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FreeBSD is a Unix-like open source operating system that can trace its ancestry back to the original Unix. It's well known and well respected in the server marketplace, but until recently FreeBSD lacked an easy-to-use desktop version. In 2005 the PC-BSD project was started to provide just that. This month PC-BSD version 7 was released. I downloaded and installed it to see how it squares up to user-friendly Linux distributions like Ubuntu. I came away a little disappointed. PC-BSD offers the stability and security of FreeBSD but pitches itself as "a complete desktop operating system, which has been designed with the 'casual' computer user in mind," so from the start my expectations were high. I downloaded the CD ISOs (three in total; a single DVD version is also available) and booted a test machine. The installation is straightforward and the PC-BSD guide gives detailed installation instructions if you get stuck anywhere.

Know someone in your community—an individual, government official, NGO or other entity—who has significantly advanced the cause of document freedom, yet whose actions have not received the public recognition they deserve? Thanks to the efforts of its supporters worldwide, ODF has become the format of the future, a truly open standard that has achieved growing popularity and support in a variety of software products, bringing to an end the era of closed formats that have kept users tied to a single vendor’s products.

The Mono Project, which develops an open source implementation of the .Net Framework, released the long-awaited 2.0 version on Monday. Mono 2.0 offers complete API compatibility with ASP.Net and Windows Forms applications, and is compatible with desktop and server components of Microsoft’s 2.0 version of its .Net Framework. Mono 2.0 lets users develop and run .Net client and server applications on Linux and other operating systems. It also features the Mono Migration Analyzer, which helps determine changes applications need for .NET-to-Linux migrations, if any.

Over the past couple of days the online media has been full of stories of dissatisfied Linux netbook users returning their computers. Bloggers and journalists quickly picked up on the fact that return rates for Linux-based netbooks were apparently much higher than for Windows-based machines. It seems the origin of the story is an interview with Laptop magazine in which MSI’s Andy Tung said that the “return rate is at least four times higher for Linux netbooks that Windows XP netbooks”. MSI is the maker of the Wind netbook.

Dojo, one of the leading open-source libraries and widget sets for JavaScript programming, released its latest version (1.2) yesterday. Dojo, which is developed by the Dojo Foundation and released under both the BSD License and Academic Free License, is officially integrated with a number of Web development frameworks, such as Django and the Zend Framework, and by vendors such as IBM and Sun Microsystems.

I've got several machines downstairs in my basement office, of course, but in our family the others have computers too. we've set some basic rules for it. Notably, they can't just play all those flash games all the time. And sometimes, if they don't do their homework, we disallow it entirely, or - happily more commonly - we give extra time for good behaviour or for some homework that needs more googling. But I'm a geek, and I'm not at all interested in trying to do any of this manually. So I wrote a simple internet usage tracker for them, which allows me to set usage limits per kid, and which tracks how much time they use online, and forcibly logs them off if they go over the limits.

Iconv makes character set conversion easy. Remembering all of your character sets can still be hard. Today's topic was obliquely referenced in yesterday's post on using the online multilingual dictionary from the Bash CLI. Yes, after I woke up around 1 am and thought about it, the results did seem odd. It turns out, when I went to the page, that the multilingual dictionary on reference.com is actually house within a frameset under the online Thesaurus. My belated apologies for getting the name incorrect, although, if you think about it, it's not even a multilingual dictionary (not really).

Linux breaks out with Mono 2.0 today. You can develop and run all your .NET 2.0 applications on Linux.

As I had predicted earlier this year LinuxWorld is no more. Well not quite. LinuxWorld the big Linux show that occurs ever year in San Francisco is morphing into a new show called OpenSource World. The re-naming follows a move by O'Reilly to bring the OSCON conference to San Francisco earlier this year

I recently got the chance to talk with Gentoo Catalyst/Genkernel Release Engineering Lead Andrew Gaffney and developer/council member Donnie Berkholz about Gentoo Linux, the challenges it is facing, and the work that is being done by the community -- from veteran developers to new users -- to overcome them.

This article, and the one to follow, are based on a Software Development class I taught a few years ago. The students in this class were non-programmers who had been hired to receive bug reports for a compiler product. As Analysts, they had to understand the software compilation process in some detail, even though some of them had never written a single line of code. It was a fun class to teach, so I'm hoping that the subject translates into interesting reading.

I must say I have always loved SUSE for the desktop, but after a month or so I always wind up switching back to Ubuntu or Ubuntu based Distributions. Now OpenSuse always maintains it's beautiful look as always as well as the infamous YAST tool. In the end of this install it failed trying to install GRUB, since this is in Beta I would have to assume this is a bug but none the less OpenSuse is a great OS. Enjoy the ScreenShots below.

For various reasons, not everything is configured in the easiest way for a new user. Because of this, some simple and quick modifications can make the life of a new Ubuntu user much easier.

I respect Richard Stallman for the same reason I respect gravity. The man is a force of nature. He is like the iron core of the Earth: fixed, central, essential. So, when I read a story like "Cloud computing is a trap, warns GNU founder Richard Stallman", which ran in the Guardian last week, I take notice. And I'm not alone. A search on Google for stallman "cloud computing" brings up 142,000 results.

I have read a number of heated complaints about Ubuntu's default implementation of sudo privileges in preference to simple root access. While I have issues with some of Ubuntu's implementations and features, this is not one of my complaints. Indeed, I prefer it. I have an administrative account that has sudo rights that I do not normally use. My activities are primarily restricted to another user's account that lacks any machine administrative rights [1.]. However, I use a single command to gain full root access rights when I desire it. Perhaps those driven away from Ubuntu due to this one issue might reconsider.

Berdou examined parallels and disconnects between paid and volunteer contributors in the GNOME and KDE projects, using earlier incidents of such events (such as the Gstreamer/Fluendo SL summit). The hypotheses and analysis she presents are thought-provoking.

One of Facebook's two cofounders is jumping ship to start his own Internet company. Dustin Moskovitz announced he'll leave the social networking site in about a month. He and colleague Justin Rosenstein, a Facebook engineering manager who previously worked at Google, will launch a new enterprise software business.

Joe Brockmeier has an interesting piece up on the differences between paid and volunteer open source contributors. In it, he cites this post from former Debian Project Leader Martin Michlmayr, and a paper by Evangelia Berdou. "Berdou finds that paid developers take up key positions in projects, while volunteers often work on the periphery." I agree with Joe that the combination of these two types of contributions can be very powerful.

Some time ago I had a long talk with an IBM’er about social networking. He said the first key to bringing social networking to business was a simple directory. We should all have our own page somewhere, whether as individuals, as members of a hierarchy, or as business entities. We need to be found, and have our expertise known. Then we need to use that directory to network with others. That’s a key idea behind Bluehouse, the service IBM launched in beta today.

Most free software projects produce applications for users. A minority, however, produce specifications or libraries for developers and other contributors. An example of this second type is the recently announced Manju project, whose goal is to make themes easier to create. The project's goal is to write the specifications and scripts for using scalable vector graphics (SVG) files to store widget and other theme-related information that can be used on a variety of toolkits.