Last year, I wrote about our school district's implementation of LTSP. In the article, I pointed out the significant limitations a thin client environment gives you. While I don't think my article was the reason the issues were addressed, less than a year later just about every limitation I highlighted has been eradicated.

Its not breaking news, since it happened in March, but Wireshark 1.0 has been released. The news, for me at least, was that Wireshark even existed, never heard of it before. Somebody mentioned it recently when we were trying to diagnose a networking problem.

If somebody accidentally drops a critical table in MySQL, the application no longer works. The solution to this problem is to utilize the (open source) Zmanda Recovery Manager.

This week's "Linux Product Insider" features Trolltech's Qt 4.4, Matthew MacDonald's Your Brain: The Missing Manual, the Embedded Linux Track at LinuxWorld, AdRem's NetCrunch 5, MindTouch's Deki Wiki v8.05 and REAL Software's REALbasic 2008 Release 2

One of the items on the Geek Ranch agenda is a weather station. While we don't have one yet, we have learned a bit about weather stations and Linux.

First, why don't we have one? Well, there is no electricity at the Geek Ranch site yet for starters. But, more important, there is no Internet connection. So, let's just call this research.

When I demonstrate software for Linux Journal, I tend to use Ubuntu as my operating system. The reason is simply because Ubuntu is extremely popular, but it begs the question, should the Linux community standardize on a single distribution? Let's look at some of the pros and cons:

Advantages of a Single Linux Distro

This week's "Linux Product Insider" features SkyWayUSA's Rural Hi-speed Internet, Apress' MINDSTORMS NXT book, Curl Nitro, Open-Source Java and Linux, SugarCRM 5.1 Beta and Plat'Home's OpenMicroServer.

If you like the latest and greatest version of everything and you use an RPM based system you probably want to learn how to create RPMs. You don't have to, you can just download the latest source and compile and install it in /usr/local. This of course leaves your system in a state where your RPM database does not accurately reflect what is installed on your system. Again, this will work, but building RPMs isn't (usually at least) that difficult.