Reinstalling your operating system is never a fun or welcome task, but sometimes it's unavoidable. Restoring settings and downloaded applications after installing an operating system can take quite a bit of time, so I've come up with a shell script...

Poster presentations are a common way of presenting results, proposing strategies, and explaining concepts and methods. You can create nifty poster presentations with Scribus, the free desktop publishing tool.

Joomla! project leader Louis Landry and his colleagues want to protect the project they love. That's why, after two years of allowing proprietary plugins for the open source CMS, the group has decided to ask third-party developers for voluntary...

The Linux Standard Base Driver Development Kit (LSB DDK), released last week by the Linux Foundation, aims to allow printer manufacturers to support virtually all Linux distributions via a single driver package.

Twice a week, Dr. Alain Empain drives his car away from his solar-paneled home in the Belgian countryside, then parks and boards a train that an hour and 10 minutes later will take him to a bus, which half an hour later will take him a small village...

Hewlett-Packard released version 4 of its Linux Common Operating Environment (LinuxCOE) software this month. LinuxCOE is a front end to a set of Perl scripts that helps administrators by building customized install images for various Linux...

IBM anticipates that the enhanced EAL4 security certification earned by Red Hat Enterprise Linux Version 5 earlier this month will further its adoption by businesses and government entities worldwide.

WordNet is one of the best English language references available, but its command-line and rather primitive graphical interfaces don't really do it justice. WordNet would greatly benefit from a graphical front-end similar to Visual Thesaurus that...

Mote Marine Lab in Sarasota, Fla., has enjoyed great success with its Google Maps-based beach conditions reporting system. Covering the six public beaches of Sarasota county and operational for eight months, the system receives 1,200 hits per day...

Users of VideoLAN's VLC cross-platform media player are strongly advised to upgrade to the just-released version 0.8.6c, which fixes "a security vulnerability in the CDDA, Vorbis, Theora and SAP plugins."

Support for YouTube and Lulu.tv streaming video is a key feature of Gnash 0.8.0, the third alpha release of the open source Flash movie player. Gnash is available as a standalone application, or as a plugin for Firefox, Mozilla, Konqueror, and Opera.

Computers can make your life easier, but you may not think so if you use more than one and like to keep your workspace the same across them. For instance, if you browse the Web, switching to another computer is a hassle. Where are your bookmarks?...

I've been using OpenWrt on my Linksys router for a year or so. I take it for granted -- I ignore it because it just works. But back at X-Wrt.org, which is a related project, not a competitor to OpenWrt, developers have been busy creating a new user...

When Linspire 6.0 is released next month, it will include the fruits of the recently announced marriage between Linspire and Microsoft. Linspire CEO Kevin Carmony says he has been in talks with Microsoft for about a year and a half before reaching...

Ten years ago, when Metadot founder and CEO Daniel Guermeur was working for a large technology company, he discovered that the Web-based content management systems he was developing were too complicated for his customers, who kept saying they needed...

Practicing attorneys with a basic knowledge of free/open source software and a desire to learn about relevant legal issues are invited to apply for a spot in the Software Freedom Law Center's new Open Source Law Immersion Program.

The RPM Package Manager (RPM), fundamental to an array of Linux distributions and the Linux Standard Base specification, has been on uncertain ground as a project in recent years. The versions of the utility shipped by the various RPM-based distros...

All modern operating systems are able to run many programs at the same time. For example, a typical Linux server might include a Web server, an email server, and probably a database service. Each of these programs runs as a separate process. What do...

The Baylor College Human Neuroimaging Lab (HNL) uses Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) to record and research brain activity. The fMRI scans human brains at work, detecting areas of greater blood flow that indicate which part of the brain...

I run a Postfix-based mail server that services a few hundred users with an average load of a couple of thousand legitimate messages a day -- but thanks to spam, the actual load on the server is much higher. I use Realtime Blackhole Lists (RBL) and...