During the early years of GeekTimeLinux, Dave had several friends who helped write for the web site. Doing that again would be the way to keep the site alive and fulfill its’ original mission, which was to promote Linux as an operating system and share information with new users to make it easier to use and promote. If you have ideas along that topic, post here as a comment and I will eventually work through them and contact you if it seems like a viable option.

I know Dave would like to have this site carry on and with help, we can get it back to being more of what he had in mind in the early days.

The Software Freedom Law Center (SFLC) said it has filed suit against two companies for allegedly violating the General Public License, which covers usage of Linux and thousands of other free and open-source products. The suits are the second and third time that the nonprofit foundation has filed suit, signaling

If you’re both a Gmail junkie and Ubuntu user, you might have set up Thunderbird as your ultimate IMAP client. But non-Thunderbird users and those who prefer web emailing don’t have to suffer through unnecessary clicks, thanks to a post at the CAL design NZ How-To Geek blog. By downloading and running a quick terminal command on a script file, you can have all email links on the web and elsewhere open up a Gmail composing window (assuming you’re logged into Gmail). This trick should also work in any other Linux distro that lets you set preferred applications, and Windows and Mac users can still use Gmail notifier to get the same effect.

The Birmingham News: “‘Over 15,000 children will be receiving their own personal laptops,’ said John Katopodis, a longtime Langford friend who is negotiating with the One Laptop Per Child foundation on Langford’s behalf…”

Linux-Watch: “Red Hat may be not be a super-computer company, but with its just-announced partnership with Platform Computing, it is ready to deliver the enterprise-grade high-performance computing goods…”

Trevor’s Trinkets: “Seven years ago the IT tabloids were full of the question, ‘when will Linux take over the desktop…?’”

How many of you still stick with the same default wallpaper that was there when your Linux was installed? Come on! Don’t be shy, hold up your hands. Hmmm, that’s far too many.

Colin Walters of Red Hat chaired a FOSSCamp session about Hotwire, a unique and innovative graphical shell environment designed to improve the command-line user experience.

Former Linux Journal editor Nicholas Petreley argues that the open-source operating system will break through big time on the client side, especially if pre-installs increase and the KDE graphical environment is adopted.

An effective war against spam requires that open source collaborate with the proprietary world.

That’s the view Vipul Ved Prakesh (right), creator of Vipul’s Razor, and Justin Mason of the Apache Foundation, project committee member for Spam Assassin.

I talked to both men about both this and Prakesh’s day job as founder and chief scientist for Cloudmark.

Cloudmark’s niche in the anti-spam market lies with small corporations and ISPs, said product director Dave Champine.  “We came up with a plug-in API, and I’m happy to see Cloudmark’s commercial product running on top of the Spam Assassin platform.”

Still, the spam wars are an arms race. Increasingly consumers are turning to Web-based systems like GMail and dumping their Outlook Express addresses, mainly due to false positives which keep vital mail from getting through.

“You have a perfect storm brewing,” said Mason, spam volumes growing 100% per year. Even if more bits are running through peer-to-peer protocols, the sheer number of messages makes spam the biggest challenge faced by Internet routers.

“The processing power to identify these new sophisticated approaches, and fundamentally the storage….that impact is intense,” said Mason. The solution, added Prakesh, is to “create a closed loop between the user and the filter,” making each filter unique to reduce false positives.

“Infrastructures have upgraded quite a bit in the last year and we’ll soon start to see an impact from that,” Prakesh insisted.

But the question remains, can even this collaboration save small enterprises from the spam flood?

What do you think?

Explore new ways to record UNIX logins and other system activities in a number of different logs, and take advantage of this information to monitor user usage. This can be helpful from a number of perspectives, either to use for chargeback reporting or just to get an idea of how busy and active individual users are on the system to help when planning and allocating resources.

The Yahoo user interface (YUI) library allows you to easily develop cool web tricks with less code. Discover how you can create a faux lightbox, create transition effects on page elements, add widgets to your pages, and easily make AJAX requests using a single JavaScript library set.

Using open source tools for developing grid applications opens up a wealth of possibilities. The first is a very rapid development process, especially if you take advantage of script languages like Perl or Python and deployment environments like Apache. There is also a wealth of examples available that can help you. Examine the advantages and disadvantages of developing a grid solution using open source technology.

PC Perspective posted a review on the Asus Eee PC 701, a super small and light notebook that uses a solid-state hard drive and a custom Linux operating system

When it comes to file systems, Linux is the Swiss Army knife of operating systems. Linux supports a large number of file systems, from journaling to clustering to cryptographic. Linux is a wonderful platform for using standard and more exotic file systems and also for developing file systems. This article explores the virtual file system (VFS) — sometimes called the virtual filesystem switch — in the Linux kernel and then reviews some of the major structures that tie file systems together.