opensource.com

Learning is based on the open exchange of ideas and experiences. By sharing, testing, and practicing what we've learned with others, we're able to develop in our lives and careers. It follows that openness is the ideal state for any successful learning organization. 

I have a printer in my office, but sometimes I work on my laptop in another room of the house. This isn't a problem for me for two reasons. First of all, I rarely print anything on paper and have gone months without using the printer. Secondly, though, I've set the printer to be shared over my home network, so I can send files to print from anywhere in the house. I didn't need any special equipment for this setup. It's accomplished with just my usual Linux computer and the Common Unix Printing System (CUPS).

In my last article, I gave a brief introduction to using the ncurses library to write text-mode interactive applications in C. With ncurses, we can control where and how text gets displayed on the terminal.

Most Linux utilities just scroll text from the bottom of the screen. But what if you wanted to position text on the screen, such as for a game or a data display? That's where ncurses comes in.

A recent article provided an introduction to parsing command-line options in Java. Because I really like Groovy, and because Groovy is well suited for scripting, and because it's fun to compare Java and Groovy solutions, I decided to paraphrase Seth's article, but using Groovy.

Every so often, I need to do some calculations related to dates. A few days ago, a colleague asked me to set up a new project definition in our (open source, of course!) project management system. This project is to start on the 1st of August and finish on the 31st of December. The service to be provided is budgeted at 10 hours per week.

So, yeah, I had to figure out how many weeks between 2021-08-01 and 2021-12-31 inclusive.

This is the perfect sort of problem to solve with a tiny Groovy script.

The Linux kernel is turning 30 this year! If you're like us, that's a big deal and we are celebrating Linux this week with a couple of special posts.

Today we start with a roundup of responses from around the community answering "What Linux kernel module can you not live without? And, why?" Let's hear what these 10 enthusiasts have to say.

I guess some kernel developers will run away screaming when they hear my answer. Still, I list here two of the most controversial modules:

The Linux kernel is turning 30 this year. That's three decades of pioneering open source software, enabling users to run free software, to learn from the applications they're running, and to share what they've learned with friends. It's argued that without the Linux kernel, the luxuries of open culture and free software we enjoy today may not have surfaced when they have. It's highly improbable that the parts of Apple and Microsoft and Google that are open would be open at all without Linux as the catalyst.

In the first part of my review of Michele J. Gelfand's book, Rule Makers, Rule Breakers, I explained the author's argument about the ways social norms impact organizational cultures. In this part, I'll explore more deeply the ways understanding social norms can help leaders build open organizations.

Open source made it into a lot of news headlines last month. Read on to learn about some of the major advances.

Modernizing and transforming legacy applications is a challenging activity that involves several tasks. One of the key tasks is validating that the modernized application preserves the functionality of the legacy application. Unfortunately, this can be tedious and hard to perform. Legacy applications often do not have automated test cases, or, if available, test coverage might be inadequate, both in general and specifically for covering modernization-related changes. A poorly maintained test suite might also contain many obsolete tests (accumulated over time as the application evolved).

The negative impact of poorly run meetings is huge. So leaders face a challenge: how do we turn poorly run meetings—which have a negative impact on team creativity, success, and even cause stress and anxiety—to meetings with positive outcomes? But to make the situation even tougher, we now find most meetings are being held remotely, online, where attendees' cameras are off and you're likely staring at a green dot at the top of your screen.

Terminal commands usually have options or switches, which you can use to modify how the command does what it does. Options are included in the POSIX specification for command-line interfaces.

An impedance mismatch in software architecture happens when there's a set of conceptual and technical difficulties between two components. It's actually a term borrowed from electrical engineering, where the impedance of electrical input and output must match for the circuit to work.

The iPhone and iPad aren't by any means open source, but they're popular devices. Many people who own an iOS device also happen to use a lot of open source, including Linux. Users of Windows and macOS can communicate with an iOS device by using software provided by Apple, but Apple doesn't support Linux users. Open source programmers came to the rescue back in 2007 (just a year after the iPhone's release) with Libimobiledevice (then called libiphone), a cross-platform solution for communicating with iOS.

Let's say you were writing a chess game in C. One way to track the pieces on the board is by defining a structure that defines each possible piece on the board, and its color, so every square contains an element from that structure. For example, you might have a structure that looks like this:

Even though it's the future now and we're all supposed to be using e-ink and AR, there are still times when a printer is useful. Printer manufacturers have yet to standardize how their peripherals communicate with computers, so there's a necessary maze of printer drivers out there, regardless of what platform you're on. The IEEE-ISTO Printer Working Group (PWG) and the OpenPrinting.org site are working tirelessly to make printing as easy as possible, though. Today, many printers are autodetected with no interaction from the user.

The stat command, included in the GNU coreutils package, provides a variety of metadata, including file size, inode location, access permissions and SELinux context, and creation and modification times, about files and filesystems. It's a convenient way to gather information that you usually need several different commands to acquire.

On Linux, you probably already have the stat command installed because it's part of a core utility package that's generally bundled with Linux distributions by default.

When someone is new to contributing to open source, the best place to start is often beginner-friendly bugs and issues. But before they can do that, they have to be able to find those kinds of issues. As a member of an open source project, there's a lot you can do to help beginners find a way to contribute. 

Computer users tend to amass a lot of data over the years, whether it's important personal projects, digital photos, videos, music, or code repositories. While hard drives tend to be pretty big these days, sometimes you have to step back and take stock of what you're actually storing on your drives.