Traditional weather reports will give notice of vague forecasts and severe weather alerts in your general area. The code and tools presented in this article will allow you to create precise detection zones so you can receive a page, SMS, or e-mail a few minutes before a precipitation event is likely to occur at the monitored location.

The concept is fairly simple. Schedule a custom php script under crontab that will parse a weather rss feed and create a file containing weather info that we can use in our custom prompt.

For a lightweight system monitor, Conky can display an awful lot of useful information. But besides the usual stuff like RAM usage, processor load, and wireless signal strength, you can use Conky to display something more interesting like the current weather conditions and a four-day forecast complete with snazzy weather icons.

Linspire has upgraded its CNR.com (Click'N'Run) download site for Linux software to support the Ubuntu-based, consumer-friendly Linux Mint distribution. CNR.com will also add a Linux version of Weatherbug's weather service, which offers live, local weather information and severe weather alerts.

Gnome-Do comes with a variety of different docklets for use with it’s ‘Docky’ interface. The Weather Docklet is even more useful than these to me, and can provide up-to a 6 day forecast right inside your dock!

The Philippine government's official weather service, PAGASA, has replaced its SGI supercomputer with a clustered Debian Linux system that can process information vital to protection against typhoons, floods, droughts, tsunamis and other wild weather conditions at a fraction of the cost.

Not only will you not have to open the window, now you don't even have to open the browser window to find out the weather ;)

For years, I've been getting my weather from Firefox plug-ins, usually ForecastFox. The trouble with these is they have to update every few minutes, causing a brief lag in bandwidth and even a small blip in performance if you're using some other program while Firefox is running. Recently, my ForecastFox started misbehaving for no particular reason. It would blank out and freeze up and so on.

Weather.com, the online arm of Atlanta-based Weather Channel Interactive Inc., last month moved its final customer-facing, proprietary application to open source. Chief Technology Officer Dan Agronow doesn’t say whether his staff broke a bottle of bubbly over the new MySQL app server that replaced an Oracle system, but you can tell he’s happy.