When writing any beginner's Linux book, invariably the topic of DVD playback comes up, and I always wrestle with what to tell new Linux users about the convoluted legal mess that watching a DVD on a Linux machine has become.

Android is too restricted and closed and therein lies Palm's potential to make a comeback, by essentially learning from OpenMoko

If you work in an educational or training environment where you instruct users on the ins and outs of using computers, or you need to be able to (for whatever reason) control the PC user's use of a machine, the tools available are often quite expensive or quite difficult to use. Neither is the case in the Linux environment, where tools like iTalc are available.

VLC Media Player 1.1.0 Pre 2 was released a few days ago and today I finally had some time to package it and upload it to the WebUpd8 PPA. Ubuntu 10.04 will be released in a few days but unfortunately VLC 1.1.0 won't be officially available until Ubuntu 10.10 so installing it from a PPA (or compiling it yourself) is the only way to use the latest VLC Media Player in Ubuntu.

This tutorial describes how to scan emails for image spam with FuzzyOCR on an Ubuntu 9.10 server. FuzzyOCR is a plugin for SpamAssassin which is aimed at unsolicited bulk mail containing images as the main content carrier. Using different methods, it analyzes the content and properties of images to distinguish between normal mails (ham) and spam mails.

The rise of the NoSQL movement is also highly relevant in the context of open source software, however, especially in relation to two key issues related to open source software.

While I firmly believe that Android will challenge in the enterprise soon, it's just not happening now. The security and configuration features that IT departments demand simply aren't ready yet.