In the previous parts of this series writing a simple program to see if a port is available was covered, in this the final text the last three points from the previous text are discussed: migrate the pre-check into its own module entirely, add in more descriptive error handling locally and for the connection errors and lastly any last thoughts about the program itself and where it could go.

Here we are not long after the release of many different operating systems and hardware platforms. What an exciting time in the industry! With Google launching phones, Apple confirming a tablet, Oracle buying Sun, Microsoft releasing Windows 7 and talk of a new gaming device, and companies like Novel and Red Hat standing back to see what happens. This is certainly a contentious atmosphere.

After tinkering with the Thinkpad 560e for a while and learning some of the eccentricities of it, I swapped the 64Mb memory stick. With a total of 80Mb to work with, the playing field changes instantaneously.

The Ubuntu development community announced today the availability of Ubuntu 10.04 alpha 2, a new prerelease of the next major version of the Ubuntu Linux distribution. This alpha is the first Ubuntu release to completely omit HAL, a Linux hardware abstraction layer that is being deprecated in favor of DeviceKit.

These test profiles seem irrelevant for free system distributions in that they use some non-free software in order to make their benchmarks "powerful". Phoronix Test Suite is free software: i think it'd be useful to do these benchmarks with software freedom involved...

Molly-Guard is a command line script which prevents you from accidentally shutting down or rebooting your Ubuntu system.

We often read (including in the book Advanced Bash-Scripting Guide by Mendel Cooper) that if we pass variable names as parameters to functions, they will be treated as string literals and cannot be dereferenced (ie the value is not available). But this is not so...

Below are 5 music players for the Linux platform (Ubuntu being my base) you probably did not know about.