I’ve been a fan of David Allen’s “Getting Things Done” system for awhile, so seeing the folks over at TuxRadar publish an article on GTD apps for linux and rate them piqued my interest. I found some new apps that I hadn’t had any experience with before, but I think my modified system of using RememberTheMilk (RTM) still works best for me. I use the Google Calendar and GMail widgets so I see them every time I check my email. On my Linux desktop I have Tasque auto-launch and bring up my task lists so I see those every time I login. I also pay for the yearly RTM Pro membership so I can access my tasks on my freedom-hating iPhone. Using this combination, I am never disconnected from my list and that enables me to forget things alot less than I used to and feel like I’m alot more productive at work and at home.

Does anyone else have a favorite Linux GTD app/combination of apps that they use? Or maybe you prefer a different system for being productive?

• Amazon link for David Allen’s Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity

Jeff Layton from Linux Magazine just published “From ext3 to ext4: An Interview with Theodore Ts’o.” The interview goes over the design decisions of ext4, the progression from ext3 to ext4, discuss things like SSD optimization, and and Ted Ts’o even gives some performance tips in the last question of the interview. They do not touch on the recent ext4 delayed allocation bug or the recent kerfuffle on the kernel developers mailing list between Linus and Ted (one possibility for this may be that the interview was conducted before these events transpired). The interview isn’t too long, so go on over and give it a read.

Glyn Moody from Linux Journal just published an article titled “Building on Richard Stallman’s Greatest Achievement“. Glyn asserts that Mr. Stallman’s greatest achievement is the creation of the GNU General Public License (GPL) and I agree with him. Without Mr. Stallman’s great tools like emacs, GCC, and the numerous other parts of the GNU toolchain that he’s created many FLOSS  projects wouldn’t be around today. He is also the creator of the GNU project which encompasses the GNU system tools and the GNU kernel in an effort to create a complete Unix-like operating system comprised of free software.

Mr. Stallman’s creation of the GPL expressed his message of freedom to all developers and users. I do not agree with all of Mr. Stallman’s ideas, but I do agree with his idea of freedom. His license has helped create great communities of users that are able to freely exchange code and even more importantly IMHO, ideas.

Enough of my ranting, I recommend reading Glyn’s article and considering what you think Mr. Stallman’s greatest achievement to be.

Another week of linux distro releases means it time for the weekly distribution release roundup. Read on to see whats new this week.

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EDIT: corrected the potential amount of the acquisition from $6.1 billion to $6.5 billion

There’s been alot of discussion about IBM being in talks with Sun Microsystems about a $6.5 billion acquisition. Initially Sun’s stock (ticker: JAVA) shot up significantly while IBM’s stock (ticker: IBM) initially dropped a few points before recovering to only a small loss. While this may or may not be good for each company, I started to wonder what would happen to some of the projects that Sun manages, specifically MySQL but also ZFS, OpenSolaris and others.

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Earlier  this evening, Linus Torvalds announced the availability of the 2.6.29 version of the Linux kernel.

This version contains many changes including changing the mascot to Tuz the Tasmanian Devil in an effort to bring awareness to  and raise money for the plight of tasmanian devils in Australia during the 2009 linux.conf.au conference. Tasmanian devils are endangered and are currently afflicted with a form of communicable cancer.

Other major changes include the inclusion of the Btrfs filesystem. This filesystem is a “next-gen filesystem” that tries to “focus on fault tolerance, repair and easy administration”, but it is still in the development phase. Ext4 also received some updates and SquashFS, primarily used in embedded devices, also enters the mainline kernel. Another major addition is an 802.17 WiMax stack, eCryptfs filename encryption, and many updated and new hardware drivers.
As always new kernel versions can be downloaded from kernel.org and the full changelog can be found here.

The GNOME project announced last Thursdaythat they would be migrating to the git version control system on a post to the gnome-devel mailing list. This is another major project that announced a move to the version control system started by Linus Torvalds in 2005 as an alternative to BitKeeper.

Previously Perl, Ruby on Rails, YUI, Merb, DragonFly BSD, GPM, WINE, and X.org announced moves to using git as their version control system. The GNOME project had been using the Subversion version control system before they chose to switch.

Further information on the migration can be found here.

Time again for our weekly distro release roundup. There’s a lot of small and specialized distros in this week’s list, so let’s get started.

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Patrick McHardy announced the release of the first public version of NFTables on the NetFilter development list and Linux kernel net development list. From the announcement:

The kernel provides a netlink configuration interface, as well as runtime ruleset evaluation using a small classification language interpreter. libnl contains the low-level functions for communicating with the kernel, the nftables frontend is what the user interacts with.

Patrick  goes on to give in depth information on the new implementation and highlighting the differences between the new NFTables interface and the existing NetFilter interface. I recommend at least skimming over the post if you use IPTables/NetFilter on a regular basis so you can see what may be coming down the line.

Command Line Kung Fu is a blog started by Hal Pomeranz, Ed Skoudis of InGuardians, and Paul Asadoorian of Pauldotcom Security Weekly and PaulDotCom Enterprises, LLC. that “will include fun, useful, interesting, security related, non-security related, tips, and tricks associated with the command line. It will include OS X, Linux, and even Windows!” They started off with a one-post per day strategy for the first week, and now publish new posts every Monday-Wednesday-Friday.  The majority of the scripts are most useful to persons in the penetration testing realm, but like any good shell script they can be adapted to many different uses.

The post structure usually follows this formula: Ed Skoudis gives the Windows command shell version of a script, Hal Pomeranz gives a Linux version, and Paul Asadoorian gives a different Linux version or an OS X specific version. The best part about the posts is that there is an explanation of what they are doing that really helps make the scripts easier to understand, especially if you are unfamiliar with any of the commands or unfamiliar with one of the shells (e.g. me and the Windows command shell).

They’ve been going for a little over a month now and have some high quality posts and even have had a few guest posters to provide different perspectives in the standard shells or to introduce new things like  writing the script in Windows PowerShell. Congratulations on the great site guys, I can’t wait to see more great posts!