alll about linux

The new book, The Developer Shortcut Guide to SUSE Linux was written for developers who want to learn the quickest ways to write customized open source business applications. But the book’s author, John Featherly, has insights into more than just the developer side of things.

SearchEnterpriseLinux.com caught up with Featherly to talk about his new book and to get his thoughts on where Linux and the open source applications market is heading. The author also offered tips for SUSE administrators and developers, those comparing KDE and GNOME, and those mulling the deployment of JBoss with SUSE. >>>>

How-To: Most system builders know all too well the headaches involved in recovering a crashed hard drive. The bottom line is, there really are only three kinds of hard drives:

• Hard drives that have failed.
• Hard drives that will fail.
• Hard drives that were retired in the course of a computer upgrade before failure.

In this TechBuilder Recipe, I’ll show you how to set up a hard drive mirror clone–as opposed to a new drive mirror (or what’s known as a “bare metal restore?)–for Linux-based systems. >>>>

After seeing the same mistakes repeated by different IT managers over the years, I’ve noticed a pattern of common errors. Here are the five common mistakes, along with tips for avoiding them. >>>>

Nope. It’s not a garden garnish. GNOME is a desktop software project designed to look familiar to anyone who has ever used a computer. Aaron Weber distills what the GNOME desktop is, what apps users will find as well as what platform development tools developers will find, and the resources to help you get started using it. >>>>

This Thursday, the Open Source project OpenOffice presented Release Candidate 1 of its free Office suite; this test version — possibly the last one — was, however, already available for downloading from the OpenOffice web site before the official release on Thursday: all of the mirror servers had been prepared since Wednesday. With the release of RC1, the developers are entering the last test phase. The results of this test will show whether additional release candidates will have to be produced before the Final Release.

There are two versions of SUSE Linux 10.0. One is the retail (box purchase) version known as SUSE Linux 10.0, and the other is the free downloadable version, which is known as SUSE Linux OSS 10.0 I found that quite a lot of people find difficult to understand the difference between the Retail and Downloadable versions of SUSE distro. One difference is that with the box version, which you have to pay (it’s less than $50 and worth it), you get a set of printed versions of User and Administration Guides, which are very comprehensive and excellent. The other difference is thatthe retail version can contain closed source packages. Since OSS stands for Open Source Software, the OSS version does not contain closed source software.

For further information on which packages comes with the retail version, that are excluded from the downloadable version, visit the Novell’s Coolsolutions site. >>>

Here is a review on WordPress from eWeek, which is little old, but I found it interesting, as I myself am experimenting before I will settle down for one. Till now I find and hope that WordPress will be my choice ….

Review:  The open-source blogging platform WordPress is an excellent choice for building a straight Web log site. And with its good administrative features, ease of content contribution and extensive configuration options, WordPress (www.wordpress.org) can also be used for corporate portals and collaboration.

Bring up the term “corporate blogging” in a group of technology workers, and there’s bound to be a few snickers as images are conjured of lame and infrequent executive-level blogs or marketing campaigns disguised as blogs.

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Review: Sun Microsystems’s StarOffice 8 is a full-featured office productivity suite that supports multiple platforms and costs significantly less than Microsoft Office. However, while this StarOffice release stands as the best Office alternative we’ve tested as of yet, minor format inconsistencies can complicate migrations. For more information, go to www.sun.com/software/star/staroffice/index.xmlwww.

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The Mozilla Foundation is developing an enhanced calendar extension for Thunderbird, its popular e-mail application.

According to a post on Mozillazine.org, “Lightning,” the enhanced calendar function, will offer “a set of user features that is much more competitive with Outlook, especially in enterprise usage.”

Sunbird has been available for a long time as an extension for both Thunderbird and the Firefox browser. It was derived from Mozilla suite’s integrated calendar function.

Lightning is not intended to replace Sunbird. Lightning, the Mozilla Calendar, and Sunbird (the current calendar plug-in for Thunderbird and Firefox), “will share large amounts of code,” the Mozillazine.org article says.

“While the current extension only aims for a loose integration with Thunderbird, Lightning aims to integrate into the main Thunderbird UI and user interaction model as tightly as possible,” the article states.

Version 0.1 of Lightning is expected to be released in November. The Lightening roadmap is available here.

By DesktopLinux.com Staff

The final version of Ubuntu 5.10 is expected to be released in October. At that time, Canonical will mail pressed CDs free of charge. To receive a complimentary copy of the Official Breezy Badger CD — or a handful of them to give to your friends, your school or LUG — place your request at http://shipit.ubuntu.com/. Remember that these CDs won’t ship until after the final release in October.