If you’re anything like me and love tech gadgets that allow you to do almost anything..then you undoubtedly own an iPhone.  For the past year of being an iPhone owner, I’ve discovered a ton of iPhone apps that help me in my every day life.  Many of them are Linux apps.  Below you will find a list I’ve put together of must have Linux iPhone apps for you to check out.

Linux Command Reference (FREE) – This iPhone app is a handy command reference for the Linux Terminal.  Perfect for situations when you need to reference a command but you’re in the server room without your computer.

LinuxTube – This app allows you to view Linux related videos as well as chat with other Linux enthusiasts.

Server Remote – Easily monitor your Linux server from your iPhone.  This iPhone application uses the standard SSH protocol to communicate with your servers, and requires no special software to be installed on the server end.

SSH – The best SSH client I’ve found in the iPhone app store. It works over Wi-Fi, Edge, and 3G networks.

Chmod (FREE) – Very simple and straight forward reference app for determining file and directory permissions on Mac OS X, Linux and Unix.

Vi Reference – A great reference for those of us who use Vi/Vim.

UNIX Fortune – For those old school nix users, this is the entertaining fortune cookie application converted to an iPhone app.

Hopefully these Linux iPhone apps save you a little bit of time, or just provide some good old fashion entertainment, like they have me.

Do you know of any other iPhone apps available that should be added to this list? Let us know in the comments!

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Over at Internet News Sean Kerner writes that the IT industry is turning to Linux in our current economic downturn.

A new report out today from IDC, sponsored by Linux vendor Novell indicates that the current economic downturn is a good thing for Linux adoption. with more than half of the IT executives surveyed planning to accelerate Linux adoption in 2009… According to IDC, in a poll of 300 IT professionals more than 72 percent reported that, “they are either actively evaluating or have already decided to increase their adoption of Linux on the server in 2009.”

I’m sure most of our readers have heard that Linux, as well as open source, is a great option during times of economic stress.  Companies and even every day users are turning to cheaper and free alternatives to expensive software and operating systems and Linux is just the right place to turn.

This is a great thing for Linux, even though it sucks for our current state of the economy.  Let’s just hope Linux can prove worthy and benefit in these tough times.

Read the full article here.

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Celebrating the 15 year anniversary of the Linux 1.0.0 kernel, Junauza posted a list of 15 cool facts about the Linux kernel.  Here are a few of my favorites:

- An asteroid was named after the creator of the Linux kernel.

- According to a study funded by the European Union, the estimated cost to redevelop the most recent kernel versions would be at $1.14 billion USD.

- Linux kernel 1.0.0 was released with 176,250 lines of code. The latest Linux kernel has over 10 million lines of code.

- The Linux kernel can be found on more than 87% of systems on the world’s Top 500 supercomputers.

Read the full article here.

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LinuxHaxor recently wrote a blog post discussing how every year hundreds of writers come out of the woodwork to discuss how “this is the year for Linux” or that Linux is finally ready for the masses.

Every year, every major Linux development, every major distribution release sparks a volley of so-called expert opinion of this being finally the year of the Linux. As they provide arguments and counter-arguments over certain news of Dell/HP/IBM/Asus releasing pre-installed Linux computer; and how this will single-handedly fix every problems and finally allow Linux to take over the world.

I agree that these “expert opinions” do always contain the suggestion that this could finally be the year Linux launches into a much higher stratosphere and knocks out major competition.  However, most of these “expert opinion” articles that I read every year, or every major release, mainly focus on how Linux is getting closer to becoming a much better operating system than the competition has to offer.  Isn’t that all that really matters?

As another year is coming to an end, and another major distribution is around the corner; this might be a good time to remind everyone how next year will not be much different from this year. It took years and years of dedication and innovation for MacOS to finally reach 8% market share. Depending on your level of cynicism, Linux Desktop market share is at somewhere around 1%-5% (being generous).

Sure, lets stop looking at every single Linux advancement or breakthrough with the “this is it! we’ve done it” mentality, I can agree with that.  But really, if you look at the facts, 2008 was a great year for Linux.  In fact, the past five years have been “the year of the Linux“.  Linux will continue to grow over time.  After all, Linux is an open source operating system.  Anyone can contribute, anytime, and the number of contributors continues to grow every year.  Eventually these developers will have worked out all the pesky kinks that stop most users from switching to Linux. It’s really only a matter of time before the mainstream users decide to make the switch to the Linux operating system they keep hearing more and more about.

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It’s been rumored in the past week or so that HP may be developing a flavor of Linux to allow them to move past all of the headaches that come with Windows Vista.  Nobody really knows at this point, but I do think that if it is true, it’s both a good move for HP, and a good thing for the Linux community in general.

If HP were to develop a flavor of Linux for their systems, there are a number of things that could finally come to the forefront for Linux.  A wider audience, official hardware and driver support, and better technical support, to name a few.  However, it’s unlikely that HP will develop a flavor of Linux made for distribution across all hardware platforms, though the Linux implementation may be easier to move to new systems than it’s current proprietary Unix implementation HP-UX.  But that doesn’t mean the contributions to further improve Linux will not help the entire community.

For Linux to finally make it as a mainstream desktop operating system, a backing like this from a major player such as HP is the final push it needs to compete with Apple and Microsoft.  This could mean big things for Linux.  Let’s hope the rumors are true, it could be interesting.

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After visiting LinuxWorld in San Francisco, Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols took away a common theme with the panels he sat in on, “What does Linux need to do to compete more successfully on the desktop?”  What he came up with was three specific things that Linux needs to do in order to beat Windows on the desktop.

