While perusing some Linux stories today, I came across a reference to using SBM, Smart Boot Manager. SBM runs from a floppy disk and allows systems to boot from a selection of disks, effectively allowing one to bypass an old BIOS and have more advanced boot options. From the SBM site: “Smart BootManager is an os independent BootManager which has easy to use interface and many other features. The main goals of SBM are to be absolutely OS independent, flexible and full-featured. It has all of the features needed to boot a variety of OS.”

How do you produce a major update of a popular desktop for GNU/Linux? Following the January 11 release of KDE 4.0, Bruce Byfield sat down with KDE and discussed the new and improved elements of KDE, and what it took to get them there.

Christopher Negus is responsible for some of the most widely-read and well-respected mass-market books on Fedora and Red Hat Enterprise Linux. You may already know of, or own, Linux Toys, its sequel Linux Toys II, or one of his miraculously up-to-the-minute Fedora and Red Hat Enterprise Linux Bible books. Negus has an uncanny ability to [...]

The infrastructure and tools required to make Linux a green operating system are now in place, according to Linux leader Linus Torvalds, who was in Melbourne this week attending Australia’s largest Linux conference.

A great wiki engine used on Wikidot.com is now free software are Wikidot Inc owners: Pieter Hintjens and Piotr Frąckowiak, release the code on AGPLv3 licence just today. This is great news for the Internet as Wikidot is one of the most advanced wiki engines out there, leaving MediaWiki and TWiki far behind.

"I haven't written code since the end of 1999. It makes me sad"

In a candid discussion of his classified ads site and its business model, Craigslist founder Craig Newmark said Tuesday he has considered open-sourcing some Craiglist technology, frowns upon banner ads, and ... via Computerworld

Polyspool combines the Common Unix Printing System, Ghostscript, Samba, and a live Linux CD to create an easy-to-use open source print spooler capable of supporting Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux clients. Polyspool provides a simple Web interface and requires no knowledge of Linux commands to successfully deploy. Because Polyspool uses the standard PostScript driver bundled with the Windows operating systems and Ghostscript to render the print job, only one driver needs to be installed for any supported printer.

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License: GNU General Public License v3

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Changes:
This release adds the ability to save and restore the configuration to an available hard drive or USB disk. USB printers can now be created with the make_printers utility. A new tool, ip_config, allows the ip configuration (DHCP or manual) to be set up.

Highlight is a universal converter from source code to HTML, XHTML, RTF, TeX, LaTeX, and XML. (X)HTML output is formatted by Cascading Style Sheets. It supports more than 100 programming languages, and includes 40 highlighting color themes. It's possible to easily enhance the parsing database. The converter includes some features to provide a consistent layout of the input code.

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License: GNU General Public License (GPL)

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Changes:
Highlighting issues with nested comments and distinct delimiters were fixed. XML and CSS highlighting was fixed. C escape sequence parsing of octal and hex values was fixed. GCC 4.3 compilation support was added. Several language definitions were improved.

XML::Validator::Schema is a Perl module which validates XML documents using the W3C XML schema. The module does not implement the full W3C XML schema recommendation, but rather a useful subset. It is implemented as a SAX filter using XML::SAX.

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License: Perl License

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Changes:
This release adds support for unions and fixes several bugs, one of which prevented the module from working with Perl 5.10.

Globus is a project to provide robust, secure, peer-to-peer distributed computing on supercomputers, clusters, and other high-performance systems. It differs from other such network toolkits in that it is tuned to the needs of high-end machines.

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License: The Apache License

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Changes:
Numerous bugfixes, some severe. Improved timeouts. Connection caching has been added.