MythTV and XBMC can turn your Linux system into a video playback device with all the options you've ever dreamed of.

The Linux desktop is a place to work and a place to play. People fortunate enough to have time to play have many distractions to amuse them. Audio fun abounds with programs like Amarok and Rhythmbox. Video enthusiasts will find a plethora of options, from standalone video players (like MPlayer, Xine and VLC) to comprehensive multimedia environments (like Freevo and Moovida). Being a video enthusiast, I find myself drawn to two of the most popular open-source entertainment tools: MythTV and XBMC.

Read the full thing at http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/10713

Here you go, munchkins. Judge Ted Stewart has ruled for Novell and against SCO. Novell's claim for declaratory judgment is granted; SCO's claims for specific performance and breach of the implied covenant of good fair and fair dealings are denied. Also SCO's motion for judgment as a matter of law or for a new trial: denied. Novell is entitled to waive, at its sole discretion, claims against IBM, Sequent and other SVRX licensees.

CASE CLOSED!

Read the full thing at http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20100610161411160

Just a quick update. I’ve released ver sion 0.4.0 of Lightspark, a free flash player implementation. This release was focused on improving stability, so all the crashes found by many testers should be fixed now. Thanks a lot for testing, several issues were related to particular graphics hardware and I would have never found them with out your collabortion. Please keep testing and reporting any issue.

Read the full thing at http://allievi.sssup.it/techblog/?p=345

One of my pet peeves is Linux installers for proprietary software requiring root permissions.

Last time, Adobe got me into rant mode by requiring root not only to install the Adobe Air runtime, but to install any Adobe Air based application as well. This time it's Abbyy – makers of the famous Finereader OCR software.

Read the full thing at http://www.splitbrain.org/blog/2010-05/17-please_dont_port_philosophy_with_code

Monitoring and analyzing performance is an important task for any sysadmin. Disk I/O bottlenecks can bring applications to a crawl. What is an IOP? Should I use SATA, SAS, or FC? How many spindles do I need? What RAID level should I use? Is my system read or write heavy? These are common questions for anyone embarking on an disk I/O analysis quest. Obligatory disclaimer: I do not consider myself an expert in storage or anything for that mater. This is just how I have done I/O analysis in the past. I welcome additions and corrections. I believe it’s also important to note that this analysis is geared toward random operations than sequential read/write workloads.

Read the full thing at http://www.cmdln.org/2010/04/22/analyzing-io-performance-in-linux/

After a long delay, eComStation 2.0 GA will finally become reality. It will be released in time to be presented at the Warpstock Europe 2010 event which is held in Trier, Germany, from May 14 to 16.

We consider eComStation 2.0 to be the biggest overhaul of OS/2 so far. Together with a team of both hired and volunteer developers, we have extended the functionality, removed limitations, updated hardware support as far as possible, and resolved close to 1000 issues that had been reported since the release of eComStation 1.2R. The new eComStation 2.0 GA is the result of several years of combined efforts and investments.

Read the full thing at the longest URL known to mankind....

Dive Into Python is one of the worst books for learning Python and it must die. I've had too many potential programmers find this book and get tripped up by its horrible design decisions that I'm declaring war. The book is weird, uses antiquated technology, has horrible examples, and Mark Pilgrim is too much of a neckbeard ass to listen to anyone about it:

Read the full thing at http://oppugn.us/posts/1272050135.html

The MeeGo community has "opened the repositories" on early code for the netbook-oriented Linux platform, which combines Intel's Moblin and Nokia's Maemo. Images are available for the MeeGo distribution infrastructure and OS base "from the Linux kernel to the OS infrastructure up to the middleware layer."

Read the full thing at http://www.desktoplinux.com/news/NS8394200105.html

Exscript is a Python module and template processor for automating Telnet or SSH sessions. Exscript supports a wide range of features, such as parallelization, AAA authentication methods, TACACS, and a very simple template language. Please refer to the project page for updated documentation (see the links at the bottom of this announcement).

The consensus among new Unix and Linux users seems to be that sudo is more secure than using the root account, because it requires you type your password to perform potentially harmful actions. In reality, a compromised user account, which is no big deal normally, is instantly root in most setups. This sudo thinking is flawed, but sudo is actually useful for what’s it was designed for.

Read the full thing at http://www.longitudetech.com/blog/linux-unix/the-perils-of-sudo-with-user-passwords/