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Top Open Source Innovators Gather for Three-Day Show; Open Source Applications Foundation Chair Mitchell Kapor to Speak

In my previous article, I introduced some of the exciting new tools people are using to manage information on the Web. One of these is del.icio.us, which is best described as a social bookmark manager. The concept of del.icio.us is simple: every time you come across an interesting site, use a bookmarklet to type in a few keywords about the page, and save it to del.icio.us Web site. All saved bookmarks are public and everything is available through RSS feeds. Like any useful tool, del.icio.us has attracted a number of extensions and improvements as people figure out new ways to use it. Here are a few of those tips, tricks, and tools for del.icio.us that I have found particularly useful.

Much of the attention that Linux has received has been focused on its growing use in servers. However, Linux scales down as well as it scales up, and as a result, Linux has become an ideal operating system for a wide variety of systems. Nowhere has this been more evident than the world of embedded computing. Here's why.

The 2.6 kernel includes many new features and improvements over previous releases. Kernel developer Andrew Morton provides a personal tour, describes what lay ahead for 2.7 and beyond, and explains how others can contribute to the Linux core.

With the recent acquisitions of Ximian and SuSE, Novell Chief Executive Officer Jack Messman has transformed a marginalized company into a mover-and-shaker. Look out, Red Hat - and Microsoft - Novell has big plans for Linux.

Back in 1985, in my last year of graduate school, I was lucky enough to get a "real" office, including a door, a lock and key, a telephone, and a shiny, new Sun 3/110 workstation. After timesharing with the general population on VAX 11s for three years, the Sun machine was a godsend: a bitmapped screen, shell windows, and all the processing power of a 16 MHz 68020. (Man, those were the days!)

In case you don't have your map of Linux-related litigation handy, the docket for the SCO Group looks something like this.

To paraphrase a famous maxim, "Oh, what a difference a decade makes." The emergence of the Internet over the last ten years has brought extraordinary changes to software development. Because of the Internet, large amounts of useful, well-engineered code are now widely available, and much of that code is available for free or under generous licensing terms. Moreover, there's little distinction these days between developers and end-users: end-users have capitalized on the newly-networked world to take an active role in the development and enhancement of products that many of us use every day.

RPMs can be a great way to manage the packages you install on your system. Unfortunately, not everything you might want to install is available in RPM form. Perhaps you need a more recent version of a program than the one that ships with your distribution; or maybe it's a program you wrote yourself; or perhaps it's just something that's very obscure. Similar dilemmas can occur with non-program packages, such as font or clip art collections

Imagine that you're back from your summer vacation with 500 TIFF photo files that you'd like to convert to JPEG. You also need to rotate a lot of them. However, you don't want to open them one-by-one in your camera's photo editing program.

With the explosion of Internet use and its attendant traffic, keeping pace with rising demand is a common problem. Luckily, there are some concrete steps you can take to relieve system stress.

In the previous two columns, I introduced my templating system of choice, the Template Toolkit. Continuing from where I left off, let's look at some of the other features of the Template Toolkit (TT), including how to configure TT and use it from Perl, from the command line, and embedded in Apache.

While complex URLs work fine in the browser, sharing and bookmarking (and indexing) those URLs can be quite problematic. Email applications often scramble long URLs, and URLs filled with ? and& characters are hard for users to read and remember. Moreover, sites are rarely static. Keeping "legacy" URLs valid remains a challenge for an expanding site.

The Message Passing Interface (MPI) has become the application programming interface (API) of choice for data exchange among processes in parallel scientific programs. While Parallel Virtual Machine (PVM) is still a viable message passing system offering features not available in MPI, it's often not the first choice for developers seeking vendor-supported APIs based on open standards. Of course, standards evolve, and the MPI standard is no different.

Lately, it's getting so you can't tell the Linux players without a scorecard. So, here is my handy-dandy guide. First, we have IBM. There's something terribly ironic that Big Blue, the original Evil Empire, has been instrumental in Linux's explosive growth. But there it is. Of course, keep in mind that IBM is being good to Linux because Linux is good for IBM. Linux has given the company the universal, multi-platform operating system that they've always needed for their customers.

In this interview, Hall spoke with SearchEnterpriseLinux.com about what he knows best -- Linux – and discussed integrated Linux applications in the enterprise, open source office suites and the future of enterprise Linux.

CNET's News.com and ZDnet ran a news story today about Adobe and Linux. It appears that Adobe is advertising for Linux-related positions: one as director of Linux marketing and another for a senior software architect for an Adobe open source project. NewsForge contacted Adobe for additional information and was given the opportunity to speak with Pam Dezieo, Director of Product Marketing for Acrobat, about those ads and the Adobe view of the Linux market.

Security firm Mi2g has released a report declaring Mac OS X and BSD Unix the "world's safest online computing environments" and Linux the least secure, although some security experts say the findings could be misleading.

If people can't install you new program easily and quickly, without endless tweaking and reconfigurations, what good is it?

Ucopia, Mandrakesoft and the Université de Paris LIP6 research laboratory have been granted a 1 euro million research grant to collaborate in advanced mobility research. The project aims to find novel methods of enabling and managing wireless mobility.