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Looking for a lightweight Linux alternative? Damn Small Linux 4.1 is now available and clocks in at under 49MB in size. Get a copy and run it from CD, hard disk or even boot from a USB stick.

A friend of mine kept going on about how amazing Ubuntu was. He showed me some YouTube videos of the Beryl/Compiz interfaces and I got really excited. He assured me that it was possible to run it on my laptop. That night I installed it (it took a week to get everything working) and I haven’t used Windows since. I’m now on my second laptop (my old one didn’t have a good enough graphics card) and have since installed Ubuntu 7.10 (fresh install). I don’t hate Ubuntu (or Linux for that matter), I just have a long list of things that I hate about it.

[How often can you miss the ball in a single article? Quite a lot it appears... - Sander]

Gartner has gone on the warpath, smacking down proprietary vendors' practice of discounting upfront license fees in order to lock customers into lucrative, ongoing maintenance contracts. The ironic thing is that it sounds somewhat similar to how commercial open-source companies price their software, except that there is no upfront license fees.

Towards the middle of last month, NVIDIA had released the 169.04 Beta Linux Driver. The change-log was quite lengthy and what we had discovered while benchmarking the GeForce 8 series was that there were improvements to be found in this release and it was far more than a simple version bump. One of the reported changes for this driver release was "improved RENDER performance", and out of requests from readers and interest by the Linux desktop community at large, we have conducted XRender benchmarks using render_bench and have the NVIDIA results available today.

Red Hat has an announcement tomorrow that we'll be telling you about in due course. In the meantime, here's a snippet: a Red Hat vice president slated Novell's real-time SUSE Linux which launched last week, saying it's code that Red Hat would only treat as beta - and Red Hat should know because it wrote most of it.

I found a really interesting device today in the vast expanses of Internet. A company named Aleutia (established in London, 2006) sells an extremely mini PC that consumes a really small amount of energy (8 watts), runs Linux and can be powered by the sun! It’s named Aleutia E1 and is available starting at 250$ (180 EUR).

[Warning: Bad grammar ahead. - Sander]

"Interoperability" has become a weasel word. The word is regularly used to insinuate that two (or more) computer systems should work very well, but they usually work well for the wrong reasons.

This is the third in a series of articles that examine why the ODF Foundation closed down. The leaders of the recently shuttered OpenDocument Foundation have moved their attention and efforts away from the Open Document Format and towards the W3C's Compound Document Format, which they believe will be able to neutralize Microsoft Office by repurposing those documents.

No matter what Linux distribution you are using, chances are you'll find more than one graphical FTP client in its repositories, but if you are looking for a powerful command-line FTP tool, your best bet is lftp. Of course, you can always use the good old ftp command, but lftp takes the task of managing files and directories using the FTP protocol to a new level. To see what I mean, let's use lftp to write a script that creates a local backup copy of a Web site.

As a lawyer, law professor and software programmer, Eben Moglen is passionate about technology, software and user freedom. A former board member of the Free Software Foundation and the founder, president and executive director of the Software Freedom Law Center in New York since 2005, Moglen has worked to protect and advance open source and free software. Moglen recently talked with Computerworld about his work, his belief in open source and what he sees as the changing future of software in the world economy.

The NetBeans community has released the latest build of its open source, Java-based integrated development environment (IDE) with, among other new features, a dual-licensing scheme. NetBeans 6.0 Beta 2 is licensed under both the GNU General Public License (GPL) v2 with ClassPath exception and Sun Microsystems' Common Development and Distribution License (CDDL). NetBeans creator and primary corporate sponsor Sun Microsystems proposed adding the GPL license option.

Ubuntu developer Matthew Garrett has succeeded in getting the MPAA to remove their 'University Toolkit' after claims it violated the GNU GPL. After several unsuccessful attempts to contact the MPAA directly, Garrett eventually emailed the group's ISP and the violating software was taken down.

ESET has announced three new products for Linux and FreeBSD users. The new Gateway, File and Mail products provide SMB and enterprise users with the highest level of malware protection throughout their Linux infrastructure, without impacting on network performance. ESET Gateway Security for Linix/FreeBSD provides a first line of defence against evolving threats by protecting an organisation’s HTTP and FTP gateway from known and unknown viruses, worms, trojans, spyware and phishing.

Sorry for the delay, but Xfce 4.4.2 is now available. It's the second maintenance release in the 4.4 stable series, focusing on fixing bugs and updating translations. Downloads are available from the Xfce website. An overview of changes is available in the changelog. Enjoy!

Amadeus this week will unveil the first components of a new next-generation distribution technology platform for the hotel industry. As a first step, Amadeus has completed the migration of the 75,000 hotel properties that participate in its GDS from a system based on TPF (transaction processing facility) to a Linux platform, Jerome Destors, deputy managing director of Amadeus' Hospitality Business Group, said. All hotel GDS operations are now running on the open-systems platform.

Linux's market share has increased significantly in the last year. The rate of increase accelerated after Dell began selling machines with Ubuntu in May of this year.

The new Asus Eee PC has been released to many positive reviews and great consumer interest. A streamlined and customized Xandros and KDE interface combines with other free software applications, a slim form factor and an attractive price point. HotHardware.com was one of the very first sites to review the Asus Eee and report back on this new device. Read on for an interview with Editor-in-Chief Dave Altavilla and his thoughts on the Asus Eee PC and its value proposition.

New Linux based JeOS (Just Enough Operating System) facilitates rapid deployment of enterprise service management and help desk infrastructure.

While there are some Linux users who still insist on running free software exclusively, a growing number are more than happy to mix and match open-source and proprietary software. For these latter users, Ubuntu 7.10-based Mint 4.0 is a distribution made in heaven.

The open source model has taken its toll on a number of EnterpiseDB staff. The company recently laid off some sales workers and under performers, as it realigns its business. According to CEO Andy Astor, EnterpriseDB has enjoyed a strong recent run. “We are in the middle of our best quarter ever,” Astor said. “We are in extremely good shape right now.”