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I’ve toyed with Linux since 2002, when I first installed Mandrake. With the latest release of Ubuntu, I was interested to see how far Linux had come since then in terms of being used easily by the mainstream. So, I tricked my grudging girlfriend Erin into sitting down at a brand new Ubuntu 8.04 installation and performing some basic tasks. It’s surprising how many seemingly simple things become complicated and even out of reach for someone without a knowledge of Linux. There are a lot of little things that could be done to make the experience a lot more friendly for non-computer-literate people – some of them easy to implement, others not at all.

Sun is to open-source the last closed-source parts of Java, a move that should make it possible to fully integrate the software into Linux distributions. Rich Sands, Sun's group manager for developer marketing, confirmed on Friday that Sun expects the work to be completed by the end of this year. Most of Java has already been opened up, barring a few elements that had been held back because Sun did not own the rights to them.

Well, here I am just a few miles from Yahoo!' headquarters and Microsoft's Silicon Valley residence. It's Sunday, and I've yet to hear screams from either camp. So, it seems that Microsoft's call to action deadline around the Yahoo! buy is passing with a lack of fanfare. Yahoo! may surprise us yet by leaking something to the New York Times or perhaps Steve Baller will call up his buds at the Wall Street Journal, but in lieu of such actual movements, I'm left wanting.

Want to install a DVD release of Linux but dont have a DVD drive or recorder? Your CD/DVD drive has died but you still want to install a new or updated version of Linux? You can, and you can do it all from your hard drive without burning a single CD or DVD.

LXer Feature: 27-Apr-2008

In this week's Roundup we have several Microsoft related articles including, extending the life of XP to parry the Linux threat, Office 2007 fails OXML test and MSN users find out that they get to re-buy all the music they purchased from MSN Music. Also, an interview with Kurt Denke - the man who shut up Monster Cable and a ton of Ubuntu related articles because of the Hardy Heron release. Also there are three LXer features, The Biggest Blunder, an intro to secure web data Input, and Accurate market share statistics and The $60 Billion dollar question for your reading pleasure as well.

Linux Ubuntu 8.04 virgin no longer, I popped my own cherry last night, installing Hardy Heron for the first time, with some odd installation experiences I can only hope aren’t the ‘norm’. So, what happened? So, Hardy Heron, Ubuntu 8.04, the final release version. You’re finally on my computer. It’s been a long wait – I never did bother with your predecessors Eft, Gibbon and the rest.

Bill Gates steps down as the Chairman of Microsoft on July 1st to transition to full time philanthropic efforts with the Gates Foundation. However, I wonder how effective Bill will be other than writing checks. You see Bill's never played well with others.

Ubuntu 8.04 was released a few days back and here is a list that helps you install all the essential codecs and applications easily on your Ubuntu 8.04 desktop saving your googling time and helping you make transition from Windows to Ubuntu .

It's day 2 for my Ubuntu 8.04 LTS install. Things have gone more smoothly that I expected. First of all, I got the ISO on Friday -- one day after Ubuntu 8.04's official release -- in under 2 hours. I remember my 7.10 download taking much, much longer. Part of my success this go-round was that I used a good mirror. That speeds things up considerably.

This tutorial shows how to set up an Ubuntu Hardy Heron (Ubuntu 8.04 LTS) server that offers all services needed by ISPs and hosters: Apache web server (SSL-capable) with PHP and Ruby, Postfix mail server with SMTP-AUTH and TLS, BIND DNS server, Proftpd FTP server, MySQL server, Courier POP3/IMAP, Quota, Firewall, etc.

Gzip compression reduces response times by reducing the size of the HTTP response. This document describes gzipping http traffic which can reduces the response size by about 70%. Approximately 90% of today’s Internet traffic travels through browsers that claim to support compression.

The last couple of years have seen a renewed push within the kernel community to avoid regressions. When a patch is found to have broken something that used to work, a fix must be merged or the offending patch will be removed from the kernel. It's a straightforward and logical idea, but there's one little problem: when a kernel series includes over 12,000 changesets (as 2.6.25 does), how does one find the patch which caused the problem? Sometimes it will be obvious, but, for other problems, there are literally thousands of patches which could be the source of the regression. Digging through all of those patches in search of a bug can be a needle-in-the-haystack sort of proposition.

A computer hacker testified on Wednesday that a News Corp unit hired him to develop pirating software, but denied using it to penetrate the security system of a rival satellite television service. Christopher Tarnovsky -- who said his first payment was $20,000 in cash hidden in electronic devices mailed from Canada -- testified in a corporate-spying lawsuit brought against News Corp's NDS Group by DISH Network Corp.

I'm helping to edit what is turning out to be a shockingly good book on the legal issues around open source, from the developer's perspective, which Van Lindberg is finishing up and which O'Reilly will be publishing. When it comes out, you will want to buy it. It's incredibly well-written and expresses things much more clearly than I've yet seen in my 10 years within the open-source community.

Linux in the data center brings with it a dilemma: more boxes to manage. Traditional IT management tools such as HP OpenView, IBM Tivoli, and CA Unicenter can creep up in cost as the server count increases. With management tools in the picture, the total cost of ownership may actually increase instead of decrease when Linux is brought in.

Both Mark Shuttleworth and myself have discussed this idea before. Because Mark brought it up again in a recent interview, I feel compelled to developer this idea further. The main concept is that Linux distributions, and open source in general, have a lot to gain by synchronizing their release schedules.

LXer Feature: 26-Apr-2008

Earlier this week an article concerning Vista and market share and one about how Open Source Software has cost the IT Industry $60 Billion dollars over the last five years or so hit the newswire. Needless to say this generated some conversations about their validity. I got to wondering if there have ever been accurate market share statistics for Linux or any operating system for that matter and to ask myself the $60 Billion dollar question.

Article about installing Django with Apache mod_python, with memcached caching and lighttpd for serving static files on CentOS 5 server.

One of the best new features of Ubuntu Hardy Heron is the features list itself, which taken a huge leap forward.

Terry Hancock, a regular contributor to Freesoftwaremagazine.com, offers a detailed critique of Google's App Engine which allows users to run we applications on Google's infrastructure. Google's mantra may be "do no evil" but does this seemingly generous offer disguise an unhealthy dependence on a company that has used Open Source freely but kept it's code closed?