VMware to make server product free | CNET News.com

On Monday, however, the company is expected to announce it will give away GSX for free, sources familiar with the plan said.

This is an interesting move for VMWare. A gain in the use of their software hopefully will equate to migration to the more powerful ESX. It’s rare to see companies embark on such a bold venture, but I hope complete success comes their way — at least to pave the way for other companies who are contemplating the same gesture.

NSLU2-Linux - OpenSlug / InstallWinTVPVRUSB2. Have you ever wished to record TV programs without paying for a DVR like TiVo or ReplayTV or wanted to do so without spending the cash for an extra computer (e.g. to run MythTV or Freevo)? The nslu2-linux project is getting very interesting with some of its cool peripherals projects. The Linksys NSLU2 is essentially a network storage device adapter to plugin external drives (USB) and then allows you to use these drives via the network. Originally it was a device with a built-in proprietary filesystem for storing files on the device. But since the adapter itself ran Linux, hackers were easily able to fix that “bug” and were changing the firmware to allow other file storage systems to work. This is possible because the NSLU2 is essentially a standalone embedded computer. Since it is a computer, the hacking community is continuuing development to produce functionality that is more reminiscent of a computer rather than just a network device like a router or NAT device. In one particularly interesting project, it can be made to control devices such as the USB version of the Hauppauge WinTVPVR, which is a device that will plug to your cable TV and allow video to be recorded to your computer. Hence, once this project matures even further, you could have the NSLU2, WinTVPVR, and an external drive tucked away in some media closet, quietly recording your TV programs and remotely access them via any computer you wish in your network at any time. Cool huh?

Google and Open Source, the Real Story

In the future, existing Google programs, like the Google Toolbar, Google Talk and Google Desktop may be made open source.

Although the operative word is may, if Google does not release their tools open-source, FOSS proponents will likely pick up the ball and release even rudimentary competitive tools. Of the programs listed above, Google Desktop, is by far the most desirable with few competitors filling the void. However, it presumably is the most difficult to have released as open-source, since it may provide glimpses into Google’s bread-n-butter search algorithm. We wonder if Google is working on determining how to release it open-source while at the same time obscuring its search methods.

ARCHOS 2-Tone 40GB Mobile Digital Video Recorder Model AV 700 - Retail at Newegg.com. Although Apple’s release of its iPod video will probably trump just about every portable video device to come, let’s not forget that a number of other companies had already ventured into portable video, namely Archos with its AV models or their PMA (personal media assistants) that actually run Linux (Trolltech’s Qtopia, like that from the Sharp Zaurus devices). If you’re looking for portable video devices that pack a little more punch — i.e. portable recording ability to record off cable, satellite, dvd, etc. — then the Archos line is what you should look into. There is an option to add a camera as well. Their devices are the Swiss-army knives of portable media. You can listen to mp3s, watch MPG4s and even have the capability to transfer data via USB from other USB devices such as cameras and other MP3 players! The cost of the AV700 model is more than that of Apple’s low end models but not obscenely higher. Paying the premium is worth it for you power hungry users.

Apple - iPod. Although this news has nothing to do with Linux, we thought it would be interesting to discuss how Apple’s release of the new iPod may actually be helpful for Linuxers. As video permeates even deeper into our tech culture, the tools to record and edit video on Linux will only get better for it. With the advent of Google video and now the hardware player, Apple’s iPod video, we may be witnessing the emergence of two technologies coming together to perpetuate the growth of portable video and video-on-demand. Sure Apple has iTunes and will probably be rolling out more video in this service for video-philes, but for those of us using Linux, there will be other alternatives like Google video (once downloading the actual files is allowed and the bandwidth issues solved).

Although Adam Curry was so adamant that Apple was not going to release an iPod video unit (listen to his podcast) for fear of cannabilizing sales of the newly released nano, video was unquestionably the next step. Linux currently has great audio editors (see audacity) and video editing is beginning to show healthy interests and activities (see cinelerra and kino). The next best thing is to get iTunes running natively in Linux (without the messy wine installation) and we can have one killer of an OS with all the trimmings. Sure, Mac OS X is a great OS that does it already, but for now, give us our Linux.

