Media Access Control address (MAC address) is a unique identifier assigned to network interfaces for communications on the physical network segment. Logically, MAC addresses are used in the Media Access Control protocol sub-layer of the OSI reference model. MAC addresses are most often assigned by the manufacturer of a network interface card (NIC) and are stored in its hardware, the card’s read-only memory, or some other firmware mechanism. If assigned by the manufacturer, a MAC address usually encodes the manufacturer’s registered identification number. It may also be known as an Ethernet hardware address (EHA), hardware address, adapter address, or physical address.

Mozilla announced a beta release of the Firefox 4 for Mobile ("Fennec") web browser, initially supporting Android and Maemo Linux (Nokia N900). The Firefox 4 Beta for Mobile aims to increase performance, adding a new "Layers" technology claimed to streamline scrolling, zooming and animations, but an early review says it still needs to get faster.

If you happen to think, as I do, that Google Chrome is emerging as the very best browser available, it's worth noting a point that we've made many times on OStatic: Chrome's evolution will have everything to do with the ongoing development of Google's upcoming Chrome OS. Chrome OS, Google's first operating system aimed squarely at computing desktops, is an ambitious project for Google, and, from the outset, it's been clear that because the Chrome browser interface--and much of its plumbing--form the UI and guts of Chrome OS, the fate of the operating system and its sibling browser are inextricably tied. As glimpses of version 8 of the Chrome browser appear, this seems more true than ever.

This new type of touch screen, which was demonstrated for the first time at a tech conference in New York this week, uses a small static force to control friction between a user's finger and the touch screen. "It's kind of like a buzzing or a vibration. It has the same effect as a buzz," said Chris Harrison, one of the Disney researchers and a Ph.D. student at Carnegie Mellon University. "But if you carefully tune the frequency and the vibration of the panel you can actually create things that feel like sandpaper or rubber or a wall."

[Not FOSS related but very cool. - Scott]

"We see it all the time, someone straying from one distribution or another because you "have to use the command-line". I've even heard that in person, I've heard it too many times. So, I looked around to see what may be causing this impression, and sure enough it didn't take long to fine. Simply browsing Ubuntu Forums I would get the impression that Ubuntu doesn't have any graphical way to configure the system if I didn't know any better."

A group of OpenOffice.org developers has announced the creation of an independent foundation - called the Document Foundation - to guide the further development of the office suite, which is provisionally named LibreOffice. At the heart of this effort is longtime OpenOffice.org developer Michael Meeks. We had the good fortune to discuss the LibreOffice effort with Michael; read on for his comments on this new initiative

In today’s Fedora 14 beta review, Dmitri Popov uncovers a slew of under-the-hood improvements and the inclusion of new development tools that will please power users and developers alike…