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Whenever a service rises to popularity, an “open” alternative is usually close behind. The problem is that most of these alternatives never go anywhere, let along get close to the service they’re trying to supplant. But the rate at which Diaspora*, the open project hoping to be the new Facebook, is gaining funding is getting too big to ignore.

Having successfully bricked not one but two Linux/Unix installations in the same month (Debian Lenny-to-Squeeze and FreeBSD 7.3-release), I jumped on the Ubuntu Lucid bandwagon early — starting with one of the alpha releases. Over the course of the waning days of the alpha, through the beta and now a couple weeks into the release, I've had a few issues to deal with, needing to tweak grub2, Ubuntu One, Gwibber, Totem and various GNOME settings. But things have settled in a bit, and I'm productive and generally enjoying using the distribution and all that comes with it.

When Sony issued a recent PlayStation 3 update removing the device's ability to install alternate operating systems like Linux, it did so to protect copyrighted content—but several research projects suffered collateral damage. The Air Force is one example.

Tired of slogging through Facebook's interface? Sick of seeing the Fail Whale? Cut through the cruft and simplify your social services with Gwibber -- a microblogging client for Linux that supports Identi.ca, Facebook, Twitter, and more.

Mark Sobell again delivers the answers to common Linux administration challenges, and provides thorough and step-by-step instructions to configuring many of the common Linux Internet services in A Practical Guide to Fedora and Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Fifth Edition.

Google Chrome extensions pool is growing and growing fast. Firefox has been the primary tool for web developers for a long time now. Tools like Firebug in Firefox has taken cult status among web developers. But things are slowly changing now and a number of good alternatives for Firefox web developer extensions can be found among Google Chrome extensions too.

Despite the massive distraction of this weekend's theatrical release of Iron Man 2, CodeWeavers, Inc., a leading developer of software products that turn Mac OS X and Linux into Windows-compatible operating systems, today announces it has completed the development of CrossOver Games 9.0 for both Mac and Linux.

Novell is close to launching Service Pack 1 for SUSE Linux 11 on the desktop and server. Which stands to reason. With all the new server iron being injected into the market, (and more to come later this year) and an impending release of Enterprise Linux 6 from Red Hat and the just-released Ubuntu 10.04 from Canonical, commercial Linux distributor Novell has to either put out a new version of SUSE Linux or crank out a service pack to keep pace.

Speaking at the Secure360 Conference here, Marcus Ranum, CSO of Tenable Network Security, said that the country's reliance on commercial off-the-shelf software has made us more susceptible to attack, not to mention less innovative and creative. Why don't we have a government coding office? We have a government printing office," he said. "Why don't we have a strategic software reserve? Is this putting us at a greater or lesser risk? I'm not sure. But our own software is probably a greater threat to us than anything other people can do to us."

Notify OSD has been in Ubuntu for a long time yet for some odd reason, it never supported any kind of customizations so if you wanted to change it's color or position you had to compile it with the new settings. But there is an Ubuntu PPA with a patched Notify OSD for Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic Koala and Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid Lynx which supports customizations via a simple text file so you don't have to compile it and can change the Notify OSD settings on the fly.

Custom versions of Ubuntu can offer anything from ease-of-use to a multimedia studio. Ubuntu 10.04, aka Lucid Lynx, has now been released and work has already started on version 10.10, its successor. But, if Ubuntu 10.04 isn't your ideal operating system then it's worth taking a look at some of Ubuntu's derivative versions. Chances are that one those will suit your needs.

The front-runners for replacing the expensive MS Office are openOffice.org and Google Docs, but which one is right for your business?

What is Linus Torvalds' secret to managing the Linux development community? And is it a technique that can be applied elsewhere? You might be surprised by the answer.

Ubuntu was famous for being brown, even though it was probably half-orange for most of its storied existence. Mark Shuttleworth and Co. mostly blew that notion out of the water in Lucid Lynx (10.04 LTS), which is purplish and dark. I'm pretty simple about these things, so I looked at what came with the Lucid install and ditched the default Ambiance theme in favor of Radiance. I also dumped the purple wallpaper by clicking on the Background tab and selecting the Cosmos slide-show background, which not only presents a nice outer-space view but periodically changes the image (hence the "slide-show" portion of the name).

I spoke to Jeff Teper, Microsoft’s Corporate VP of the Office Business Platform, who runs the SharePoint engineering group. I asked him to clarify something has puzzled me: the licensing for Office Web Apps. From a technical point of view, Office Web Apps is an add-on for SharePoint; it does not require the paid-for SharePoint Server (success to Microsoft Office SharePoint Server), but neither is it free – you may only install it if you have a volume license for Microsoft Office.

Right now you have multiple desktops but only from the applications point of view: you can move applications from one desktop to another and that's it. There is currently a mockup posted @ Gnome Shell Design Playground website (and a lot of discussion about it on the Gnome Shell mailing list) which seems very interesting:

I recently got visualizations back on my Linux system by way of XMMS. I cannot resist sharing a few screen shots.

In all honesty, are there any open source applications that you prefer and would use in exclusion to others? For example, do you like OpenOffice.org more than Microsoft Office or iWork? If so, do you like it enough that you would install OpenOffice.org on any system that you were using (even if your OS were closed source, such as OSX or Windows)? I might could see someone using OpenOffice.org instead of Office 2k7 (as I've met no one who really likes the new ribbon interface), but what about audio programs? Would you use Exaile, Amarok, or Rhythmbox instead of iTunes, Foobar2000, or some other application?

This article provides few simple scripts to scan and monitor network using combination of bash and ping command. Obviously, these scripts are no match to a full monitoring dedicated software like nagios but they could be useful for a small home brand networks, where implementing sophisticated monitoring system can become an overhead.

The release of GNOME 3.0, the popular desktop's first major release in eight years, promises to be the major free software event in autumn 2010. Where is GNOME now? What can we expect of GNOME 3.0? Of GNOME 3 as a series of releases? When I asked Stormy Peters, the executive director of the GNOME Foundation, where to go for answers, she directed me to Vincent Untz. A director of the GNOME Foundation and one of the senior members of the GNOME Release Team, Untz is better positioned than almost anyone to offer an overview of the project from both a general and a technical perspective.