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A directory service is an application that lets you store, retrieve and modify information about network-attached resources such as users. If you want to keep a directory of company employees, for example, you would use a directory service instead of storing that information directly in a database. A directory service is created in a directory server, which is built on top of the database.

I tend to hammer my Ubuntu laptop. Running a website like Tectonic means I am constantly installing new applications to try them out. Many of which I later have to remove or lie forgotten on the hard disk until I start to wonder where the +40GB of free hard disk space went to. And when that happens I tend to back up the essentials - email, documents and website backups - format my hard disk and install a clean version of Ubuntu. Doing this every few months means that a few times a year I get to really consider what the most important applications on my desktop are.

In reading through IDC's excellent report, "2007 Industry Adoption of Open Source Software, Part 2: Project Adoption," analyst Matt Lawton stumbles across an intriguing observation in open-source software adoption. He apparently believes it is a weakness of the current open-source landscape, but I believe it is a strength.

LXer Feature: 17-Feb-2008

In this week's Roundup we have more Microsoft-Yahoo fallout, Booting Linux in under 40 seconds and Linux-Unix cheat sheets to help you remember all those commands that make you look smart in front of your friends. AMD launches a open GPU website, SCO group returns from the dead after receiving some emergency funding, a couple of articles about Linux on Mac hardware, someone asks if they should put Windows XP on their ASUS Eee PC and for a belated Valentine's day gift we have Linux, the language of love.

"Ok, this kernel is a winner," began Linux creator Linus Torvalds, playfully announcing the 2.6.25-rc2 kernel which gained the name "Funky Weasel is Jiggy wit it". He continued: "Just to show how _much_ of a winner it is, it's been awarded a coveted 'weasel' series name, which should tell you just how good it's going to be. It's a name revered in Linux kernel history, and as such this brings back the good old days where if you find a bug, you're almost certainly simply mistaken, and you probably just did something wrong. But hey, you can try to prove me wrong. I dare you."

In this week's KDE Commit-Digest: Plasma applets can now be dragged from the desktop to the panel. More internet data sources for the Picture Frame and Comic Plasmoids. Configuration dialogs are added to many Plasmoids. The in-development "WorldClock" Plasmoid supercedes the KWorldClock standalone application. A new Plasma applet: Conway's Game of Life. KRunner becomes completely plugin-based. Support for editing GPS track lists in Digikam. More work on expanding theming capabilities across KDE games..

M-Audio has supplied hardware and software to computer-based musicians for 20 years. Its new "make-music-now" line of products, aimed at musicians just getting into computers or PC users with an interest in music, includes a microphone, speakers, drum machine, and DJ mixer deck. Unfortunately, its bundled software, called Session, is for Windows only. Our challenge was to try out this hardware -- specifically the KeyStudio MIDI keyboard and Fast Track audio interface -- with Linux applications. We were half successful.

Linux Journal recently caught up with Intel's Arjan van de Ven. Van de Ven leads Intel's green Lesswatts.org initiative and is the developer of PowerTOP, one of the most acclaimed power management tools on the Linux platform.

You've probably seen them: black and white checkerboard-patterned matrices printed on labels and other real-world objects that you can optically scan with a cameraphone or other handheld device to extract an encoded message. But although 2-D barcodes (as they are known) are getting more common, working with them is still a bumpy road for the Linux and free software crowd. Fortunately, several options exist for reading and generating them with open source software.

I use, on a daily basis, three different Linux distributions: MEPIS 6.5 and 7, OpenSUSE 10.3, and SLED 10 SP1. So, when I saw that Frank Ohlhorst, my colleague over at The Channel Insider, had gotten his hands on a ThinkPad T61 with SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop 10 Service Pack 1, I was interested in what he would find.

With MySQLfs you can store a filesystem inside a MySQL relational database. MySQLfs breaks up the byte content of files that you store in its filesystem into tuples in the database, which allows you to store large files in the filesystem without requiring the database to support extremely large BLOB fields. With MySQLfs you can throw a filesystem into a MySQL database and take advantage of whatever database backup, clustering, and replication setup you have to protect your MySQLfs filesystem.

The /proc directory is a strange beast. It doesn't really exist, yet you can explore it. Its zero-length files are neither binary nor text, yet you can examine and display them. This special directory holds all the details about your Linux system, including its kernel, processes, and configuration parameters. By studying the /proc directory, you can learn how Linux commands work, and you can even do some administrative tasks.

SCO Group, which for years has claimed that Linux infringes on its Unix intellectual property, has received new funding and seems set to continue its battle against the open source operating system. Stephen Norris & Co. Capital Partners said Thursday it and unnamed Middle Eastern partners will fund The SCO Group with up to US$100 million to take over the financially beleaguered Unix company, move it out of bankruptcy protection, complete its controversial and unsuccessful Linux litigation, and take it private.

On Monday, the LiMo Foundation, an industry consortium that wants to put Linux technology onto mobile handsets, announced the first release of its shared platform. The foundation also announced the immediate availability of the application programming interface (API) set for the platform. Prior to the announcements, ZDNet UK spoke with LiMo's executive director, Morgan Gillis, to discuss the platform, LiMo's rivals, and Nokia's entry into the organization.

Linpus Technologies has long been known in Taiwan for its Linux distributions. Now, it wants to become a player in the global Linux market with its new Linux distribution Linpus Linux Lite, which features a dual-mode user interface. One mode is for people who may never have used a computer before; the other is for experienced Linux users.

An ambitious initiative that aims to bring open source software to a new level in Europe hopes to make competition with US companies more interesting. QualiPSo is a four-year project partly funded by the EU. Its mission is to "bring together the major players of a new way to use and deploy open source software (OSS), fostering its quality and trust from corporations and governments."

If you come from the world of Windows, you undoubtedly understand the concept of a shortcut. In the Linux world, shortcuts do exist, but they're generally referred to as symbolic links, or symlinks. They are so named because, like shortcuts, a symlink is really just a symbolic placeholder or link to the file or directory you're trying to get at.

Zenwalk, a Slackware-based slim-and-zippy distribution, released a major update last month. The release announcement listed some noticeable enhancements and promised the best support for Wi-Fi you can expect in any Linux distro. Excuse me for being skeptic, but one doesn't expect midget distros to be the best in any field. How well can a single-CD 469MB distro hold up against every other multi-GB DVD distro available today? As it turns out, Zenwalk manages to squeeze in a long list of open source wireless drivers, as well as the proprietary Intel wireless device firmware. Surprisingly Zenwalk 5.0 not only does things you don't expect from a single CD distro, it does them with ease and very little command-line sorcery.

Mozilla has released beta 3 of Firefox 3.0, with around 1300 ‘individual changes’ from beta 2, with fixes for stability, performance, memory usage, platform enhancements and user interface improvements. Firefox 3.0 beta 3 is here, with plenty of improvements set to send Firefox’s percentage of market share soaring ever higher once the final version is released to the public.

"Andrew [Morton] was looking for someone to run a linux-next tree that just contained the subsystem git and quilt trees for 2.6.x+1 and I (in a moment of madness) volunteered. So, this is to announce the creating of such a tree," began Stephen Rothwell, resulting in a lengthy thread discussing the current Linux kernel development process. In a follow up email announcing the first linux-next release, Stephen went on to explain, "it has two branches - master and stable. Stable is currently just Linus' tree and will never rebase. Master will rebase on an almost daily basis (maybe slower at the start)."