LightScribe technology, which allows users to etch labels directly onto CDs and DVDs, finally arrived on GNU/Linux in late 2006. LaCie LightScribe Labeler for Linux (4L) was released in October 2006, with Hewlett-Packard's LightScribe business unit releasing its own Simple Labeler a month later. Both are free downloads with proprietary licenses, but they are currently the only tools available for using LightScribe on GNU/Linux. Both offer basic labeling, but each is limited in its own way.
In 1993, the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) gave us Mosaic, the first Web browser with a graphical user interface. Today, the NCSA is still innovating, creating a project that monitors how global climate change is affecting plants and wildlife, one that tracks oil spills, and another that predicts the possible effects of seismographic activity on bridges and other structures. To facilitate communication and collaboration between stations, NCSA is making use of the Web infrastructure it helped to launch almost 15 years ago, in a research program called the CyberCollaboratory. Not surprisingly, open source software is an integral part of the Web-based intiative.
Most of the ISO images and other software you grab off the Internet come with a message digest -- a cryptographic hash value that you can use to verify their integrity. While almost all Linux distributions come with utilities to read and generate digests using MD5 and SHA1 hash functions, the md5deep utilities can do that and more.
EtherBoot isn't an application you install on your Linux desktop, but if you run computers that boot over a network -- or would like to explore network booting for either fun or profit -- it is an essential free software project.
Phil Shapiro seems to delight not only in remaining a staunch supporter of free software ideals, but also in his role as a encourager and defender of people. "I see myself as more of a follower than a leader," he says. But Shapiro really is a leader, the best kind: one that nurtures the gifts in others instead of promoting himself.
Has your organization migrated a key part of your IT infrastructure to Linux or an open source application? Share your success story with Linux.com readers.
Tools like phpMyEdit allow you to create a quick-and-dirty front end to a database, but what if you need to publish a spreadsheet or BibTeX file on your Web site and give your visitors the ability to dynamically sort, filter, group, and visualize the published data? For that, you can turn to SIMILE Exhibit, an impressive data publishing framework that uses plain old HTML, CSS, and a bit of JavaScript to create Web pages with support for sorting, filtering, and data visualization. Exhibit requires neither database nor server-side coding wizardry, and you can master the tool in no time, even if you don't have any programming experience.
Users regularly cite lack of compatibility with Microsoft Office files as a reason for not using OpenOffice.org. OpenOffice.org does include Microsoft Office export filters, as well as a number of settings for increased compatibility, but these features provide only good, not complete, compatibility. For this reason, Sun Microsystems' ODF Plugin for Microsoft Office, released earlier this year, sounded like good news. Promising export and import filters for Word, Excel, and PowerPoint, the free download appeared to tackle compatibility from a new but promising angle by giving Microsoft Office users the ability to open and save files in Open Document Format, the default format for OpenOffice.org 2.0 and higher. Unfortunately, the plugin is designed for older versions of Windows and Microsoft Office. If you're using the increasingly ubiquitous Vista and Microsoft Office 2007, the plugin delivers only a fraction of what it promises.
Managing disk space used to be a royal pain for admins and users. Running out of disk space often meant reinstalling Linux or spending a few hours with tools like Parted to resize partitions. However, using the Logical Volume Manager (LVM) tools, you can grow, shrink, and manage disk space with very little hassle.
More than 500 people were killed when Peru was hit with by an enormous earthquake last week. When we learned that Richard Stallman, founder of the Free Software Foundation and author of the GPL under which the GNU/Linux operating system is licensed, was in Peru during the quake, we asked if he would share his experiences with us. Here's his report.
Most Web publishing systems on the market can automatically generate RSS feeds, but there are situations where you might want to have fine-grained control over your RSS feeds. For example, you might want to provide alternative RSS item descriptions, or to manually select which RSS items to publish. While you can code an RSS feed by hand, you'd be better off using a dedicated tool like ListGarden. It can help you to not only create and manage RSS feeds, but also to do more advanced tasks like publish the feeds on a remote server, back up the feeds, generate an HTML page, and much more.
As a former course designer and academic, I used to be experienced in talking in front of people. However, one thing I hadn't done until now is appear on television. That, more than anything, is why I agreed to appear on the computer show Lab with Leo Laporte in a five-minute spot about the GNU/Linux desktop. The show is scheduled to appear October 11 on G4TechTV in Canada and the How-To Channel in Australia, with my spot being posted to Google Video on the same day. I won't know if I look savvy or imbecilic until I see how the segment is edited, but the experience taught me several points about appearing on TV in general, and evangelizing for GNU/Linux in the studio in particular.
Interclue is a Firefox extension that lets you preview whatever a hyperlink on a page is pointing to. Unlike other link previewers, Interclue doesn't just display a tiny replica of what's hiding under the link. It uses algorithms to intelligently construct a summary of the target page and displays it in a window with lots of other information and statistics about the page.
Freespire, the free as in beer version of the Linspire Linux distribution, this month released Freespire 2.0, the first version of the operating system based on the popular Ubuntu distribution, and the first to contain proprietary codecs and drivers. Despite its attractive appearance, it left me with mixed feelings.
The OSI License-Discuss mailing list has been ablaze for the past few days since Microsoft submitted its Permissive License (MS-PL) to the OSI [Open Source Initiative] for official open source license approval. Jon Rosenberg, source program director for Microsoft, posted, "Microsoft believes that this license provides unique value to the open source community by delivering simplicity, brevity, and permissive terms combined with intellectual property protection."
Finding an addictive computer game on a Friday evening can be dangerous. Instead of doing things you have been promising your wife, you spend the weekend in front of your computer playing the game and trying to explain that "this is for work." This is exactly what happened to me when I discovered Battle Tanks.
Ever thought about how nice it would be if you could edit the files stored on your Web server directly without the cumbersome download-edit-upload routine? Web-based Distributed Authoring and Versioning (WebDAV) is the way to do it. A WebDAV server works like a file server that uses HTTP as the underlying protocol. It facilitates collaborative editing and versioning. If you manage a Web server or an enterprise document management system, where different authors need to edit resources, WebDAV is a useful way of providing write access to them. You can use the Apache modules mod_dav and mod_dav_fs for basic WebDAV functionality, while a Subversion module for Apache, mod_dav_svn, provides versioning support.
No other hardware nowadays supports GNU/Linux as weakly as wireless network adapters. Between the constant release of new models and major vendors who are uninterested in supporting the operating system, free drivers for wireless cards are next to impossible to reverse engineer. Nor can you find many retailers willing to customize laptops as readily as they do workstations. In this situation, ndiswrapper and the Broadcom firmware cutter provide a functional, if not always satisfactory, solution.
The topic of information sharing among US intelligence agencies, the FBI, and other federal agencies has attracted attention since 9/11. At Defcon XV, I had the opportunity to ask Tony Sager, chief of the National Security Agency's Vulnerability Analysis and Operations Group, about information sharing within the agency.
San Diego -- Mainframe programmers and sysadmins get more than just sales pitches and informational talks at SHARE this week -- they also get real-world training. I sat in on a number of educational sessions and hands-on labs at the conference, taught by engineers from IBM, Novell, and independent software vendors.
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