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Source: LinuxTracker.org

Category: Ubuntu Size: 1.94 GB Status: 13 seeders and 104 leechers Added: 2007-08-02 23:31:35

Source: vector

Robert Lange has announced the first release candidate for VectorLinux 5.8.6, SOHO edition: "VectorLinux is pleased to announce the availability of the RC1 release of 5.8.6 for the VectorLinux SOHO product. This RC release includes the following improvements: upgrade to X.Org 7.2 from the previous 6.9 series which .

Source: mepis

Warren Woodford has announced the availability of the first development snapshot of SimplyMEPIS 7.0, now based on Debian GNU/Linux: "SimplyMEPIS 6.9.51prebeta is a preview of upcoming SimplyMEPIS 7. MEPIS has discontinued using Ubuntu binary packages in favor of a combination of MEPIS packaged binaries based on Debian and .

Source: suse

Stephan Kulow has announced a new alpha release of openSUSE 10.3: "Alpha7 is ready, after 5 rebuilds we're happy to say it looks good enough for the public. Important changes since Alpha6: Linux kernel 2.6.22.1, GCC 4.2.1, libzypp 3.12.1; the package set of the CDs are heavily reshuffled .

Source: Linux Today

Rudd-O: "What happens if an application on your Linux machine goes haywire? Here's how to recover from these dreadful situations, as well as a nice prevention tip "

Source: Linux Today

HowtoForge: "So, you have a large collection of mp3 or ogg files and you want to share it with your buddy in your working place ?"

Source: Linux Today

developerWorks: "In the Internet age, people want information packaged like fast food: served instantly, hassle-free, and in bite-size (or is that byte-size?) morsels "

Source: Linux Today

Raiden's Realm: "Some may or may not know that KDE comes with its own built in Office suite known as Koffice. What even fewer people may know is what it actually contains "

Source: Linux Today

ReviLinux: "I had the same feeling when I reviewed Austrumi Linux 1.5.1 which is a business card size bootable Live CD Linux distribution from Latvia and is based on Slackware Linux "

Source: Linux Today

Linux.com: "GeeXBoX, a small media center Linux live CD distribution, can run from any small device, such as a USB disk or a wallet CD-R, and can play both disk-based media like DVDs and online media like Icecast streams "

Source: Linux Today

Raiden's Realm: "Vector Linux SOHO edition is the big brother to Vector Linux Standard Edition and is designed to be run on more modern and powerful hardware than its little brother "

Source: Linux Today

GNUman: "Mandriva, on the heels of trying to gain popularity in the office environment has released a desktop that can rival its opponents like the Microsoft sponsored Suse Linux Enterprise Desktop (SLED) and Red Hat's Fedora desktop "

Source: Linux Today

Linux Journal: "Open Source methodology has gained some ground in one of the last places you and I might expect: In the development area of corporations "

Source: Linux Today

The Jem Report: "I don't know what specifically pushed me over the edge about Ubuntu articles "

Source: Linux Today

Yet Another Linux Blog: "The one thing about FOSS that I love is that you can take whatever you need from various sources and build what you opine is a better wheel "

Source: Linux Today

The Wisdom of Ganesh: "I don't trust Microsoft any more than she does, but I don't share her seeming paranoia that every move the company makes is a deviously cunning ploy to destroy its enemies "

Source: Linux Today

DesktopLinux: "As expected, Warren Woodford of MEPIS Linux has announced that the next version of SimplyMEPIS 6.9.51 will be based on Debian Linux instead of Ubuntu "

Source: Linux Today

Hoosier Penguin: "That was the initial reaction I had when I first learned about Blue GNU, a new free software news and information site that just launched yesterday "

Source: Linux Today

The Inquirer: "However, the Vole's approach to OSI and Open Sauce in general deserves to be met with a shipload of skepticism "

Source: Linux Today

ZDNet: "Dan Farber is featuring news of another 451 Group study showing that open source is 'just about' to take over the system management business "

Source: Linux Today

iTWire: "Microsoft has begun to talk about open source again. Sure, atheists sometimes do talk about God "

Source: Linux Today

KernelTrap: "'Is anyone testing the kgdb code in here?' Andrew Morton asked in his release announcement for the 2.6.23-rc1-mm2 patchset "

Source: Linux Today

CIO: A series of point-counterpoint articles detailing reasons why you should or should not use Linux in the enterprise. With a list of why Windows should be avoided.

