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Recently we looked at networking your Linux receiver – and described how you can stream video from it to any PC on the same network. Now we'll take these networking aspirations further afield by going online. Although a few satellite receivers offer the Ethernet port that gives rise to such flexibility, only Linux-based receivers are capable of taking full advantage of such functionality.

The fifth alpha version of the upcoming Ubuntu 9.04 (codename Jaunty Jackalope) was uploaded a few minutes ago on the official mirrors. As usual, we've downloaded a copy of it in order to keep you up to date with the latest changes in the Ubuntu 9.04 development.

If you edit a lot of configuration files, and are confronted a lot with the configuration files edited by others, you probably spend a lot of time looking at the changes made to the file since the last time it was edited or installed. The standard command line utility diff does a reasonable job when it comes to finding small differences. It shows that it wasn't developed to create the best possible human readable output when you try reading long listings. diff output looks something like this:

Did you ever vote for an issue on the OpenOffice.org bug tracking system? Well, today could be your first time! In this article, I try to demonstrate why the rulers should be hidden by default in OpenOffice.org Writer. A UI detail, maybe. But aren't small changes for millions of people a big change? In any case, it could be a good occasion to visit the OOo bug tracking system, tell your opinion, and get involved!

Without much fanfare or self-congratulations, networking giant Cisco Systems has become one of the top contributors to the Linux kernel and an active contributor to the broader open source community. It's a message that Cisco isn't boasting about yet, but was willing to discuss with InternetNews.com. Cisco is the world's largest networking vendor and a technology juggernaut that is seeing the value in using and contributing to open source.

According to an announcement on Mepis.org, Simply Mepis 8 was released on Sunday, February 24, 2009 to the delight of people from all over the world. It didn't take me long to download both 32-bit and 64-bit iso images, burn them and begin installing them on my HP 6449US laptop. Actually, I had been testing all the way from the earliest betas through version 8 gold, but wanted to do a clean install on both partitions.

For months we have seen S3 Graphics advertise a magical Linux driver in their press releases that promised to offer OpenGL 3.0 support and advanced video functionality. They had reported to us the driver would be released in December, but that deadline had passed and they continued to announce Linux support when launching the Chrome 540 GTX, but still there was nothing. However, S3 Graphics has now actually delivered such a driver! They have delivered a Chrome 500 series Linux driver that not only provides OpenGL 3.0 support but also H.264, VC-1, and MPEG-2 hardware decoding on the GPU. While it may appear to be good, this driver is still far from perfect.

Exciting news from the LinuxDNA project, which earlier this month successfully compiled a recent Linux kernel with the Intel C/C++ compiler (ICC). This is not just a compile without errors, this is — for the most part — a fully bootable, compatible Linux kernel that can boot into a full Linux system. The full system is based on Gentoo Linux, and utilizes kernel version 2.6.22.

Novell's management was asked why Novell's Linux business wasn't performing at the same level at which Red Hat's Linux business is performing. Red Hat's most recent set for financial results showed improvements in revenue and income. Novell executives answered that Novell's business is a different one than Red Hat's for a number of reasons. "We will continue to be aggressive with the Linux tool and product in order to drive more of our other management products and other products that sit above that," Hovsepian stated. "So fundamentally we have a different strategy on long-term value of Linux in the marketplace and as part of our portfolio. We see it as an important part but we see the long-term profitability coming from these other categories for our business."

I was asked by the editor of OLPC News to comment on the sales of the Intel Classmate PC based on my experiences seeing its marketing while visiting Colombia this month. I have also seen its competition, the ASUS Eee PC being sold there the past 2 years. These events have happened while people asked me where they could purchase an OLPC XO that I had shown them. My basic response to those interested in the OLPC XO has been to say that they needed to purchase one via Ebay.com, since I had arrived in Colombia after the G1G1 program had ended the past 2 years. Just shipping an envelope via FedEx to Colombia costs $50, so most would not get the XO from my suggested source after paying the initial Ebay price.

Novell's $340 million lifeline from Microsoft appears to be losing its potency. Although Microsoft originally gifted Novell $240 million to help fight Red Hat, and later added another $100 million to the pile, it doesn't seem to be enough to revive Novell's fortunes, as the company reported disappointing first-quarter earnings and a slide even in its Linux business, which had been growing fairly well.

Akkana Peck has shown us how pathnames work, the difference between /home and home, and using ls to see the contents of a directory. Today we're going to go all dotty and learn what ../../ means, and how to share, or not share, files with other system users. You'll never be mystified again

In a presentation at the Southern California Linux Expo (SCALE), GNOME Foundation executive director Stormy Peters discussed the differences between companies and communities and how to bridge the gap. This issue is becoming increasingly important for open source software projects that are trying to build close ties with corporate adopters and contributors.

Microsoft's current patent suit against navigation software maker TomTom has caused quite a stir in the Open Source arena and might turn into a wave of MS attacks on Linux.

What do you get when you put a stable operating system, an innovative desktop manager and plenty of eye candies together? You get nothing short of a beautiful and functional OS. Elive is a Debian-based Linux distro, customized with Enlightenment e17 desktop manager. It is designed with the aim of providing a stable, fully functional and beautiful operating system that can run with minimal hardware requirement.

Mobile workers are especially vulnerable because they operate outside corporate security systems, and often return home to unload nasties into the company network. Paul Rubens finds seven excellent Firefox plugins to help protect the mobile worker.

Webmin is a browser based program that you can use to manage a Linux server, from a remote location. It is an excellent tool for those who are making the transition from a GUI based system to the Linux command line. However, if you are going to use Webmin take a few security precautions first.

In March (3-8, 2009), CeBIT will once again be opening its gates in Hannover, Germany. The world's largest and most renowned trade fair for the world of IT and telecommunications will be featuring Open Source topics in hall 6. The CeBIT Open Source Forum 2009 will be the venue of daily lectures on the use of Linux and free software - and you can watch them online, live and for free!

Last week, we began the migration from Outlook in Windows to Thunderbird in Linux. We transferred over the basic data to the open source email client. Now we'll install a calendar, task manager, and note feature. We'll also figure out how to export our existing Outlook data and import it into Thunderbird. Lastly, we'll set up auto signatures. Let's get started!

The realtime preemption project is a longstanding effort to provide deterministic response times in a general-purpose kernel. Much code resulting from this work has been merged into the mainline kernel over the last few years, and a number of vendors are shipping commercial products based upon it. But, for the last year or so, progress toward getting the rest of the realtime work into the mainline has slowed.