Mutt is a great mail client, in large part because it is extremely customizable. You can tweak Mutt’s behavior and have it do tricks that are nearly impossible to do with other mail clients – but it can be a bit daunting to get started with. Let’s take Mutt on a short trip to mail client obedience school and see how easy it can be to make Mutt handle mail just the way you want it to.
Just reading Mark Shuttleworth’s response to Matt Zimmerman’s summation of the community’s expectations of the Ubuntu Dapper Drake 6.06 LTS release. One thing stuck out about Zimmerman’s comments, that’s the complaint that users still have to use the command line for some tasks. I know, the Holy Grail for a lot of users is to be able to pointy click their way through life, and that’s just a bar that Linux will be measured by no matter what, but I find it odd that so many users seem to have such a deep fear of text. Or is it the command line that they fear?
Okay, so I read on Slashdot (is a link really necessary?) that Microsoft has put up a program called FlexWiki under an Open Source license… a real OSI-approved license, not just some evil license that they’re calling Open Source. Well, you don’t see that every day, so I head over to the site to check it out. Now, if you’re not familiar with Wikis the concept is that (by default) anyone can edit them....
This month, I’m going to wrap up discussion of network troubleshooting tools. So far, I’ve covered netstat, tcpdump, and ngrep and sniff. This month, I’ll discuss Ethereal, a tool for browsing network traffic interactively and analyzing network traffic. To put it more emphatically, Ethereal is the all-singing, all-dancing, packet-inspecting tool that all admins should have in their software toolboxes. Ethereal is capable of capturing packets for analysis or reading saved packet captures in a number of common formats....
This month, I’ll discuss cdargs, a tool that simplifies using the command line. cdargs is a handy little utility that provides browsing and bookmarks for cd. Installing and using cdargs I just recently dicovered cdargs, but it’s already proved to be a great application and big time-saver. It’s also easy to set up — just grab the source tarball and unpack it. Run configure ; make then su to root and run make install-strip....
Change can be scary, especially for those who have grown accustomed to the status quo over a period of several years. And in the programming world, sweeping change is brewing. Perl 6 is a fairly ambitious redesign of both the Perl language and the Perl interpreter, so Perl 5 developers may be a bit nervous about the prospect of drastic changes, which NewsFactor explored in Part 1 of this story. But Allison Randal, one of the Perl 6 design team members, told NewsFactor that programmers have little to worry about....
Perl is somewhat unique among programming languages, largely because its inventor, Larry Wall, wanted his creation to resemble a natural language. For the most part, he has succeeded; Perl has evolved quite like a natural language since its inception in 1987, adapting to changing circumstances and a growing developer community. However, unlike with a natural language, Wall has always been the primary force behind Perl’s design and revisions. Now, Wall is taking another step closer to his ideal....
Is mainstream acceptance for Open Source a " nuclear winter" for the software industry? I certainly hope so. Some argue that Open Source and Free Software are best left as a niche market, and that widespread acceptance of software without license fees will harm the economy. Certainly, widespread adoption of Linux, OpenOffice and other freely available software would be harmful to the bottom line of certain companies, but would it be harmful to the economy overall?...