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There's an enormous difference between your average PC consumer and the hardcore computer enthusiast. One of the key differences is how much time someone is willing to expend on a system.

In Windhoek last week, several African ministers met to review progress on their collective public service work. Chaired by FOSSFA patron and South African minister of public services and administration, Geraldine Fraser-Moleketi, the potential for free and open source software use was on the meeting's agenda.

This article explains how to set up a two-node load balancer in an active/passive configuration with HAProxy and keepalived on Debian Etch. The load balancer sits between the user and two (or more) backend Apache web servers that hold the same content. Not only does the load balancer distribute the requests to the two backend Apache servers, it also checks the health of the backend servers. If one of them is down, all requests will automatically be redirected to the remaining backend server. In addition to that, the two load balancer nodes monitor each other using keepalived, and if the master fails, the slave becomes the master, which means the users will not notice any disruption of the service. HAProxy is session-aware, which means you can use it with any web application that makes use of sessions (such as forums, shopping carts, etc.).

Who's fault is the deadlock in SC 34, the ISO/IEC JTC1 committee responsible for processing the vote on OOXML? One way of looking at it says that ODF and OOXML supporters are equally to blame. The other says that it's the surge of OOXML immigrants that's causing the problem. Guess which one is right?

Linux Mint 4.0, codenamed Daryana, was released on Friday. Based on the Ubuntu Gutsy packages, this distro appears to fulfill the development team's stated goal to "produce an elegant, up to date and comfortable GNU/Linux desktop distribution". It was described by DistroWatch as one of the surprise packages of the year and one of the most user-friendly distributions on the market. DistroWatch made particular note of the constant interaction between users and developers within the Linux Mint community.

I've been using the XChat IRC client for many years. The only thing I find lacking in it is a list of favorite channels. The Uberscript plugin, written in Perl, adds a favorites list to XChat, and also allows you to do things like auto greet users when they join a channel and hide nick changes, quit, and join messages.

Welcome to this year's 44th issue of DistroWatch Weekly! As the Ubuntu Developer Summit gets under way in Boston later today, it is clear that the project's recently released version 7.10 is a resounding success - certainly one of the most user-friendly desktop Linux distributions ever delivered to the computing world. We take a look at both Ubuntu and Kubuntu 7.10 and look forward to the project's next release - "Hardy Heron". In other news, FreeBSD gears up for a flurry of development releases prior to the 6.3 and 7.0 versions, Mandriva starts collecting ideas for 2008.1, Russia's ALT Linux revels in the success of Linux on the domestic market, and the popular GNU Image Manipulation Program hits version 2.4. Finally, don't miss the statistical piece analysing the DistroWatch web logs, with a brief note explaining why these data aren't as useful in measuring distro market share as some readers might believe. Happy reading!

Welcome to Fedora Weekly News Issue 107 for the week of October 22nd.

Better hardware support - this is something we would all like to see happen. And it seems that it could happen, thanks in part to a Dell supported project known as DKMS (Dynamic Kernel Module Support).

"Born last millenium", KDE and openSUSE's very own Stephan Binner gets interviewed for this week's People of openSUSE. Stephan talks about his beginnings starting with a Commodore 64 with Ghostbusters, to today's hacking on KDE and openSUSE. "During my studies I maintained the KDE installation on the faculty’s Solaris network (most played day-time game then was XBlast) and started in 2001 to directly contribute to KDE (C++ programming and other stuff)."

Ever have someone who just refuses to use Linux? Maybe it's you I'm talking about here. Well there is hope. I put these instructions together to take the DRM, Trusted Computing, and Vulnerabilities out of Windows. It's not full proof but it should bring you one step closer.

We are starting a short series of articles aiming to describe the key administration tools and packages used in Archlinux distribution. Today we are taking a closer look at Pacman — the Arch’s package manager of choice.

An Italian user asked for a refund after buying a Compaq computer that came with Windows XP and Works 8 pre-installed. HP tried to avoid the EULA agreement which states, approximately: '[I]f the end user is not willing to abide by this EULA... he shall immediately contact the producer to get info for giving back the product and obtaining refunds.' The court ruled in favor of the user who received back €90 for XP and €50 for Works.

After much work on the by the WeatherBug software developers, I am thrilled to announce that they have released a Java based application into the wilds of the Linux world. Available both in Deb and RPM format, this self-contained app will install easily on most popular Linux distributions. Just remember to make sure that Java is already installed first.

Blue GNU interviews Dimitri van Heesch, founder and maintainer of the Doxygen project, to learn more about about how developers can manage their documentation.

Companies selecting a VoIP solution must choose from a dizzying array of options, including whether a hosted, hybrid-hosted or premise-based telephony system will work better for them, and whether the benefits of open source outweigh the potential risks. Digium CTO and Asterisk creator Mark Spencer called the proprietary hybrid-hosted model "very evil" during the Internet Telephony Expo West 2007 in Los Angeles, leading to a conversation-starting blog posting by SearchNetworking.com site editor Amy Kucharik.

Taking a break from our graphics excitement last week with the release of AMD's 8.42.3 Display Driver, we have finished our largest (and most time consuming) Linux performance comparison to date. We have taken the last 12 major kernel releases, from Linux 2.6.12 to Linux 2.6.23, built them from source and set out on a benchmarking escapade. This testing also includes the Linux 2.6.24-rc1 kernel. From these benchmarks you can see how the Linux kernel performance has matured over the past two and a half years.

LXer Feature: 28-Oct-2007

It looks like it was a busy week in Open Source News. Carla Schroder continues her series on digital photography with part 5, Microsoft concedes in European antitrust case, Where are the American Linux desktop users?, GIMP 2.4.0 is released, a NY investment company offers to buy SCO for $36M, a Battle For Wesnoth game review and ripping and encoding audio files in Linux. In our funny article of the week we have, The World's toughest jobs: Microsoft's interoperability chief, funny stuff.

The author shows how to install Windows on a Solaris system.

This document describes how to set up a Linux Mint 3.1 full edition desktop. The result is a fast, secure and extendable system that provides all you need for daily work and entertainment. Linux Mint 3.1 builds upon Ubuntu Feisty and is compatible to its repositories - about 22.000 packages are available.