Ask me what is one of the most useful feature on the net which will remain popular for times immemorial, come what may, and I will without an iota of doubt tell you that it is maps. That is right, maps were used in the bygone era to navigate from one place to another and maps are still relied upon in these modern times for charting out ones journeys. So it is no surprise that with the dawn of the

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I have always looked at the DOS operating system with some nostalgia. At a time when networking as you see now was confined to some labs or universities in the US, and one had to put up exclusively with floppies to transfer data from one computer to another, DOS was a big player atleast on the home front. I have fond memories of playing games such as pacman, Dig Dug, galaga, ….. on Dos.

I

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Lets face it. Developing websites means using a mis-mash of software right from the ubiquitous text editor to full blown graphics editors, having access to a variety of web browsers and even good ftp clients to upload the files to the remote server. I have at times wondered what it is like to develop complete websites right from the designing stage to the final implementation all from within

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In previous posts I have explained how to set up apache server to serve webpages on ones personal machine. But then I explained how to do it the Debian way. Obviously there are other ways of doing the same thing. For instance, if you put the same query (of setting up apache webserver) to a person running RedHat, the steps he will list out will be some what different from what I had covered. By now

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Does an OS have to be as costly or even more than the hardware on which it runs? This seems to be the question that I am forced to ponder myself again and again. When I open the day’s newspaper, I am besieged by ad after ad offering to sell PCs at bargain prices, some of them as low as $250. To list an example, I came across this newspaper ad offering the Dell Poweredge SC430 Server which features

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While running GNU/Linux, it is common to find different versions of the same software residing on your hard disk. This is especially true for programming language compilers. For example, Java for Linux comes in different forms. One is the open source version which is popularly known as the Blackdown java and the other is the official release from Sun Microsystems which is the original Java. Then

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I remember, the first time I was introduced to Unix – Yes my first experience with a POSIX OS was with Unix, more specifically SCO Unix and not Linux – the instructor told us that the real power of Unix was in its accomplishment of complex tasks by splitting them into smaller tasks which inturn are split into even smaller tasks and then assigned to different utilities. And the output from these

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A very prominent personality once said, and I quote :
“Sometimes, people ask me if it is a sin in the church of Emacs to use the editor Vi. It is true that Vi-Vi-Vi is the editor of the beast….”Just for once, I wouldn’t mind siding with the beast if that is what it takes to use Vi. The modern avatar of Vi is Vim – the free editor created by Bram Moolenaar. Riding from strength to strength, this

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Nothing has created furore more than the GPL version 3 which is still in the draft stage. The Free Software Foundation’s move to create a separate version of GPL taking corrective measures to guard against DRM has not been well received by the core group of Linux developers which includes Linus Torvalds.

Linus’s line of thought (as far as I have understood) is plainly that DRM is just a

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In a traditional software development model, the client asks for one thing and is delivered something else not to say anything about the galloping costs involved as is rightly illustrated by the cartoon below.

Fig : Traditional software development model (original link)

Shouldn’t it be reason enough to take a long hard look at the development model of open source software instead of sticking to

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A couple of years back, the computers were connected to each other by what is known as a bus network where all the computers were connected using a single coaxial networking cable hooked to each computer using a T connector. But this kind of arrangement caused a lot of problems and a break in the cable,loose connectors or a cable short was enough to bring down the entire network. And

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Consider this scenario… Your computer running Linux somehow ran into a hardware glitch and had to be hauled to the neighborhood Computer service center. And you are asked to leave the machine at the service center and come back after a couple of days so that the technician can have a good look at it. But you are a bit worried because the harddisk contains the blue prints of the most secret

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A couple of months back, I started working on a Mind Map of Linux distributions which endeavored to show a birds eye view of all the Linux distributions and its descendents. But only when I started documenting it, did I realize the gravity of the situation. For one, there are umpteen Linux distributions and then a couple dozen more. And many Linux distributions do not have enough documentation

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There was a time when Linux code was managed using the Free as in Freedom Beer tool called Bitkeeper – a Source Code Management tool developed by Larry McVoy. But due to the differences of opinion between the free software developers and Larry, Linus decided to develop his own free (as in freedom) revision control software which he named Git. For those who are curious, Jermey had written a

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The latest buzz as far as Open Source is concerned is that Bruce Perens – the very same who played (is playing) a significant role in the open source movement and gave us the definition of Open source has been voted off the board of SPI. This is what Mr Perens himselves had to say about the matter.
I missed oh, 8 out of 12 board meetings due to being on airplanes (doing stuff for Open Source) and

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Open Source as Prior Art is a project conceived by a group consisting of USPTO (United States Patent and Trademark Office), Eclipse foundation, IBM, Novell, Open Source Development Labs (the sponsors of Linus Torvalds), Red Hat and OSTG (the owners of slashdot.org, sourceforge.net and other sites).

