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Working on a little script the other day I had the need to determine if the input to the script was coming from a pipe or from the terminal. Seems like a simple enough thing to determine but nothing jumped immediately to mind and a quick internet search didn't help much either. After a bit of pondering I came up with two solutions: the stat command and using information from the proc file system.

I've been hearing a lot about Google Buzz lately and lo and behold, it shows up in Gmail this morning. Initially, I ignored it, but I visit my Gmail account quite often and so figured, "what the heck". As I was going through the set up process (which isn't really involved), I was inspired to open up Google Wave for the first time in more than a month. I saw a few new Waves, but nothing like the flood of unread messages I'd expect if I just ignored Gmail for about six weeks. I've written a couple of blogs on Wave, including an an initial review and an update called Why Hasn't Google Wave Gone Viral? My interest in Wave has waxed and waned and now that Google has thrown Buzz into the mix, was I supposed to get excited?

In the latest part of "An Open Source Business", we take a look at the online music world and the business models for competing with or even making a business out of "free."

"I have come to believe that a license alone is neither a secret to success nor an absolution of sin." Michael Tiemann President of the Open Source Initiative

Recently, Google announced that its operations in China (and beyond) had been subject to sophisticated attacks, some of which were successful; a number of other companies have been attacked as well. The source of these attacks may never be proved, but it is widely assumed that they were carried out by government agencies. There are also allegations that the East Anglia email leak was a government-sponsored operation. While at LCA, your editor talked with a developer who has recently found himself at Google; according to this developer, incidents like these demonstrate that the security game has changed in significant ways, with implications that the community can ignore only at its peril.

Why use a derivative of Ubuntu (or Debian for that matter) instead of just using the original product? Simple: The derivative is better.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.5 (RHEL) is now available in early beta, providing users of Red Hat's flagship operating system with bug fixes and an early look at some new features, too. With RHEL 5.5, Red Hat (NYSE: RHT) is continuing to build on the RHEL 5 base, which was launched in 2007. Its most recent update was the RHEL 5.4 release, which officially debuted in September and was notable for its new KVM virtualization base. It's a base that Red Hat is further expanding now with RHEL 5.5, thanks to a new run-time memory allocation feature for KVM virtual guests.

Lost in all the Google Buzz hype today was an announcement Google was making 1 gigabit super high speed fiber channel internet access available to a few lucky communities in the US. This is unheard of speed and I would certainly welcome it in my home town.

LOS ANGELES -- Ubuntu announces that it will hold the first UbuCon hosted at the Southern California Linux Expo (SCALE 8x) on Friday, Feb. 19, in an all-day session of talks and activities. Part unconference and part scheduled sessions, UbuCon will cover what is going on with, and how to improve, the Ubuntu community. The final hour of the event will include lightning talks.

When Jammie Thomas (now Thomas-Rasset) became the first alleged P2P file-swapper to take her case all the way to trial and verdict, no one suspected that she would actually have three trials and verdicts, but that's the case today, as the RIAA rejected a federal judge's decision to slash Thomas-Rasset's damage award. Instead, we're headed to a truncated third trial on the issue of damages. The recording industry also made it clear this week that both Thomas-Rasset and Joel Tenenbaum (the second P2P defendant to go to trial and verdict) are, in its view, quite terrible people: lying, deceiving, irresponsible, and unreasonable. And the industry can't understand why they're both fighting on.

Novell Inc. and The Linux Professional Institute (LPI) today announced an international partnership to standardize their entry-level Linux certification programs on LPIC-1. Under this program, Linux professionals who have earned their LPIC-1 status will also satisfy the requirements for the Novell® Certified Linux Administrator (CLA) certification. In addition, Novell Training Services has formally agreed to include required LPIC-1 learning objectives in its CLA course training material.

What is an Android device like without the Google apps? We take a look at the Archos 5 Internet Tablet to find out...

Tail light chasing your competition means you will NEVER own a concept in your customers's minds. Matt Asay recently blogged about Novell's continuing practice of chasing Red Hat in the Linux market rather than defining itself on its own strengths, (in this case offering support for Red Hat servers cheaper than Red Hat).

Last weekend, during the tenth edition of FOSDEM, we had the joy of organizing the first ever Mono developer room. While there had been talks about Mono before (including Miguel's great presentation at FOSDEM 2007), it was still a rather underrepresented topic. For that reason, Stephane and I requested a developer room and gladly we got it.

KDE and GNOME pile on the eye candy and grow ever-larger and hungrier of system resources. Thankfully, Linux users who prefer a lightweight desktop environment have a number of great choices. Today Juliet Kemp takes us on a tour of the attractive, nimble, and functional Xfce desktop.

Since Apache is most of the time a memory hungy process, people started to look for different ways to host their website. Apache is clearly not the only webserver available. A few good examples are lighttpd and nginx. In this tutorial I will show you how to install nginx on your Ubuntu server. This tutorial also applies to Debian, though. There is only a very small difference.

multicd.sh is a shell script designed to build a multiboot CD / DVD image containing many different Linux distributions and/or utilities. You can use it for instance to burn Gparted Live, Clonezilla and Ubuntu, all on the same multiboot DVD.

There is power in authority. Microsoft's strategy against open source uses authority. It ties up institutions that are authoritative, that have power over professions, creating a benefit for the institution that ties its members to proprietary Microsoft tools....To Microsoft open source is not an end in itself. It is a marketing tool. It is a way to gain lock-in with important customer sets.

The 'Not Microsoft = No Good' lobby is digging the knife into the Apple iPad for being 'no good for business' - specifically no good for hospital use or on construction sites. Did I miss something, did Steve Jobs say it was aimed at such specialist markets? What next, Linux is no good for government use because you can't run Internet Explorer 6 on it? Doh.

Two days ago, I installed Debian Squeeze onto my new 64-bit PC, using ext4 partitions, KDE4 and grub2. Two nights ago, I was up until 3:00 AM, thanks to Debian Squeeze’s version of KDE4. My experience may surprise you. It certainly surprised me.