Open Source Pixels

Reader Christian Nielsen wrote from Sweden to tell us he and his girlfriend have named their baby Linux, after the operating system, and attached this darling photo.

Back in the early days of Linux, a developer wishing to meet his or her peers at a conference had a relatively small number of alternatives. Two of those - Linux Expo and the Atlanta Linux Showcase - were held in the United States. But it has been a long time since the US has hosted a serious developer-oriented conference - especially for developers who are working on the lower layers of the system. The US-based conferences died out as a result of a combination of a number of factors, including poor management, competition from the Ottawa Linux Symposium and (yes, really) LinuxWorld, and a feeling among certain developers that becoming the next Dmitry Sklyarov would not be a fun way to spend the rest of the year.

Krusader is an advanced twin panel (commander style) file manager for KDE and other desktops in the *nix world, similar to Midnight or Total Commander. It provides all the file management features you could possibly want with features like extensive archive handling, mounted filesystem support, FTP, advanced search module, an internal viewer/editor, directory synchronisation, file content comparisons, powerful batch renaming and much much more

Part of an ongoing series of on open-source geographic information system (GIS) programs, this article offers an introduction to uDig GIS. uDig is for GIS users of all levels, from beginners to advanced.

Get step-by-step details to implement Xen virtual server high availability via the IBM® System Director Virtual Availability Manager. The Virtual Availability Manager is included in the IBM System Director Virtualization Manager package, an extension for IBM Director. In this article, the authors walk you through all the steps, from prerequisites and setup to troubleshooting—everything you need to get started delivering virtual high availability capabilities.

I finally found a good Linux Distribution for kids. My daughter who is turning 5 soon completely loved the learning games on Foresight, especially TuxTyping. I highly recommend this OS for us Linux Geeks that have kids. It has a nice set of learning games, fun to play games, OpenOffice, and more. I just feel it is lacking a good proxy wizard so that kids are not allowed to hit certain sites. I feel any distro targeted at kids and learning should have a great proxy wizard. Well I hope you enjoy the screenshots below.

Sun Microsystems, Inc. today announced the winners of the OpenOffice.org(TM) Community Innovation Challenge designed to fuel innovation and community around OpenOffice.org, as the community prepares for the imminent launch of its next-generation productivity suite, OpenOffice.org 3.0. The contest was part of Sun’s million-dollar Open Source Community Innovation Challenge Program, a multi-year program supporting several Sun-sponsored open source communities. “It has been a pleasure to contribute QATrack, which gives the OpenOffice.org Community the ability to track the qualification of the many releases being worked on,” said Gold Medal winner Per Eriksson. “I look forward to future involvement with this truly innovative, global project.”

Military IT folks wondering if their use of Apache, Perl, Linux and other open source software is copacetic with the brass will soon get some answers from the Defense Department’s Office of the Chief Information Officer. The office is preparing a memorandum that further clarifies how open source may be procured and used within the services. The memo should answer many lingering questions still surrounding the open source, said Daniel Risacher, the data strategy leader for the Office of Secretary of Defense who is drafting the memo. The draft may point out some potential benefits as well.

These days there’s a lot of buzz about “Web 2.0” and making websites more interactive, but what’s really going on is a reconnection to the community nature of the internet. Collaboration, cooperation, and the information commons are all ideas that pre-dated the world wide web in the form of older internet technologies. In today’s distributed computing environment, though, these technologies have really flourished. Here’s a guide to eight that you should consider making use of in building a community around an information commons project of any kind, from multimedia, to hardware, to software. Read the full article at Freesoftware Magazine.

Debian project leader Steve McIntyre has dismissed claims that the next stable version of Debian – codename Lenny – could be delayed until June 2009. Based on the number of outstanding release-critical bugs and the time it has taken to fix them on previous releases, Debian developer Bastian Venthur estimated it will take a further eight or nine months to bring Lenny up to release quality.