Many of you have commented that our NewsVac section hasn’t been refreshed since the middle of last month. Others have noticed that our story volume has dropped off. Changes are coming to Linux.com, and until they arrive, you won’t see any new stories …

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The free and open source software community has been waiting for the G1 cell phone since it was first announced in July. Source code for Google’s Android mobile platform has been available, but the G1 marks its commercial debut. It’s clearly a good de…

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Many public administrations already use open source Geographic Information Systems (GIS) to let citizens look at public geographic data trough dedicated Web sites. Others use the same software to partially open the data gathering process: they let cit…

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The Interclue extension is supposed to give you a preview of links in Firefox before you visit them, saving you mouse-clicks and, with a little luck, allowing you to move quickly between multiple links on the same page. Unfortunately, the determinatio…

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Shell programming is heavily dependent on string processing. The term string is used generically to refer to any sequence of characters; typical examples of strings might be a line of input or a single argument to a command. Users enter responses to p…

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Many religions have some sort of holiday during this season, where we look back at the joyful moments of the year that’s coming to a close, and look ahead with anticipation and hope to the year to come. We hope your year is filled with all you wish for.

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Google Maps gives you a quick and easy way to add maps to your Web site, but when you’re using Google’s API, your ability to display other data is limited. If you have your own data you want to display, or data from sources other than Google, OpenLaye…

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At a time when new and buggy features cloud basic computer functions, it’s refreshing to see a new release of a distro like Slackware that stays true to its core philosophy. Slackware has an unfair reputation of being a distro only for experienced use…

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Documentation is one area in which free/libre/open source software (FLOSS) is weakest. A project called FLOSS Manuals is trying to remedy this situation. The idea behind project is to create quality, free documentation for free software.

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A next-generation package manager called Nix provides a simple distribution-independent method for deploying a binary or source package on different flavours of Linux, including Ubuntu, Debian, SUSE, Fedora, and Red Hat. Even better, Nix does not inte…

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Managing buddies on a few online social networks isn’t too much of a hassle, but throw in your contact list from instant messaging platforms and online apps and services like Flickr, Digg, and Twitter, and you have a contact list that’d rival that of …

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As a regular browser of the Firefox Add-ons site, I’m troubled by the apparent proliferation of proprietary extensions in the last year. Maybe I’ve simply exhausted the free-licensed extensions that interest me, but recently every interesting-looking …

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The past couple of years have seen an explosion of open source programming languages and utilities that are geared toward children. Many of these efforts are based around the idea that, since the days of BASIC, programming environments have become far…

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It’s that time of the year again. No, not Christmas — it’s the time of the year we get the latest versions of our favorite Linux distributions. Version 11.1 of openSUSE is being released today. Designated as a point release, there are enough new good…

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Let’s take a look at three projects that are aimed at showing calendar information through a Web interface: WebCalendar, VCalendar, and CaLogic. These projects run on a LAMP server and provide a Web interface to calendar events.

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For many years Spamhaus has been top dog in the anti-spam world of DNSBL (Domain Name System Block List; also known as Realtime Blackhole Lists or RBLs). But Spamhaus is no longer a 100% free service. Even small nonprofits are now expected to pay at l…

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If Parkinson’s Law for computers holds true, then no matter how much disk space you have, it will get used up. If you’re already feeling a pinch, consider using a disk space analyzer tool to see what’s eating your space.

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The week-long Ubuntu Developer Summit (UDS) meets every six months at changing locations to discuss what will be in the next release of Ubuntu. The mostly unpublicized FOSScamp always meets the weekend before. The FOSScamp un-conference has no program…

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Pulse is a build server that can monitor your source repository and trigger a build and test cycle every time somebody does a commit. With Pulse you will always know if the most recent sources in your revision control system compile and if they pass y…

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Properly speaking, Nadav Rotem’s Open Text Summarizer (OTS) is not a summarizer at all. True summaries generally involve rewording contents at a higher level of generality while preserving the meaning, not just producing a condensed version of the ori…

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All WordPress site owners have their own list of "must have" plugins. Is one or more of these administration and security add-ons among yours? Each adds valuable functions to WordPress, and is simple to configure and use.

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For a long time, I recorded a basic list of all the backups I made of my movie collection in a scruffy notebook. In due time, I found that relying on a simple piece of paper was wishful thinking. I then endured the laborious process of migrating my li…

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While I’m a die-hard Google user — especially the PIM apps — I still appreciate offline applications for the integration with the desktop, speed, and features they sport. The Evolution contact and calendaring application is a great example: it’s as …

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After more than a year in development, Amarok, a multipurpose media player with a host of features, has issued release candidate code for version 2. It comes with a completely redesigned interface, and takes advantage of KDE 4’s new libraries and inte…

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GameLayers’ Passively Multiplayer Online Game (PMOG), which allows users to immerse themselves in a virtual world of adventures, challenges, and intrigue, has been picking up traction thanks in part to its robust open source framework. Underpinning th…

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Two Oregon educators who founded the K12Linux project seven years ago are glad that they have been able to hand that project over to Fedora, the home they always meant for K12Linux to have.

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GNOME’s Vala programming language lets you use the GLib2 object system at the heart of the GNOME desktop without having to do object-oriented programming in ANSI C. Unlike Mono or Java, a Vala program does not require any virtual machine or runtime li…

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"The future of software is in cloud computing," says Fabrizio Capobianco, CEO of Funambol, a company that provides mobile services. And if free and open source software (FOSS) is going to survive in that emerging market, he says, then the co…

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Corporations and home users alike need firewall protection. Many choices abound, including some expensive, commercial options that only run on specialized hardware. Others, like SmoothWall Express, are freely downloadable, built on the same technology…

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Archmbox lets you list, move, and copy messages from one mbox mail file to another, primarily for archiving messages. This tool lets you easily move all messages that are older than a given date into another (possibly compressed) mbox file, and you ca…

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