In short, the three points are

1. Better power management.  This goes far beyond ACPI.
2. Applications.  Wine, virtualization, or alternative software.
3. Device drivers.

I agree with Steven in that these three areas should be at the top of the list for Linux developers.  There is no excuse for Linux being behind in any of these areas and we should be doing everything we can to make sure Linux at least can compete with Windows and Mac in these three simple areas.

Read more here.

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If you didn’t know already, Linux is not just a platform that runs on desktops and servers.  Many of us use devices everyday that run Linux or Unix without even knowing.  A number of mobile phones, Digital Video Recorders, and MP3 players run a variant of Linux or Unix.

Here is a list of 10 devices that run Linux.

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There are a number of reasons a non-Linux user will give you for not trying Linux.  The sad fact is that most of the reasons are either old Linux truths, or are just flat out Linux myths.  Things like the Linux installation is too difficult, or Linux only uses a command line interface are some of the ignorant answers I’ve heard in the past.

LinuxHaxor.net has an article that is written to dispel some of the myths surrounding Linux, check it out here.

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Richard Morris recently took some time out to interview the great Linus Torvalds, the founder and creator of our favorite operating system, Linux. The interview is very well put together with both great questions and answers.

Here are two of my favorite Q & A’s with Linus:

RM: ‘Do you think software patents are a good idea?’

LT: ‘Heh – definitely not. They’re a disaster. The whole point (and the original idea) behind patents in the US legal sense was to encourage innovation. If you actually look at the state of patents in the US today, they do no such thing. Certainly not in software, and very arguably not in many other areas either.

Quite the reverse – patents are very much used to stop competition, which is undeniably the most powerful way to encourage innovation. Anybody who argues for patents is basically arguing against open markets and competition, but they never put it in those terms.

So the very original basis for the patents is certainly not being fulfilled today, which should already tell you something. And that’s probably true in pretty much any area.

But the reason patents are especially bad for software is that software isn’t some single invention where you can point to a single new idea. Not at all. All relevant software is a hugely complex set of very detailed rules, and there are millions of small and mostly trivial ideas rather than some single clever idea that can be patented. The worth of the software is not in any of those single small decisions, but in the whole. It’s also distressing to see that people patent ‘ideas’. It’s not even a working “thing”; it’s just a small way of doing things that you try to patent, just to have a weapon in an economic fight. Sad. Patents have lost all redeeming value, if they ever had any. ‘

RM: ‘What part of an Operating system do you think is the most difficult to write?’

LT: That’s actually an interesting question, just because my answer is that it’s never any particular part. Yes, all the details tend to be complicated too, but the real job is to make it all work together. Compared to that, any particular detail you might want to point at may be a technical challenge, but ultimately not anything that really puts people off. For example, one area that we had a really hard time with (and that still causes problems, even if it’s gotten much better) is power management and the whole suspend/resume that people do on laptops. And it was hard not so much because any particular detail was really intractable, but because it touches every single subsystem in the whole kernel (and many out in user land too!), and that was really what ended up making it so challenging.

Read the full interview here.

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Amarok has finally released a alpha version of Amarok 2.0!

Here is the official announcement:

The Amarok Team is proud to present the first official alpha release, codename Malina, of the upcoming Amarok 2 series. Features available in this release outline the feature set of Amarok 2.0 while making a starting point in the Amarok 2 journey.

Some of the highlights of the new alpha include:

New fascinating look: With the use of vector graphics, artwork looks crispier than ever, while color scheme independence guarantees it’ll look gorgeous no matter what.

Innovative user interface: Don’t miss several UI innovations like the Plasma powered Context View, new space efficient playlist, and amazing PopUp Dropper! The new Context View allows you to show all the context information you care about. We expect a lot of Plasmoids to be provided by the community in the first months after the release of Amarok 2. PopUp Dropper lets you do different things with your files by simply dragging them to the context view and dropping them on the appropriate area. Append songs to the playlist, copy songs to your local collection, transfer them to your mobile device and edit their tags are just some of the operations PopUp Dropper offers.

Almighty Internet service framework: Seamlessly integrate online music repositories and web services into your musical experience. With online sources like Magnatune, Last.fm, Jamendo, Ampache and MP3tunes you’ll be supplied with music 24/7.

Powerful scripting: The new scripting interface is fully based on Qt technology. The APIs are being redesigned, so script authors are asked to wait at least for the first beta release before porting their scripts.

Dynamic and new Biased playlists: Let Amarok choose the music for you. In this alpha you will see the foundations of the new Biased playlists which in the future will let you specify dynamic playlist for any occasion.

Mobile devices support: We are working hard to make sure you’ll easily and efficiently access music on your media devices within Amarok, and integrate it with your music collection.

Cross platform: This Alpha release lays the groundwork for a release on all major platforms. Future releases will feature Linux, Windows and MacOS versions.

Don’t wait any longer! Grab your copy of Amarok Alpha 1 and help us polish it into a best release so far! Any kind of help is highly appreciated: from patches and bugfixes, through testing and bugreports, to documentation writing, translating and promotion. Oh, and we like artists too! Check out our Jobs page, or drop by in #amarok on Freenode.

Please be aware that this is alpha stage software. Bugs and unfinished features are to be expected. All of the features mentioned above still need work.

The Amarok 2 FAQ addresses some of the questions you might have about Amarok 2.

Read more here..

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