Podcast fever is here to stay. With the increase in popularity of podcasts due to satellite radio and iTunes broadcasting and listing them respectively, linux users are never short of cool tools for automating feed downloads. Our favorite, and probably the geekiest, is using cron and bashpodder to harvest the new recordings. Check bashpodder out at: BashPodder - the best podcatcher.

Installation is fairly simple. Obviously, you need to be familiar with the commandline. Copy the file “bashpodder.shell” to your /etc/cron.daily directory (at least that’s the directory in a standard Debian box). Rename bashpodder.shell to bashpodder (not necessary, but we wanted to keep consistent with the cron.daily files already there). Make it executable with “chmod 755 bashpodder”.

All the rss feeds that refer to the podcasts that you want to download are listed in the file bp.conf. Use a text editor to remove or add the URLs referring to the rss/xml files of interest.

If left alone, bashpodder will create dated directories in /etc/cron.daily with the mp3 files in them. If you don’t want this, then obviously you’ll need to edit bashpodder. In your favorite text editor, change the line:

datadir=$(date +%Y-%m-%d)

to

datadir=/home/podcasts/$(date +%Y-%m-%d)

or change /home/podcasts/ to wherever you want the files to exist. bashpodder will still create directories labeled with the date that it downloaded the files.

Be aware that the first time bashpodder runs, it WILL DOWNLOAD ALL THE FILES it has not done so previously. That means that if the rss/xml feed lists ALL its previous podcasts in its archive, then it will download every single one. Needless to say that this is quite time consuming (as well as bandwidth hogging). The podcasts that it has already downloaded will be marked in the podcast.log file, which serves as the log it checks before and after downloading.

You could create a podcast.log text file to begin with and put in the URLs pointing to the physical mp3 files in the enclosure tags, if you prefer that bashpodder not download those files.

Kat. Love Google Desktop? Wished there was something like it for Linux? Kat may the application you were looking for. It’ll index a slew of filetypes, including openoffice files and pdf.

Good Linux help is a dime-a-dozen; or in this case, it’s about $165-a-dozen. Critical Shortage of Linux Talent Slowing Adoption. If you got the skills, try advertising it a bit, see if anyone will bite–it’ll only make it better for all of us in the long run. More users of Linux will only mean more work for us in the future, which is a good thing.

Gtk1Fonts - Ubuntu Wiki. This is a very simple trick to change the menu font in Gtk applications like XMMS. One step not mentioned here is that you may need to run the application gnome-settings-daemon.

Bug 19950 - xrdb not called, every app must read .Xdefaults. I completely sympathize with those who are fed up with linux just because of difficulties in minor tweaks. In other words, sometimes simple solutions take so long to discover and implement. Case in point: I wanted to customize my Xemacs on startup and was putting the tweaks in a file called .Xdefaults in the home directory. To load the customizations, I needed to run xrdb -load ~/.Xdefaults, which was added into a file called .xsession. Well, .xsession was supposed to be an executable script file that was loaded on login, but never did. Googling a little longer (days later, on and off), I come to find out that .Xdefaults is deprecated and was replaced by a file called .Xresources (see link above and scroll all the way down). Days like this makes you want to throw the box out the window.

I also submit evidence number 2: I wanted to change the default Xprinter (that Mozilla and Firefox uses for printing). For whatever reason, the default printer listed in CUPS was the default printer for Xprint. A simple export XPRINTER=defaultprintername@:64 should have worked when placed in either .xsession, .bashrc, or .bash_profile, right? No, it didn’t. It turns out the best place to put that code is in the system’s Xsession directory. Editing /etc/X11/Xsession.d/92xprint-xpserverlist to include the export variable finally did the trick (see http://lists.debian.org/debian-user/2004/06/msg00989.html). If only it was easier to discover solutions to these annoying little problems that reduce productivity. Seriously though, it should be obvious that the default Xprinter should always be set to the default CUPS printer.