Source: Linux Today

ZDNet Asia: "Currently Microsoft is driving a big campaign to get its latest document format Office Open XML (OOXML) approved as an ISO standard "

Source: Linux Today

CNET News: "I was fortunate to spend most of my evening here in Atlanta with JBoss founder Marc Fleury "

Source: Linux Today

LinuxInsider: "The Linux Foundation recently scored an executive coup when it nabbed Novell's Markus Rex, a well-respected Linux-focused business executive "

Source: Linux Today

ZDNet Asia: "Sun has unveiled a new open mobile platform called JavaFX, which it hopes will bring open rapid open development to the mobile space, an environment long dominated by telcos and cellular carriers "

Source: Linux Today

Shanghaiist: "Behind the headlines of double digit growth and urban prosperity, two thirds of Chinese still live in the countryside and two hundred million people earn less than a dollar a day. Still, the Chinese government has not signed up to this project "

Source: Linux Today

Linux-Watch: "Now, open-source programmers are beginning to give the new license a try "

Source: Linux Today

LinuxWorld: "Mozilla's CEO Thursday evening answered charges that the company is dropping development of the Thunderbird e-mail client because of its partnership with Google "

Source: Linux Today

LWN: "Due to an ongoing issue with booting many Dells (and some Toshiba) systems via CD, we've had to delay the release of Test1 "

Source: Linux Today

KDE.org: "The KDE Community is happy to announce the immediate availability of the first Beta release for KDE 4.0 "

Source: Linux Today

LinuxWorld: "Torvalds was responding to criticism by programmer Con Kolivas, who had developed a patch designed to improve the performance of specific Linux desktop features "

Source: Linux Today

ConsortiumInfo: "In a not unanticipated move, Massachusetts announced today that Ecma 376, the name given to the Microsoft Office Open XML formats following their adoption by Ecma, would be acceptable for use by the Executive Agencies of the Commonwealth "

Source: Linux Today

KernelTrap: "Evgeniy Polyakov, listed as the connector and w1 subsystem maintainer, announced the first release of his distributed storage subsystem "

Source: Linux Today

HowtoForge: "Basically, tcptrack is a sniffer which will show the information about TCP connections on a specific interface. tcptrack will watch all the connections that occur and show the information in a nice interface "

Source: Linux Today

ThemBid: "In my development environment, it was almost trivial to send the E-mails via sendmail; however, it was frustrating to get SMTP to work with MediaTemple.net "

Source: Linux Today

UbuntuGeek: "monit is a utility for managing and monitoring, processes, files, directories and devices on a UNIX system "

Source: Linux Today

EnterpriseLinuxLog: "Virtualizing directories is an increasingly-deployed technique for handling some identity management issues, secure data sharing and centralization of data resources "

Source: Linux Today

Kevin van Zonneveld: "Since 2005 there has been an immense increase in brute force SSH attacks and though Linux is pretty secure by default, it does not stop evil programs from indefinitely trying to login with different passwords "

Source: Linux Today

Linux Journal: "In my last installment of this series I introduced a variety of GUI-based tools that can help you discover more about your system to help identify potentially troublesome components "

Source: Linux Today

LinuxDevices: "U.K.-based Thorcom Systems Ltd is shipping a rugged, Debian Linux-based, in-vehicle computer intended for emergency first responders "

Source: Linux Today

Linux.com: "Need a simple yet effective way to back up your laptop or desktop machine to a network-attached storage device or a network hard disk running Samba ?"

