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ZenEdu is a Live distribution that packs a whole bunch of educational tools on top of the Slackware-based light-weight and zippy Zenwalk Linux. Since learning is the core idea behind the distro, it goes beyond traditional curriculum subjects and also packs tools that'll teach students the basics of programming and music.

Whether you attended this past weekend’s Southern California Linux Expo (SCALE) or another recent open source event, one trend is clear: Linux advocates certainly love their Apple MacBooks. Here's the proof.

Firefox rocks because it acts like a Lego set -- you have your base module, and then you can stick extensions on it. Some of the most obvious extensions are toolbars. Unlike the embedded-application extensions like Chatzilla or FireFTP, toolbars actually modify your interface. A toolbar can contain search engine interfaces, bookmarks, RSS feeds, or extra tools for managing content. A lot of toolbars are very specialized -- tools for multimedia producers, musicians, and even Mormon theology students. Here are three more general toolbars that any net junkie will find useful.

You can find both design ideas and complete themes on the Web. You need to decide whether you want to work with an existing theme, or convert a design into a theme, or whether you want to start from scratch, unburdened by any preliminary constraints or alien code. This article by Ric Shreves assumes you have a working Drupal installation, and that you have access to the files on your server and deals with finding, installing, and then uninstalling an existing and current Drupal theme.

How much are Yahoo's volunteers worth? And how much less will Yahoo be worth if Microsoft scares them away? That's the question that should be at the center of talk about Yahoo's value — both as an acquisition for Microsoft and as good company to work for with.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Novell's Suse Linux Enterprise Server both use the Xen virtualization software, a "hypervisor" layer that lets multiple operating systems run on the same computer. In contrast, the KVM software runs on top of a version of Linux, the "host" operating system that provides a foundation for other "guest" operating systems to run in a virtual mode.

Welcome to this year's 6th issue of DistroWatch Weekly! Slackware Linux isn't the most user-friendly distribution, but thanks to the effort of several independent projects, it has been turned into a more palatable operating system for novice users. One of them, Zenwalk Linux, has matured into a sophisticated distribution, complete with superb hardware detection, a graphical package configuration tool, and several setup utilities; read below for a first-look review of Zenwalk Linux 5.0. In the news section, Fedora and openSUSE present new development builds, Software Wydawnictwo launches BSD Magazine, gOS hints at the change of user interface for deployment on Everex Cloudbooks, and CIO.com interviews Joe "Zonker" Brockmeier, the new openSUSE community manager. Finally, good news for the fans of SLAX - the long awaited version 6.0 of the Slackware-based live CD will finally arrive this week. Happy reading!

LXer Feature: 10-Feb-2008

This weeks Roundup has several sections this week for your reading pleasure, Linus gets quoted a lot, Microsoft cuts off access to old formats, Is MS Office adware?, Google chimes in on the Microsoft- Yahoo merger plus more. KDE 4.0.1 hits the streets, How to boot Linux in less than 40 seconds and in our FUD section a voice in the dark proclaims there is no year of the Linux desktop. Look for a SCALE roundup tomorrow where I will have pictures and a collection of SCALE related articles.

Bruce Perens doesn't regret the fact that, since officially co-birthing open source with The Cathedral and the Bazaar author and hacker Eric Raymond ten years ago, Linux and open source have moved from the sandal-wearing fringes to acceptance by Wall Street and big, closed-source industry giants.

Run by the organizers of the CanSecWest Vancouver 2008 security conference, the competition is a repeat of the "PWN to Own" contest at CanSecWest in 2007, when security researchers competed to win a MacBook Pro and US$10,000. The prize was shared between security researchers Dino Dai Zovi and Shane Macauley for their successful use of a zero-day QuickTime vulnerability, which they used to compromise the MacBook. The vulnerability was subsequently found to also affect Windows platforms.

OpenSource is giving birth to the community driven PC Vendor philosophy.

A few days ago TrueCrypt 5.0 has been released, a great tool for encrypting your hard drives. It can be used to encrypt existing partitions or create a virtual one located in a single file. In this article we cover the changes in version 5.0 and provide you some useful benchmarks.

This is a look at the fourth Alpha release of Hardy; including many of the applications that are now included by default and the major changes that will improve stability and usability. Among these are the addition of Firefox 3 and Remote Desktop on the applications side, and a new method for systems control known as Policy Kit, which enables the administrator to unlock certain functions for normal users.

libLASi is a library originally written by Larry Siden that provides a C++ stream output interface ( with operator << ) for creating Postscript documents that can contain characters from any of the scripts and symbol blocks supported in Unicode and by Owen Taylor's Pango layout engine.

Another week has slipped by with a good handful of Linux releases being announced. In case you missed them the first time around here again are some of the more interesting: OpenSuse released a second alpha version of the forthcoming OpenSuse 11.0.

eZ Publish is one of the most well known and widespread web content management systems. Because its setup is not trivial, this tutorial shows how to install eZ Publish on an Ubuntu 7.10 (Gutsy Gibbon) server.

Damn Small Linux won't add just any application to its 50 MB distribution. But when there's a big hue and cry, things that users really need tend to get added. I thanked Robert Shingledecker for adding my favorite lightweight image editor, MtPaint, to DSL, and I'm anxiously awaiting another improvement: Firefox in DSL will move from the current version 1 to the GTK 1 version of Firefox 2. That's a big deal because a lot of Web sites require at least Firefox 1.5 for full functionality.

SSHMenu is a panel applet for GNOME that allows users to connect to remote computers over SSH with a single click. The menu looks incredibly similar to the GNOME Applications menu, and it is fully customizable. The interface allows you to add seperators, submenus, and new entries really easy.

I've been as critical of gOS as anybody, maybe even more so. The Ubuntu-derived OS that first ran the $199 Everex desktop offering that sold through Wal-Mart and a few others was a distribution that was far from ready for prime time, as they say.

Yesterday I discovered a whole new world of Trusted Computing in the XBOX 360 that I had never heard of on the internet or anywhere before.