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Finally, in Ubuntu 8.04, it looks like all the major news video players work under Ubuntu Linux.

Openmoko will distribute a mass-market version of its open Linux phone through five distributors in Germany, France, and India, it announced. The Neo Freerunner features an open hardware design, and a Linux-based operating system that users are free to modify. Previously, OpenMoko phones have been available only in limited quantities, mostly to open source mobile phone software developers. Today's announcement appears to signal the forthcoming release of OpenMoko's first product aimed at the mass market.

Last fall when the two mega-distros openSUSE and Mandriva both hit the mirrors, it was difficult to decide which I liked better. In an attempt to narrow it down, I ran some light-hearted tests and found Mandriva won out in a side-by-side comparison. But things change rapidly in the Linux world and I wondered how a competition of the newest releases would come out. Mandriva 2008.1 was released this past April and openSUSE 11.0 was released just last week.

Facebook is a wonderful example of the network effect, in which the value of a network to a user is exponentially proportional to the number of other users that network has. Facebook's power derives from what Jeff Rothschild, its vice president of technology, calls the "social graph"--the sum of the wildly various connections between the site's users and their friends; between people and events; between events and photos; between photos and people; and between a huge number of discrete objects linked by metadata describing them and their connections.

Different GNU/Linux distributions provide incompatible systems for package management, and to date no one has quite figured out a foolproof way to get the best of them all. But where the alien utility tries to convert between major package formats, and Smart and Klik try to imagine new, universal forms of software installation, PackageKit has the more modest goal of supplying a universal front end that leaves the native package systems intact underneath. As Richard Hughes, the project lead for PackageKit, puts it, "PackageKit is a glue layer between the distro-specific parts, and some prettiness."

Matt Asay thinks (and has thought for some time) that the Macintosh is the best place to do open-source development. And he points out that he's not alone in this opinion. I happen to have a Mac â?? a 5-year-old iBook G4 running OS X 10.3.9 that I just recently gutted to replace a dying hard drive â?? and I've been thinking more and more about running Unix apps on it.

There is nothing more guaranteed to ignite a bad tempered, incandescent flame war that an outbreak of hostilities between the rival Gnome and KDE camps. Well, except perhaps a slanging match between the champions of the GUI and the command line. Enter stage left the compromise candidate which might just unite the warring factions: Hotwire. Gary Richmond takes a close look at this combined GUI and command line tool, a very useful piece of kit, software destined to find its way into the main distro repositories. You can read the full story at Freesoftware Magazine.

You turn on your trusty old Linux box, and things are going well as you pass through the boot loader, until the disk check reveals that your hard drive partition table is corrupt, and you are unable to access your machine. You need a good rescue disk -- and the best way to get one is to create your own. You can customize an Ubuntu 8.04 Hardy Heron live CD to make a good bootable utilities disk by adding and removing packages from the standard installation. Specifically, you can remove most of the Ubuntu applications and install antivirus, a partition recover tool, a few disk utilities, and a rootkit checker, among other things. I'm going to create the live CD within an Ubuntu installation, but the directions should work for most Debian-based operating systems, and can be easily ported elsewhere.

There are many ways to learn Linux, and I can't think of one as being the 'best'. Of course, something may work for some users while failing miserably for others. There are users who prefer to ask a friend or get their answers fast on a forum, either because they are too lazy or they just don't have enough time to learn something new: they want it to work in their own way. Well, that's not quite an option, since there is no universal program which will fit any user's way of doing things.

Created as a simple solution for managing documentation, DokuWiki has evolved into a powerful and flexible wiki suitable for most tasks involving collaborative editing. DokuWiki doesn't use a database back end (all pages are stored as plain text files), which makes it easy to install and maintain. Its access control list feature offers a user-friendly and flexible mechanism for restricting access to certain pages and namespaces. You can also extend DokuWiki's default functionality using plugins, and there are hundreds of plugins to choose from.

It's all over the Internet now: the Linux kernel developers have issued a statement urging vendors to release open source device drivers/modules.

Zenwalk is one of the most promising Linux distribution. Based on Slackware, the distro is lightweight, simple and stable. We decided to make some questions to Jean-Philippe Guillemin, Zenwalk’s creator, regarding future plans and developments about this “GNU-Linux Operating System”.

This guide explains how to set up mod_geoip with lighttpd on a Fedora 9 system. mod_geoip looks up the IP address of the client end user. This allows you to redirect or block users based on their country. You can also use this technology for your OpenX (formerly known as OpenAds or phpAdsNew) ad server to allow geo targeting.

The KDE Community is proud to announce the second beta release of KDE 4.1. Beta 2 is aimed at testers, community members and enthusiasts in order to identify bugs and regressions, so that 4.1 can fully replace KDE 3 for end users. KDE 4.1 beta 2 is available as binary packages for a wide range of platforms, and as source packages. KDE 4.1 is due for final release in late July 2008.

Shocking revelation from TRACE security labs suggests that 46 percent of all spam being distributed online is being sent by the Srizbi botnet, and volumes are growing real fast.

Watch the BBC getting grilled at the Parliament over its blind servitude to Microsoft, which it simply cannot defend

Yesterday we reported on the Linux Foundation's message they have issued on the behalf of more than 140 kernel developers: Binary-only kernel modules are harmful and undesirable. While no vendor was singled out in this message, the biggest hardware manufacturer that has yet to provide any real level of open-source support is NVIDIA Corporation.

"Not long after buying Trolltech, along with their Qtopia platform which they promised to keep as freedomware, Nokia is buying Symbian and, best of all, releasing it as freedomware via the Symbian Foundation under support of numerous mobile related businesses such as AT&T, T-Mobile, Vodafone, Samsung, Texas Instruments and many others. This is quite impressive news considering that Symbian has the majority market share in this market."

Openmoko, creator of the first completely open mobile computing platform, today announced agreements with five distributors for the Neo Freerunner Open Source mobile phone. Today, Openmoko will begin shipping the next generation Neo Freerunner to Pulster, Golden Delicious Computers and TRIsoft located in Germany, Bearstech in France and IDA Systems based in India.

In an under-reported story this week, it appears that Debian could eventually replace Xandros as the default Linux OS on the Eee PC.