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Mitch Kapor, for those of you young'uns who don't know, was the designer of Lotus 1-2-3, the killer app that made the IBM PC a must-have, and he's currently leading development of Chandler, a next-gen PIM that should really shake things up once it finally gets released. For our purposes today, however, I want to draw attention to the course that Mitch is teaching at UC-Berkeley on open source. Titled "Open Source Development and Distribution of Digital Information: Technical, Economic, Social, and Legal Perspectives", you can read the entire syllabus (on a wiki, natch) & follow all the links to the class readings. As an adjunct professor at Washington University in St. Louis who has toyed with the idea of proposing a course on open source, this is certainly a great resource; for those of you just interested in the open source movement as a whole, this is a great compendium of readings that'll keep you busy for a while.

This is part 3 of a 4-part series on uploading photos to Flickr from your Linux box (part 1 looked at jUploadr, & part 2 touched on Digikam). I'm assuming you already know what Flickr is and you have a Flickr account, and now you want to bulk upload photos to Flickr from your Linux box. In my case, I'm using Kubuntu, but the software I cover should work for you regardless of distro.

Our software for today is the quickly-increasing-in-popularity F-Spot. Of course, it's also a bit controversial, seeing as it's built with Mono, but we can ignore that today. I wrote a column for Linux Magazine about F-Spot a while ago, while it was still pretty immature, but it's gotten better. If you use GNOME, then you're probably using F-Spot; if you use KDE, you're probably using Digikam, which we covered yesterday, as both programs are the premier photo management apps for their respective desktop environments (each will run, however, in the other's desktop environment, so you can use F-Spot on KDE, for instance).

Once F-Spot is open, select the pix you want to publish to the Web, and then go to File > Export > Export to Flickr.

As with the other proggies, you have to authorize the app with Flickr. Beyond that, you can set permissions for viewing, resize the images, remove metadata (though why you'd want to do that is beyond me), and - finally! - export your tags from F-Spot to Flickr. This is great, because tagging is key to Flickr's awesomeness, and F-Spot's ability to manage tags is MUCH MUCH MUCH improved from where it used to be, to the point that it's actually pretty easy to tag pix in F-Spot. Just make sure that the tags you're using in F-Spot are in fact the tags you want to use on Flickr!

F-Spot is another photo management tool, so it may be overkill for those interested in a simple, does-one-thing-only tool to upload pix to Flickr. But it's a very good photo management tool - in many ways better than Digikam - so it might be a better choice for many folks.

Tune in tomorrow for our last app!

This is part 2 of a 4-part series on uploading photos to Flickr from your Linux box (see part 1, which covered jUploadr). I'm assuming you already know what Flickr is and you have a Flickr account, and now you want to bulk upload photos to Flickr from your Linux box. In my case, I'm using Kubuntu, but the software I cover should work for you regardless of distro.

Today let's take a look at Digikam, a popular KDE photo management tool that also uploads your pix to Flickr. I'm not gonna cover Digikam itself, as there are plenty of reviews of that program available on the InterWeb; instead, I'm just going to focus on Digikam's ability to interact with Flickr.

Open up Digikam, and then go to Album > Export to Flickr.

(The first time you try to Export to Flickr, you have to authorize with Flickr, just like all the other apps we're looking at here. Do that & then come back here.) Immediately after selecting Export, you're presented with the Flickr Export window, which gives you a couple of options for the photos you've selected.

First of all, press the Add Photos button & then select the images you want to upload. You can add tags to the pix you're uploading, & set the privacy options, & resize the pix to a maximum dimension. That's about it. Make yer choices, & then press OK. Your pictures start to upload, & you're finished.

If you use Digikam anyway, this is a good way to upload your pix to Flickr. If you don't use Digikam, I wouldn't start using it just to get images into Flickr, as it's too heavy of an app for a small purpose. There's overhead to Digikam that ain't worth it if all you want is a Flickr tool.

Tune in tomorrow for our next app!

This is part 1 of a 4-part series on uploading photos to Flickr from your Linux box. I'm assuming you already know what Flickr is and you have a Flickr account, and now you want to bulk upload photos to Flickr from your Linux box. In my case, I'm using Kubuntu, but the software I cover should work for you regardless of distro. Our first app up to the plate is jUploadr.

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Let's be honest here: BSD is incredibly powerful, stable, and secure, but it's never been the first OS that enters folks' minds when you utter the word "desktop." There are some new ideas in the BSD world, however, and the people behind those new ideas are trying hard to expand BSD to more desktops. At LinuxWorld, the evidence for that is PC-BSD, a version of BSD designed to be easy to install and use. Utilizing a graphical installer based on the slick QT (the same toolkit used by the KDE desktop environment), this is about the most desktop-friendly release of BSD I've ever seen. Even the software installer is easy to use; in fact, it's quite Windows-like. Simply click on the app you want to install and a wizard opens up that looks 'n feels exactly like the typical Windows installer we've all used a gazillion times. Heck, there's even an uninstaller that's just as easy! What the heck is happening to BSD? Have aliens taken over the bodies of BSD developers? An easy-to-use desktop BSD? What will they think of next?

(I gotta tell you guys this one, though: there's still signs of the good ol' BSD attitude at LinuxWorld. When I asked a very knowledgeable and cool dude at the FreeBSD booth about these new efforts to get more folks using BSD, he jokingly said, "Actually, we don't give a f*** if you run BSD, we just want to make the best server OS out there." He quickly followed that up by saying that the new FreeBSD marketing team, about one year old, in fact does care quite a bit about users. But it's good to see signs of the old Unix 'tude still present and accounted for.)