Source: Slashdot: Linux

eldavojohn writes "Following our last history lesson of Linux 0.01, the Kernel Trap is talking about the following announcements that would lead to one of the greatest operating systems today. A great Linus quote on release 0.02 (just 19 days after 0.01): "I can (well, almost) hear you asking yourselves 'why?'. Hurd will be out in a year (or two, or next month, who knows), and I've already got minix. This is a program for hackers by a hacker. I've enjouyed [sic] doing it, and somebody might enjoy looking at it and even modifying it for their own needs. It is still small enough to understand, use and modify, and I'm looking forward to any comments you might have.""Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Source: Slashdot: Linux

dbhost writes "Along with this morning's cup of coffee and log reviews, I discovered that the KDE team is moving forward with a long awaited beta release of KDE 4.0 beta release of KDE 4.0. The most interesting item I found in the notes is that the file manager in KDE is being separated from Konqueror into a component called Dolphin. Also, according to the announcement, konsole has been treated to a number of improvements such as split view, and history highlighting."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Source: eWEEK Linux

Software maker Red Hat said it has delayed its August release of a version of its Linux software for PCs that would compete with Microsoft's Windows operating system.

Source: eWEEK Linux

Opinion: Microsoft wins. We lose. With Massachusetts' surrender to Open XML, open standards have taken a major hit, which will eventually hit us in the wallet.

Source: Linux Magazine: Top Stories

Object relational mappers are popular, because the software disguises the impedance mismatch between objects and databases. There are many ORM variants to choose from, but many simply get in the way when you need to do something the ORM wasn’t expressly designed to do. SQLALchemy is different. It aims to provide you with objects that look and act like real objects, and data sets that provide the full power and flexibility of relational algebra. Here’s a tour.

Source: Linux Magazine: Top Stories

Discover dsh, a utility to run arbitrary commands on any number of remote machines.

Source: Linux Magazine: Top Stories

You can take it with you! Run your favorite open source programs from a USB stick.

Source: ONLamp.com

JT Smith, president of Plain Black, the creator of WebGUI, and one of the unsung successes of using Perl in business, recently sent me this essay. He gave me permission to publish it in its entirety here.

(In the interest of full disclosure, the plush WebGUI octopus I have from YAPC::NA last year is one of the coolest pieces of swag outside of Hollywood, ever.)

It seems every day I am questioned about why I write in Perl versus PHP,
Java, C#, Ruby, Python, or [insert your favorite language here]. People say
things like, “Perl isn’t used anymore is it?” or, “Ruby on Rails is all I read
about anymore.” As I write this, there are millions of Perl programmers around
the world. Perl 5 is being actively maintained, and Perl 6 is in development.
More than 3000 Perl Modules were released in 2006, and more than double are on
track to be released this year. The reality is that Perl is far from dead.

Let’s say for a second that Perl actually was dying. Even if that were true,
it would be a slow death over years to come. The reason? Businesses have
billions of dollars invested in mission critical applications written in Perl
that can not be easily replaced. For the sake of comparison, people have been
saying that Cobol has been dead for more than 20 years, but there are over 1000
Cobol jobs per month posted on Monster.com, and more than 5000 per month for
Perl.

In the past five years Perl’s usage has grown by almost 700%. This leads
people to question why it looks like Perl’s market share is sliding. The answer
is that they typically use web site development as a measure of marketshare,
and the percentage of the web that’s programmed in Perl is shrinking. Is that
due to people not using Perl? No. Absolutely not. Instead, it’s just that there
are more web sites and more programming language options. Ten years ago almost
all web applications were either written in Perl or C, but since then dozens of
new languages have caught on. In addition, there are an estimated 20 million
new sites put up each year. Even though the number of sites created in Perl
doubles every year, tracking it by percentages will make the numbers seem to
shrink.

Still don’t believe me? Well, how about we examine a small swath of really
big web sites that I’m sure you have heard of and used that are either built
entirely on Perl, or have significant portions written in Perl: Yahoo!, Amazon,
TicketMaster, The United States Department of State, The BBC, Slashdot, and
Shopzilla. Have you heard of any of those? I thought so.

To address the “Why Perl?” part of the equation, let me first point out that
Perl was designed to be an ultra flexible text processing language. What is
the the Internet if it’s not text? Nearly every protocol and document standard
you interact with on the web is just text. HTML, HTTP, SMTP, XML, CSS,
Javascript…that’s right, all text! It is only logical to choose a programming
language that was designed specifically for text processing when you’re working
on the Internet. Java and C# are designed to be generic do everything
languages. PHP, ASP, Cold Fusion, and JSP are all designed for the web only.
Ruby and Python are also both good choices, but they don’t have nearly such a
large library of code as Perl.