The motto of OSPA is to improve the quality of software patents by providing better accessibility

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I was looking forward to seeing this wonderful movie which was slated to be aired on TV a couple of weeks back and I had made sure I finished all my chores in time so that I could watch the movie with respite. But then as bad luck would have it, just when the movie started and I settled down to enjoy it, a couple of friends dropped by for a surprise visit. And that blew away any hope of watching

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A couple of weeks ago, one of Debian’s most active developer Matthew Garrett threw down the towel and called it quits protesting against the Debian’s rather strong democratic culture of having a free for all discussion about any decision making pertaining to Debian making him intensely irritable and unhappy. He went on to compare Debian’s lack of civility and slowness in decision-making with the

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Anybody who has had anything to do with the World Wide Web would surely have at one point of time or the other taken a pause to marvel at its rapid growth and the technologies that have spurred the growth. The most abundant and widely used part of the world wide web are websites which allow anybody with access to a web browser and an internet connection to view and share information.

The

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NX short form for NoMachine’s X protocol is a compression technology developed by NoMachine which allows one to run complete remote desktop sessions (be it Linux or Windows) even at dial up internet connection speeds. One of the advantages of using NX technology over VNC is that NX uses SSH on port 22 for connection between the client and the server. Which means all the communication takes place

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Recently I read an article lambasting or rather dissecting the role that Ubuntu has played in the Linux community and according to the author of the article titled – Ubuntu vs. Debian: What Canonical Doesn’t Want You To Know , it boils down to clever marketing on the part of Ubuntu folks or in other words marketing gimmicks. In fact I see this growing dissent towards this distribution in different

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Ask any person who has used a computer atleast once and he will agree that fonts form a very important part of the operating system which is installed in the computer. At one time, GNU/Linux lacked good font support and any webpage viewed in a web browser was at the most lackluster.

Things changed somewhat with the release of good set of fonts for GNU/Linux called Bitstream. But even now the

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I am sure anyone who has anything to do with computers have heard of a system administrator. But not many would be aware of a content management administrator or more specifically a Drupal administrator. Drupal is a very popular open source content management system which is used by 10′s and 1000′s of individuals and firms alike to host professional websites which integrate blogs, forums, portals

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Various governments in the developing world are slowly but surely waking up to the advantages that free software can provide both in terms of monetary savings as well as otherwise. One example of this new way of thinking is the Kerala state government’s decision to use Linux in all the government run schools in the state. In fact this trend is so prominent that even national dailies have started

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Fedora project leader Mark Spevack gave an interview to slashdot where he answers questions about Fedora and what significant part it will play in the future of Linux. He is asked about the worst aspect of Fedora, enabling NTFS support in future versions of Fedora, comparison of Fedora with Ubuntu and many other interesting questions which surprisingly, he tackles and answers in a very honest and

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When a Linux enthusiast hears the name Debian, it never fails to instill in him some awe and respect. After all, this is the one and only not-for-profit Linux distribution which has singularly built up a name synonymous with security, stability and freeness.

I recently downloaded the latest offering of Debian which goes in the garb of Debian Etch Beta 3. Ironically, I came across the correct link

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From the time of its inception, the project of providing one Laptop per child has managed to catch my imagination. It is my belief that a computer will bring the best from within a child and will give growth to its imagination. The only hurdle of providing a computer to every child is the obvious cost factor. And this exciting project spearheaded by MIT could be the corner stone for change in the

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OpenOffice.org is a very popular standards compliant office suite released under the open source licence. It supports reading and writing of MS Word documents as well as implements the Open Document Format which is an open format for saving and exchanging office documents such as memos, reports, books, spreadsheets, databases, charts, and presentations.

Now here is a chance to contribute

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When recently, Microsoft released the estimated pricing for their yet to be released OS Vista, I had wondered aloud whether it is right to price an OS at par with or even more than the cost of the hardware on which it runs. And rightly so, the cost of hardware is dropping by leaps and bounds.

A Taiwanese hardware manufacturer is shipping a Linux powered PC (code named TU-40) for just (US)$99. The

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Debian Etch is a very good Linux distribution. It has all the latest versions of software – even more recent than those found in Ubuntu Dapper (though that is bound to change once Ubuntu releases its next version) and also a pretty GUI installer. Recently when I downloaded and installed the latest version of Debian Etch Beta 3, every thing went quite smoothly – Etch correctly detected all the

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