The Daily News is leaving the windowless box it has called home since some time in the ’80s to move down the street to a newer, window-rich building. The current spot has lots of space — and that means lots of space filled with old hardware. The paper’s design desk used to subsist on Power Macintosh G4 computers hooked up to 22-inch LaCie monitors. Resident Mac guru and digital photography expert Roger Vargo announced that anybody who wanted a G4 could get one … until they were all gone. So how does Debian perform on a Mac PowerPC with 450 MHz of CPU and 128 MB of RAM? Surprisingly well. And there were absolutely zero configuration issues. Everything came out perfectly.

The Open Geospatial Consortium, Inc. will participate in the 2008 Free and Open Source Software for Geospatial Conference September 29 – October 3, 2008 at Cape Town International Convention Centre, Cape Town, …

The Really Slick ScreenSavers GLX Port is a port of some nifty OpenGL screensavers that were originally written for Windows to GLX. It is intended for use with an existing screensaver daemon like xscreensaver.

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License: GNU General Public License (GPL)

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Changes:
This release adds support for synchronizing the screen savers to vertical refresh, which is enabled by default to save some CPU cycles.

LXer Feature: 31-Aug-2008

Happy Labor Day, hopefully you have an extra day off this weekend to relax and catch up on things, thus I present this week’s LXer Roundup for your reading pleasure. This week we have 5 unpopular desktop environments, 25 killer Linux applications, 10 must have cheat sheets for those of you who are low on mental “RAM” (I know, its a groaner, but its all mine), in a new twist to the Apple-Psystar saga, Psystar claims they are going to counter sue Apple claiming anticompetitive business practices. A computer on the International Space Station gets infected with a ‘worm’ (guess what OS it was running?), Carla Schroder asks the question “Does attracting hordes of Windows users to your FOSS project benefit your project, or help the advancement of FOSS?” and to wrap things up I have a couple pieces of FUD I came across.

DrasticTools can be used to visualize table data
in a Grid (DrasticGrid), in a Cloud
(DrasticCloud), and on a Google Map (DrasticMap).
The grid supports pagination, sorting, and in-line
editing of data. This tool is the successor of
MySQLPHPGrid.

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License: GNU General Public License (GPL)

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Changes:
‘scrollbarposition’ can be left or right. An ‘addparams’ option. A redesign of the style of the grid. Cursors have been improved in the grid. The ability to give headers of read-only/editable columns a different CSS style. Performance improvements. Many bugfixes.

This article will tell you how to install and use Webmin, a web user interface mainly used for administering servers. If you are not a sysadmin, don’t run away: Webmin can also be used on a single desktop too. You may struggle to remember all the command line operations to manage, say, run levels or various daemons and prefer to do it the GUI way. One of the best reasons for using Webmin is to circumvent the sheer number of command line variations from distro to distro and the different locations for configuration files that you would otherwise require to memorize (manpages notwithstanding). Please keep in mind that it is still essential to know how to use basic Unix commands. Using Webmin without some system literacy is just asking for trouble. It should be used as an additional tool, not a replacement—because a little knowledge is a dangerous thing. On that basis, let’s look at what Webmin modules can do for the desktop user.

Lobo is a pure Java Web browser that can render
HTML with support for JavaScript and CSS. It can also render compiled JavaFX Script sources.

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License: GNU General Public License (GPL)

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Changes:
SUB and SUP have been implemented. About 20 other user-reported bugs have been fixed.

The time is right for Linux and Open Source company absorption into large corporations. Which companies will be left standing in 2010? Don’t get too attached to your favorites.