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For the last few years I have had an interest in configuration management of IT infrastructure. While by no means an expert I have a considerable amount of experience with the problems associated with mass server configuration and have come to believe it also one of the most under-served disciplines in systems management. In a previous life I had an operations role maintaining primarily Linux servers and other open source infrastructure. In 2006 I worked on launching the open source NetDirector project, a graphical tool for configuring open source infrastructure like Apache, Samba, LDAP and NFS servers. During that time the challenges of maintaining server configurations started to really come to light for me.

What good is a browser unless you can tweak it, hack it and bend it to your will? No good at all. The more you can hack it, the better it is. And that means that Firefox must be a great browser as when ever you feel that you know everything about it you come across a bunch of hidden (and some not-so-secret) tips and tricks available that will crank Firefox up and pimp your browser. Make it faster, cooler, more efficient. So today I have come up with 3 amazing firefox tricks you might not be aware of.

Someone left a comment on one of my posts similar to, "Linux won't be popular on the Desktop until it runs Windows applications." To which I silently responded, "Huh? and, "You've got to be kidding me." We have WINE for running Windows applications and it works reasonably well for those who care to spend the time to work through any problems with it. I don't think the Linux Community needs to spend time on such an undertaking. Is anyone asking Apple to run Windows applications so that it will gain popularity? No? Then, why should Linux? If you want to run Windows applications, run them on Windows.

This weekend, Google proudly announced GoogleCL, a set of new command-line tools for some of its popular services, such as Google Calendar, Google Docs, Blogger, YouTube and Picasa. GoogleCL will allow you to upload photos to Picasa and videos to YouTube, add Google Calendar events or contacts on Google Contacts, edit Google Docs documents or post on your Blogger blog… all straight from the Linux terminal. Well, you will say now… “Who needs this stuff? We are in mid 2010 and command-line is for geeks only.” You are right! But this is a very good opportunity for some developers to create a nice graphical user interface (GUI) for this command-line tool.

"This article has been bounding and jumping around in the nether regions of my mind for quite a while now. It decided today that it needs to be set free." ... "As an advocate for using FOSS in general and Linux in particular I have pondered this apparent conundrum for a long time. With FOSS and Linux I get “free” software and it is worth quite a lot to me in terms of usability and function."

With jQTouch, web developers can build smartphone interfaces for their existing web applications by simply transforming an existing Document Object Model (DOM) structure into an interface that works, looks and feels like native iPhone or Android application. In this tutorial by Mambe Churchill Nanje, we will learn how to develop such an application.

When a developer creates a new application, he must start writing it very early in the Ubuntu development stages to be able to get his application in the official Ubuntu repositories (Universe) or else the only way he can provide that application to the current Ubuntu release is through a PPA - which is not easy discoverable by the users. But Ubuntu 10.10 Maverick Meerkat wants to change the game: according to the whiteboard of the "Implementation of delivering apps post-release" blueprint, a new Ubuntu repository "extras.ubuntu.com" will be created and new applications will be uploaded to this repository even for the already released Ubuntu versions.

If you're new to the Linux or open source community, you might not have heard of live disc or USB distributions yet. They let you run a operating system on PCs without installing anything on the hard drive. It loads directly from the CD/DVD disc or USB flash drive. Many full Linux desktop distros, such as Ubuntu, can be ran in this live mode. However, there are also live distros created for a wide-variety of other specific applications and solutions. Here we'll review several of these. Let's get started!

Recently, a new client called with a Quickbooks issue. I should probably mention that I do a lot of Quickbooks (POS and Financials) troubleshooting. Most generally this work is done in Windows. Sometimes, however, we get a call about a Quickbooks Linux server. That was the case this time. What was going on was the client's machines were all losing connectivity to the server. So they called me in. I gained remote access to the server and started poking around.

An interface designer interning at Mozilla has suggested that the company mimic gimmicks in Google's Chrome to make users think Firefox starts up faster. In an entry on his personal blog that was reposted to Mozilla's uber-blog, Planet Mozilla, John Wayne Hill, an Indiana University masters student interning this summer at the open source company, spelled out changes that would give users the feeling that Firefox starts quicker.