This is Scott, reporting from LinuxWorld 2006 again. Last night was the exciting annual Golden Penguin Bowl, in which two teams - typically composed of members from competing companies - divide into the Nerds and the Geeks to answer trivia, playfully mock each other, and have a good time. Hosted as per usual by Samba developer Jeremy Allison, this year's GPB found Ubuntu as the Nerds facing off against SUSE as the Geeks (past years have seen Microsoft vs. Google, and Oracle vs. MySQL, for instance). Every year Jeremy dresses with a different theme, and this time he slowly bound on to the stage to the strains of 2001: A Space Odyssey's theme Also Sprach Zarathrustra while wearing a space suit. After introducing the teams, it was off. Which team would know more trivia about Linux, technology, and science fiction?

Before I give away the final results, let me present to you some of the questions, with the answers in white (just drag your mouse over each one to see the answer). How would you do? And keep in mind, the pressure is intense, with hundreds of LinuxWorld attendees watching.

What does SUSE stand for? (Amazingly, the SUSE team got this wrong, which the Ubuntu team got it!) Answer: Software- und System-Entwicklung.

The design for which processor has been released under the GPL? Answer: Sparc.

What is Codemonkey's favorite snack? Answer: Fritos.

What is the only non-English language every used in an ad appearing in Linux Journal? Answer: German (amazingly, the SUSE team got this one wrong too, which is incredibly ironic considering that the ad was for SUSE!)

And the grand finale: each team was given a box of giant Legos and told to build the longest free-standing arch that they could, with 500 points given per square Lego unit spanned.

So who won? Basically, Ubuntu blew SUSE out of the water (also my opinion when it comes to operating systems, but hey :) ). For most of the contest, Ubuntu was faaaar ahead of SUSE, but the final competition helped the SUSE folks pull a bit closer. However, they were still short. Final scores: Geeks/SUSE with 21,000 and Nerds/Ubuntu with 25,750. Nerds win!

I'm reporting in from LinuxWorld, letting the fine folks who read DLS know about the latest & greatest news from the Land of Free & Open Source Software. A few weeks ago, Apple made quite a stir with their announcements about their spiffy new Mac Pro and Xserves, as well as cool new updates to Mac OS X. Lost in all the hubbub, however, was an announcement by a great open source company that they are porting their software over from Linux to Mac OS X. Yes, Codeweavers, makers of the amazingly cool and useful CrossOver Office, are going to release betas of their software for Mac OS X later this month.

What's CrossOver Office, you ask? Linux users have been taking advantage of it for several years now. Basically, CrossOver Office is an easy-to-install, easy-to-use version of the WINE project, which basically fools Windows apps into thinking they're running on Windows. Why is this possibly better than Parallels Workstation, which lets you run Windows itself? Because with CrossOver, you don't need to open Windows; instead, you just click on the Word icon, or the IE icon, or the Outlook icon, and the program opens, just like a regular ol' Linux program. Can you smell the convenience? (Still want more info? Read the posts I made about CrossOver on the now-retired Open Source Weblog: Introduction to CrossOver Office in PC World, CrossOver version 5 released, & More on CrossOver ... and Win4Lin ... but please don't read Codeweavers' CrossOver Office support disappoints and apply it to the company today ... that issue was resolved to my satisfaction.)

Well now, ladies and germs, CrossOver is going to work on Apple machines that use the Intel processor. Want to run ONE Windows proggie but don't want to have to install Windows? Or need to run Outlook but don't wanna go through the hassle of setting up Parallels and then install Winders, being forced to reboot a gazillion times and then deal with the endless hassles of security? Or - and this is sooooooo cool, and it's coming up in the latest version of CrossOver - want to run Half-Life II or many other Windows-only games without requiring Windows? Then use CrossOver! It's a good company and a great product, and it just utterly fantastic that it's now going to be available to Mac users. Now that's great news!

Greetings, DLS readers. I'm reporting from LinuxWorld 2006, in cool & breezy San Francisco. Over the next few days I'll be letting you know about what's new, what's cool, and what's interesting at our annual PenguinCon.

Some of you have probably heard about Xandros Desktop, an attempt to create a Linux distro that's super easy to use and very friendly and inviting for those switching over from Windows. By and large, Xandros succeeds. I'll be honest: if you're a Linux power user, Xandros will quickly drive you absolutely nuts due to its limitations. But if you're looking for a distro easy enough for Grandma Jones or Uncle Larry to use, then Xandros may be just the thing. You can read more about Xandros' desktop offerings for the Home and Business on their web site.

That's the Desktop. What impressed me at LinuxWorld, however, is Xandros Server 1.0. The number tells you it's a new product, but since it's built on existing Xandros products, it's a bit more mature than you might expect. Basically, Xandros Server is a server OS for the small businesses that need a server on premises but really don't have anyone on staff with deep technical knowledge to administer it. With Xandros Server, it's really pretty simple to manage 24 different services - like DNS, Web, DHCP, and even Helix Streaming Server (check out the list in the screenshot) - using a nicely integrated Management Console that should be pretty familiar to anyone who's ever used Microsoft's MMC. If you happen to know enough to manually edit config files, go ahead; the Xandros Management Console will read the changes made to the configs with no problem, and won't blow away your changes. The cost? $449, which ain't bad and sure beats Microsoft on price, especially when you factor in that you don't need to buy any Client Access Licenses for each machine or user accessing the server, one of the oh-so-clever ways that MSFT extracts yet more cash from its customers.

If all this sounds interesting to you, check out the free 30-day trial. Xandros Server is just one more little bit of evidence I'm seeing at LinuxWorld that Linux is getting easier and easier for everyone to use, and that's exciting news. Stay tuned for more from LinuxWorld 2006 later today.