In addition to being a great text processing language, Perl provides a
wealth of flexible coding possibilities. It has plugins to support and
manipulate a variety of binary file formats, inculuding various forms of
encryption, compression, and images. The Comprehensive Perl Archive Network
(CPAN) provides coders thousands of easily downloaded modules that do
everything from writing network services to parsing Microsoft Excel documents.
Perl has also been compiled to work on dozens of hardware platforms and
operating systems which allows code to be written once and used on virtually
any system. In addition to this compatibility, Perl has been heavily integrated
into the Apache web server in the form of mod_perl, which means that Perl can
do anything that Apache can do.

If Perl is dead, then it is by far the most vital, active and useful
deceased programming language I have ever come across. Perl is, in fact, alive
and thriving, and it is uniquely suited to a variety of programming projects
with its flexibility, power, and extensive code base. I write in Perl because
it provides everything needed to support enterprise software applications. I
write in Perl because it is actively being maintained and developed. I write in
Perl because nothing else gets the job done better: long live Perl.

Source: ONLamp.com

So far, Adam Turoff has given us the basics of Haskell and looked at pure functions. In the final part of his introduction to the language, he looks at Monads, which are functions that are allowed to have side effects.

Source: ONLamp.com

c|net had a story up a couple of weeks ago entitled “Kids say e-mail is, like, soooo dead”. The story was about how kids were moving away from email and using instant messaging and social networking sites for peer communication. Maybe I know why. Or maybe I know why that could be such a temptation. The reason is simple. Email sucks. All email clients suck. No one of them has the feature set that I would like. Their handling of the email protocols can be atrocious, particularly IMAP. And don’t even get me started on having to interface with Exchange with anything other than Outlook. Also, you don’t know when someone has read an email (unless you’re using X.400, but that’s another story) or when they’re online. I can see why IM, social networks, and text messaging are gaining usage. Pownce, anyone? (BTW - I have a few invites left. If you’re interested, email me.)

Source: ONLamp.com

My wife’s business has the need to make some sales online and so naturally I want to help. I know next to nothing about E-Commerce, so I started to do a little bit of research. It appears there are three options available to people currently in the market for a shopping cart that will process credit card transactions. There may be more options as well, but this is what I have found on short notice.
Option 1:
It appears to be relatively cheap to just host a whole website with a shopping card and credit card transactions built in. Google Checkout has links to a couple of complete solution providers that offer WYSIWYG admin panels and editors for somewhere between 30-50 dollars a month.
Option 2:
Integrated Solutions that you build into your existing framework/website. They appear to offer differing levels of flexibility, ranging from an API, to a link to another website that has a cart.
Option 3:
Something like Satchmo which is a “webshop” for perfectionists with deadlines. I found out about Satchmo through a fellow member of PyAtl who had some success with it.
Why does E-Commerce have to be so hard anymore? Maybe it isn’t that hard, and I am very ignorant. It seems like 2007 might be a good time for mere mortals and Mom and Pop businesses to start taking orders online. So, what is the best solution for minimal effort? Is there a solution that works well with Python, and/or Python Web Application Frameworks?
On one level it would be great to know there is a completely Open Source solution to a relatively simple problem. After all, why pay 50 bucks a month if you can easily do it yourself. I think VOIP is a good example of small business doing Phone Service themselves, and the same model might apply for E-Commerce. On the other hand, processing credit cards is somewhat risk prone, so perhaps there is a middle ground that still serves as a good price point for small business owners.