When you need to expire a Linux user account or delete a user there are some factors you need to take into account. Linux administrators should follow guidelines to protect the system integrity and not allow users to access their accounts after leaving the company.

Were you imagining that "Paul Murphy" was going to apologize for his attacks on Groklaw or for being so wrong in his support of SCO? Or that he'd keep his promise to stop blogging if SCO lost? Or that he'd finally admit SCO has no case Au contraire. He continues to insult, and he predicts SCO, or a new owner of Novell, will surely succeed yet in fulfilling SCO's plot, in what he believes, if I've understood him, will be a legal Hail Mary pass to go down in history. The new FUD is his article, Suicide by Victory: More on SCO, in which he predicts gloom and doom for Linux because Novell won at the jury trial in Utah. I know. He's so funny. It makes no sense. But I'll answer him seriously anyway.

One of the common complaints about Linux is that there are too many different editions (or “distributions”) to choose from, and only a hardcore nerd can tell them apart. Well, it's true, but you can safely ignore 99 per cent of them. Welcome to The Register's guaranteed impartiality-free guide. Tomorrow, we'll tell you how to get them, burn them and set them up to dual-boot with Windows and on Wednesday there will be a guide to tweaking your new setup and getting it ready for use.

OpenOffice.org is a flagship for free and open source software, released under free software licenses and achieving downloads in the hundreds of millions. OO.o is a success by most measurements, but there have long been murmurings of discontent among developers resulting in complaints of "non-responsiveness and lack of leadership" on the project. The argument is not that the project is a failure, but that OpenOffice.org could be so much more, given a less top down approach to project management and a looser rein on developers' ability to get involved.

A Dell executive has revealed that the company is in talks with Google and is exploring the possibility of shipping netbooks with Chrome OS, the search giant's cloud-centric Linux-based mobile operating system. The news reflects Dell's interest in experimenting with new platforms.

Last month we looked at the cost of running Compiz by means of looking at how the window manager affected the frame-rate of several different games and whether compositing was used. We also tested out several different drivers and pieces of hardware. When Compiz was running rather than GNOME's Metacity it often caused a measurable drop in the OpenGL performance and then we later found this to be the case too with KDE's KWin. Today we are seeing if and how using Mutter, the window manager for the GNOME 3.0 desktop that uses Clutter-based compositing, will affect the performance of several different open-source games.

LXer Feature: 21-June-2010

In this week's Roundup we have a battle between KDE3 and KDE4,Linux versus the world: The unwinnable war?, Dell removes "Ubuntu is safer than Microsoft® Windows® " statement from website and today marks my three year anniversary as E-i-C for LXer. You know, I think my grammar has gotten a little better.

My father-in-law Ron is 88 years old, a member of what Tom Brokaw called The Greatest Generation, those who survived the Great Depression and went on to fight World War II -- in Europe, in Ron's case. Time is taking its toll now on all of those folks: limited mobility, slower reaction times, often reduced vision. It can happen to all of us who live that long.

"Seeking real freedom of choice in a technology ecosystem where vendors are exerting more and more control" ... "I'm not religious about technology. My strategy is to use what works best, period. This is why, for more than a decade, I've been using a Mac as my primary computer (and had been using Macs for some of my work long before that). Apple's personal computers continue to be the best combination of hardware and software on the market today."

To the chagrin of their competitors, GoogleMail seems to have become almost as synonymous with webmail as Google has with search engine (recently my six year old was explaining to me how he Googled for something at school). GoogleMail is a useful tool and has a lot of advantages over traditional client-server mail accounts, particularly if you are on the move. To be honest those sorts of advantages are present in pretty much any webmail setup: I’m just concentrating on GoogleMail because it’s by my experience the most popular. But GoogleMail has one disadvantage, all your messages are stored on Google’s servers. If you lose access to Google service or to your account then you lose your e-mails. Fear not oh free software lover, help is at hand in the form of the very useful getmail. Read the full howto at Free Software Magazine.