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Way back in July, the word rang out that SCO — the arch-villains bent on squeezing every dime they can out of Linux — had been vanquished by the valiant legal team at Novell to the tune of $2.5+ million. Now comes word that the victory is final — or at least, as final as can be expected.

More from the SuperComputing '08 floor. Editor Shawn Powers talks about RAID, ethernet, power conservation, InfiniBand, global super computing networks, programming tools, storage and more.

More from the SuperComputing '08 floor. Editor Shawn Powers talks about Mathematica, CUDA, quiet, efficient servers and more.

Continuing at the SuperComputing '08 floor, Editor Shawn Powers talks with exhibitors about everything from spaceships to clusters to virtualization.

With the advancements in technology available today, you can make contact with just about any place you'd like within a few seconds, thanks to the border-crossing and barrier-smashing power of the Internet. If it's Mars you're trying to reach, though, your best chance is more likely to come on the end of a probe than a DSL line. That may well change, however, as scientists at NASA have just completed testing new technology aimed — quite literally — at blasting the Internet out of this world.

We're here at SuperComputing '08 in Austin, Texas catching up with a few exhibitors. If you can't be here with us, we'll bring a little of the show to you. We're searching the show floor for the coolest Linux stuff (besides Linux Journal of course) and bringing it to you.

The article discusses E-Stewards, a new certification program for e-waste recyclers that aims to prevent dumping in landfills and developing countries.

Linux on the Label!

November 18th, 2008 by Shawn Powers

Anyone that uses Linux regularly is familiar with the "Google to see if it works under Linux" procedure before buying any hardware. I was thrilled when I saw the ad for a USB Atari 2600 joystick clone that had a label on the box claiming its Linux compatibility.


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Here in the Linux Journal offices, we sometimes get phone calls that give us a laugh. People call us because they either want to "talk to the Linux company" or buy some stock in "Linux," or have some criticism of "the Linux programmers." We thought this time we'd share one with you. Hope it gives you a chuckle to brighten your day. :)

Just a month after the release of Adobe's Flash Player 10 — with, for the first time, full Linux support out of the box — Adobe is back with another surprise: a 64-bit Flash Player — exclusively for Linux.

Everywhere you turn there are "brain training" games that claim to help you "lower your brain age" or "boost your brain power" and other such marketing hyperbole. Much like saying a certain breakfast cereal is "more satisfying" than other cereals, these claims are basically meaningless.

It's been six months since Mozilla's Firefox 3 leapt onto the scene. In that time, the browser required a tuneup only three times — until Wednesday, when patches for a swath of vulnerabilities upped the count to four.

The November 13, 2008 edition of Linux Journal Live! Shawn Powers and special guest, Linux Journal Author Daniel Bartholomew, talk e-book readers and Daniel's Kindle, DRM, and other goodness.

“They order, said I, this matter better in France.” So wrote Laurence Sterne in his 1768 book A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy. Alas, things have changed much since then, at least as far as the Internet is concerned. In the light of recent events, now he would we have to say: they order this matter worse in France. Even more unfortunately, France's bad habits are spreading, and could have serious consequences for free software.

Dual booting is a necessary evil and very inconvenient. What if you could run your windows partition in a virtual machine, so you wouldn't have to worry about rebooting anymore? With VMWare Workstation, you can.

Just months after losing 10% of its workforce in a mass layoff, and mere days since it came to light that employees were being asked to take unpaid leave to avoid additional cuts, Dell is now facing another loss: Kevin Kettler, the company's Chief Technology Officer, is cashing in his chips and going home.

At the end of my profile of AlgoScore I stated that my one wished-for addition to that program would be support for OpenSound Control (OSC). Well, my wish has been granted, the latest AlgoScore supports OSC, and I'm a happy guy. This article introduces OSC and explains why it makes me a more pleasant fellow.

Mozilla's Firefox browser is unquestionably one of the most popular web browsers on the market — topping 20% at times while the browser-to-beat continues to slide — and certainly so among Open Source users. The release of Firefox 3 in June was a major milestone for Mozilla, but still, nearly six months later, there are those who have eschewed the new for the comfortable, homey, well-worn-in welcomeness of Firefox 2. That will be changing soon, though, as funeral arrangements for the second-era Fox are in full-tilt at Mozilla HQ, and the service is fast approaching.

Bash Sub Shells

November 11th, 2008 by Mitch Frazier in

When writing bash scripts you sometimes need to run commands in the background. This is easily accomplished by appending the command line to be run in the background with an ampersand "&". But what do you do if you need to run multiple commands in the background? You could put them all into a separate script file and then execute that script followed by an ampersand, or you can keep the commands in your main script and run them as a sub-shell.

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The November 13, 2008 edition of Linux Journal Live! Shawn Powers and special guest, Linux Journal Author Daniel Bartholomew, talk e-book readers and Daniel's Kindle, DRM, and other goodness.

From the Magazine

December 2008, #176

The Oxford English Dictionary says the word "gadget" is a placeholder name for a technical item whose precise name one can't remember. Like that book-reader thingy from Amazon...what's it called? Spindle, Gindle...Kindle, that's it. Check it out in this month's gadget issue.

Other gadgets covered include the Nokia tablets, the BlackBerry, the Neo FreeRunner, the Dash Express, the Roku Netflix Player, the Kangaroo TV, The TomTom GO 930 and the MooBella Ice Cream System. On the larger hardware front, read the reviews of the Acer Aspire One and the YDL PowerStation. On the software front, check out the articles and columns on memcached, Samba security, Mutt, desktop gadgets, bash and Puppet. To wrap it all up, read Doc's thoughts on Google and the browser platform.

Read this issue

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