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Dear Steve, Hi, this is François, from Mandriva. I’m sure we’re way too small for you to know me. You know, we’re one of these tiny Linux company working hard for our place on the market. We recently closed a deal with the Nigerian Government. We had a good answer to their need: the Classmate PC from Intel, with a customized Mandriva Linux solution. And then, today, we hear from the customer a totally different story: “we shall pay for the Mandriva Software as agreed, but we shall replace it by Windows afterward.” How do you call what you just did Steve, in the place where you live? In my place, they give it various names, I’m sure you know them.

KDE4 edged closer to final release this week with the development team announcing the KDE4 beta 4 release, the last step before final release candidates are built. Although intended primarily as a bugfix release, beta 4 has enough cool features to impress.

Imagine coming home from work and instead of plugging your phone to a wall where it will just dully wait to be recharged, plug it to your computer via USB and make a few phone calls, send a few SMS messages or tidy up your phone book all by using your computer keyboard and mouse, rather than that tiny phone keypad! GNU/Linux and other Freedomware platforms have at least three user friendly software programs which allow you to do this, with varying capabilities and relatively good user friendliness. So let's see what they can do!

What is Miguel de Icaza's latest game? His obsession with tailgating everything that Microsoft develops - and trying to impress the company by producing Linux equivalents - now seems to be spreading to others as well. News has emerged that the GNOME foundation is participating in meetings to discuss adoption of Microsoft's Office Open XML formats. There are a few people in the FOSS community who think that they can actually fight with an 800-pound gorilla and win. Some of these people are apparently part of the GNOME foundation.

What could make the Free Software Foundation (FSF), proprietary software companies, and at least one venture capitalist into allies? The End Software Patents (ESP) coalition, a new organization poised to swing into action next month under the leadership of Ben Klemens. The campaign currently has seed funding of a quarter million dollars from sources those associated with the group won't disclose, and hopes to augment that with donations from individuals and companies for a struggle that, to judge by the usual amount of time it takes to push major changes through the US Supreme Court, could take five years or more to complete.

"A "truly open and welcoming" community with an agenda is a contradiction. That is what Libervis.com largely is today and changing that fact is at the core of the blueprint proposal for the next revision of Libervis.com."

The other day my father dropped off his old Dell Insprion 8100 laptop that I think he has had for many years. It had Windows XP on it and well he thought my son might like it. Well, the first thing my son said was "Gee is it heavy and slow" he was right. Its not the fastest laptop in the world and it is build rather solid. My son has a gaming Intel 3g machine and he likes his video game so I could see his point.

Everex, a longtime personal computer vendor, has unveiled its latest PC featuring Ubuntu Linux-based open-source productivity software and Google-based Web 2.0 applications, for a mere $198. The Everex Green gPC TC2502 includes popular applications from Google, Mozilla, Skype and OpenOffice.org. It runs gOS Initial G, which in turn is based on Ubuntu Linux 7.10 The gOS operating system features a simple and intuitive Linux Enlightenment E17 desktop interface with a Google-centric theme. The system comes with a lifetime of free updates and revisions. The Everex gPC will be available at some, but not all, Wal-Mart stores and walmart.com for $198 starting in early November.

How to Install Beryl in Debian Etch

If you lose a Windows password, or you buy a system that has an OS on it, but you don't know the password, what are you to do? The best thing to do would be to throw in a Linux CD, format the drive, and install the Distro. But, what if you want to boot to the system and see what's on there, and get data off?

Explore new ways to record UNIX logins and other system activities in a number of different logs, and take advantage of this information to monitor user usage. This can be helpful from a number of perspectives, either to use for chargeback reporting or just to get an idea of how busy and active individual users are on the system to help when planning and allocating resources.

In public health, harm reduction is a practice that, rather than trying to eradicate potentially dangerous choices like prostitution, tries to minimize their effects. Often, the practice involves a limited condoning of the practice, such as safe injection sites for addicts. Harm reduction is the path that Fedora 8 has chosen on the issue of MP3 and other non-free codecs in the form of Codec Buddy, a Codeina-based program that tries to educate users about free software while giving them easy legal access to codecs by linking to the commercial Fluendo site. It's a decision about which the Fedora Board and community leaders feel considerable ambivalence.

Upgrade Ubuntu 7.04 (Feisty Fawn) to Ubuntu 7.10 (Gutsy Gibbon)

China, which has long wished to develop its own computer industry, has chosen to go with Linux on the software side. Loongson is its hope for the hardware side. The Institute of Computing Technology (ICT), a department of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), has been developing the Loongson processor since 2002. Rather than use the x86 instruction set used in chips from Intel and AMD, Loongson uses MIPS, an instruction set patented by MIPS Technologies. This means that Loongson chips are unable to run the full version of Microsoft Windows, so they run Linux instead.

Users starting with Ruby and Rails are faced with the task of downloading source code, obtaining compilers, compiling code, and finding a relational database to use. Starter Toolkit for DB2 on Rails is a set of tools that enables rapid building of Web applications with Ruby on Rails and DB2.

Pundits say it is simply impossible to count all of the Linux servers in the market today. The Linux community is questioning research that suggests the open-source operating system is losing market share to Windows on preinstalled x86 servers, saying that Linux is undercounted in those kinds of studies. An analysis of IDC Quarterly Server Tracker figures for the past six quarters showed that Linux growth started to falter and reverse its positive course relative to both Windows Server and the market as a whole over that period.

The KDE Community is happy to release the fourth Beta for KDE 4.0. This Beta aimed at further polishing of the KDE codebase and we would love to start receiving feedback from testers. At the same time, a Release Candidate for the KDE 4.0 Development Platform is released. This Development Platform contains the bits and pieces needed to run and build applications using KDE 4 technology. The purpose of this Development Platform is to make it easier for third parties to port their applications to KDE 4, without having to wait until the full desktop is polished enough for the final 4.0 release.

Internet SCSI (iSCSI) is a network protocol that allows you to use of the SCSI protocol over TCP/IP networks. It is good alternative to Fibre Channel-based SANs. You can easily manage, mount and format iSCSI Volume under Linux. It allows access to SAN storage over Ethernet. Open-iSCSI project is a high-performance, transport independent, multi-platform implementation of iSCSI. Open-iSCSI is partitioned into user and kernel parts.

Network administrators frequently use the Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP) to implement a centralized directory server. You can use LDAP to authenticate users in Apache. Two popular open source LDAP solutions are OpenLDAP and Red Hat Directory Server. According to the Apache documentation, Novell LDAP and iPlanet Directory Server are also supported. This article focuses on OpenLDAP, but the concepts and examples should be applicable to the others.

One of the oft-mentioned weaknesses of Linux, fragmentation, just happens to be one of its greatest strengths. A broad range of choices in an immature market is a good thing. Of course, choice does come at a cost. For example, there may be no standard way to do a particular task. Further, development resources will sometimes be split among two or more projects. However, these are weaknesses in the short term only.One could similarly argue that evolution of species suffers from the same ‘weakness’ of fragmentation. However, in the long term, the survival and consolidation of the best traits results in an improved breed. Eventually, one of the many approaches to some desktop task will rise to dominance and show the market the right way to do it, and, at the same time, reduce the fragmentation problem.