Source: Linux DevCenter

In recent comments to my review of Vector Linux 5.8 SOHO keyfitter wrote:
There is a reason why they are using Win 98 in 2007. I think it’s called, being cheap!.
I wonder if these people realize they can buy a brand new computer for $139. Granted the hardware is a bit dated by today’s standards but it’s probably light years ahead of what they are running Windows ‘98 on. Of course these computers come preloaded with Linux: Vector Linux 5.8 Standard to be precise. That’s fine. Without having to worry about installation or hardware compatibility someone who buys this system gets a nice, ready to go, user friendly Linux system with a warranty. The return policy is listed as “no matter what” short of physical abuse. What they don’t get are Windows virii and malware. They do, of course, have to learn a new OS.
Why not offer the same system with Windows? It would nearly double the price. People forget that they pay an average of around $100 for the privilege of having Windows on their new computer. Of course Windows Vista wouldn’t run on a 1.5GHZ system with only 256MB of RAM, would it? Vector Linux 5.8 Standard will run quite nicely, though. A memory upgrade wouldn’t hurt particularly if you’re interested in a lot of multimedia applications (an extra $39 for 512MB) but it isn’t strictly necessary.
Have a few more dollars? How about one with a 3.33GHz Intel Celeron processor for $269?
The point is this: with new systems for $139 it doesn’t pay to be cheap and run an old piece of junk and ancient software. From what I’m told these systems are selling well. Hopefully Linux is picking up a few converts, ones I hope will be satisfied with their new OS, along the way.
Digg It!

Source: Linux DevCenter

I’ve had Google Desktop for Linux running for a while now; I can’t actually say I’ve used it all that much, but what I did very quickly observe was that the default cronjob (/etc/cron.hourly/gdl-update) that checks for updates had far too much output (I do not want hourly updates telling me “not going to update now”, kthx). And some spelling mistakes.

Here’s an improved version that only sends you email if something of note has happened (update occurred; update failed unexpectedly; can’t create or update timestamp file):


#!/bin/bash
# Copyright 2007 Google Inc. All Rights Reserved.

CACHE_DIR="/var/cache/google/desktop"
PREFIX="/opt/google/desktop"
GDL_UPDATE="/opt/google/desktop/bin/gdl_update"
PKG_FORMAT="deb"
PKG_UPGRADE_CMD="dpkg -i --refuse-downgrade"
TIMESTAMP_FILE="/var/cache/google/desktop/update_timestamp"
ID_FILE="/var/cache/google/desktop/id"
PATH=/sbin:/usr/sbin:/bin:/usr/bin:$PATH

if [ ! -x "$GDL_UPDATE" ]; then
echo "gdl_update is not available."
exit 1
fi

# run gdl_update
export PATH

DO_UPDATE=no
if [ ! -e $TIMESTAMP_FILE ]; then
if touch $TIMESTAMP_FILE; then
DO_UPDATE=yes
else
echo "Failed to create timestamp file."
fi
else
LAST=`date -u -r $TIMESTAMP_FILE +%s`
NOW=`date -u +%s`
DELAY=`expr 86400 + $RANDOM % 21600`
DIFF=`expr $NOW - $LAST`
# Update should only be occurred every 24 to 30 (randomly) hours.
if [ $DIFF -gt $DELAY ]; then
if touch $TIMESTAMP_FILE; then
DO_UPDATE=yes
else
echo "Failed to update timestamp file."
fi
fi
fi

if [ "$DO_UPDATE" != "yes" ]; then
exit 0
fi

UUID=""
if [ ! -f "$ID_FILE" ]; then
UUIDGEN=`which uuidgen`
if [ -n "$UUIDGEN" -a -x "$UUIDGEN" ]; then
$UUIDGEN $ID_FILE
chmod 644 $ID_FILE
fi
fi
UUID=`cat $ID_FILE`

if [ "$UUID" = "" ]; then
UUID="0"
fi

NEW_PKG=`LD_LIBRARY_PATH="/opt/google/desktop/lib:$LD_LIBRARY_PATH" $GDL_UPDATE "$PKG_FORMAT" "$UUID" 2&1`

# Note spelling error (appears to be in gdl-update binary so can't readily be removed)
if [ "$NEW_PKG" = "unavaliable" ]; then
# echo "Package is not available
exit 0
fi

# update package is successfully downloaded
if [ $? -eq 0 ] && [ -f "$NEW_PKG" ]; then
dpkg -i --refuse-downgrade "$NEW_PKG"
if [ $? -eq 0 ]; then
echo "Updated successfully."
else
echo "Update failed."
fi
rm -f "$NEW_PKG"
fi

Source: Linux DevCenter

OSS. ALSA. JACK. Linux certainly has enough ways that you can get access to the sound subsystem. But which one to use, and how? John Littler takes us on a guided tour of Linux Audio, complete with code.