The Zero Room

This development makes me think of all those years reading HOWTOs and editing modelines and want to weep tears of joy:

I love the occasional Top 25 Linux Commands articles that come along. For one thing, it gives me another opportunity to be tiresomely pedantic and say they are not "Linux commands", but bash "builtin" commands, or standalone programs. I also invariably find one thing I never knew about, or had forgotten. In this case it was "history", a bash builtin that is faster to type than "cat ~/.bash_history".

Applications are now open for Google's [Northern] Summer of Code. If you are currently a student with aspirations to becoming a master programmer, this is a fantastic opportunity to contribute to an established free software project with guidance from some of the top people in free software. There are 135 mentor organisations participating this year, including projects like Debian, GNOME, KDE, Mozilla, Samba, and on and on. So no matter where your interests lie, you will probably find a project you'll want to work on.

Last year the SoC contributions to Drupal, the software my day job is built around, really helped push development of some major features. And many of the mentors from Drupal in 2006 were themselves student participants in 2005, so this is really a serious stepping stone to getting a career in free software development off the ground.

Oh, and Google pays you for your work! Beats stacking shelves in the supermarket to make ends meet. There are a lot of things you can criticise Google for, but on the strength of this program alone, they can justifiably claim to be not yet wholly evil.

Linux.com has reviewed the new releases from Mandriva and Ubuntu, both generally favourably. Mandriva's package management system(s) still appear to be letting it down, and Ubuntu "Edgy" disappoints for it's lack of "edginess". If you've used either, leave your impressions in the comments below.

Linux Edge looks at a very early and not-ready-for-prime-time version of the Hula Mail and Calendar Server, or at least it's web interface. Nat Friedman of Novell launched this project over a year ago, touting it as the mail and calendar server people will actually enjoy using.