The Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP), which allows you to access and search a directory (another name for a specialized database or data repository that stores typed information about objects), is becoming a common component in Linux environments. If you’re looking for a Linux option to search a directory with LDAP, check out Luma.

When you’re programming a shell script, you often only need the current directory name, not the whole path that the pwd command returns. Here are four ways you can extract only the current directory.

Integrated Neurology Service SINEURO’s office, located in São Paulo,
Brazil, migrated from various versions of Windows (from 98 to XP) on a network
of five computers with eight nonskilled computer users. I was the consultant in
charge, and I spent no money on new hardware. Thank to the Linux Terminal Server Project (LTSP), hardware that’s too old for new
versions of Windows runs Linux applications just fine over a network from a server.

Every Web site has flaws, including ours. And after every major change in a large-scale site, such as the one we made several months ago, when we not only did a major redesign but started using the (open source) Xaraya content management system, problems always crop up. Here’s your chance to let us know what you think needs changing on the site, and why.

When you listen to digital music, your software or hardware player usually shows information about the current song, which it gets from MP3 tags or Ogg Vorbis comments. Most ripping software supports acquiring this metadata from the CDDB or FreeDB services based on a CD’s disc ID. But you can also can fill in and edit metadata with tools such as EasyTag and Picard.

If you’re using TiddlyWiki as your note-taking tool, you ought to give TiddlySnip a try. The idea behind this Firefox extension is simple: it allows you to add the currently viewed Web page or selected text snippet to your TiddlyWiki as a new tiddler. But TiddlySnip adds a few clever twists to this basic idea, which turn the Firefox/TiddlyWiki combo into a powerful and extremely useful tool.

Twice in recent weeks open source projects have surprised me with their lack of openness. In both cases, developers acted or spoke out in such a way as to intentionally push other developers away from their work.

Thanks to a founding member of Free Geek Vancouver, the Green Party of Canada has quietly become the first major political party in Canada to make support for free and open source software (FOSS) part of its election platform. Like officials in the Green Party of England and Wales, deputy leader Adriane Carr sees the move as compatible with basic Green ideas, but IT consultant Neil Adair also points out the move serves the practical purpose of helping the party match the technical resources of more established parties.

I felt bad for Linux vendors after reading Peter Galli’s eWeek article, which claims that Linux server sales on X86 hardware have run into a stone wall, going from a 53 percent growth rate to four percent decline over the past six quarters — until I did a little research that easily refuted that claim.