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I was an 18-year-old chemistry major working at Dunkin' Donuts when I got my first help desk job. Over a weekend, I went from deep-frying old fashioned donuts to fixing whatever computer a student brought in off the street. And I spent months in the computing center with guys who told stories. Thirteen years later, I'm a sysadmin and a programmer. I still pull all-nighters tweaking Perl scripts or helping a friend move their blog to a new ISP. And I still mostly work with men. We know that Open Source communities want more women. But what can we do to get there? Here are some things that I think we can do right now.

Hal Steger and Alberto Onetti - both of mobile open-source leader Funambol - discuss open-source marketing in the Enterprise Open Source Journal. Well worth a read, especially for those who persist in believing that open source succeeds in the absence of good marketing. In fact, real commercial success in open source comes as a direct result of savvy marketing.

I have been using the same computer for over seven years. I know that this sort of thing doesn't become a Borg like me but that is just how it is. To rectify this situation I have been slowly, piece by piece, assimilating components to create a new Locutus that will be more than just a bitzer but a new version of itself. Due to my experiences with windows I was semi-expecting it to not boot, have a kernel panic, the network wouldn't work and I would have to find some way of installing a lot of drivers. This didn't happen at all. Everything worked as it was supposed to. There were no errors, no popups, no installing of drivers needed. Everything just worked.

In proprietary software, Web page design is dominated by Adobe's Dreamweaver and Microsoft's FrontPage. Free software users have witnessed the rise and fall of several Web design apps, but it has been a while since a new one debuted. Now the next new release is here -- KompoZer, heir to the Mozilla Composer legacy and updated for today's technology.

Welcome to the Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter, Issue #59 for the week September 23rd - September 29th, 2007. In this issue we cover the Ubuntu 7.10 Beta release, newly approved LoCo team and Ubuntu members , LoCos participating in Ohio LinuxFest 2007, and, as always, much much more!

Olswang has launched a new unit dedicated to advising on open source technology, as the law firm aims to cash in on the software’s increased use in the UK. The dedicated unit will be led by former Slaughter and May partner and head of technology Nigel Swycher. It will specialise in advice on procurement and intellectual property (IP) issues arising from use of the software.

The world is changing and online applications are becoming more and more popular, whether for e-mail or word processing. The developers behind Bigboard and Gnome's "online desktop" initiative think it's time our desktops started catching up. Read on to find an interview with Colin Walters, more information about Bigboard, the online desktop and the obligatory screencast showing it off!

The Canary Islands have two derivatives of Kubuntu, one which is being installed in all their schools and one used by the largest university. The Jornadas de Software Libre conference at The University of La Laguna, took place in Tenerife, Canary Islands, Spain, from the 18th-21st September 2007. It was organised by the university’s Software Libre Office (OSL).

Sorry.. I was doing well for a while pulling all the relevant links together about Linux making headway worldwide, then I got waylayed. I've come out of retirement because of THIS monstrosity of an ad which I increasingly see coming up on Linux related pages. I hate advertising like this that is designed to confuse, but just in case you missed it: "State Government says Linux was too big a risk"

The following ballot is for voting on a Constitutional amendment: reduce the length of DPL election process. The vote is being conducted in accordance with the policy delineated in Section A, Standard Resolution Procedure, of the Debian Constitution. We are now in the second and final week of this vote. At the time of writing, 132 people have voted, out of a potential 1049. This is somewhat of an record for low participation.

Welcome to this year's 40th issue of DistroWatch Weekly! PC-BSD is fast becoming a highly usable alternative to Linux on the desktop and the project's latest release, version 1.4, is the most feature-full desktop FreeBSD ever. But can it stand tall against Linux? Read our review to find out. In the news section: openSUSE begins uploading the 10.3 CD images, Mandriva abandons its "Club" subscription service, Clement Lefebvre defends multimedia codecs in Linux Mint, Sabayon promises more bleeding-edge features in version 3.5, and Ubuntu closes on the upcoming "Gutsy Gibbon" release with a bunch of interesting new features. Finally, we are pleased to announce that the DistroWatch.com September 2007 donation goes to Damn Small Linux. Happy reading!

Way back in January, I announced a program to write Linux drivers for companies for free. When I did that, I never expected the response to be as large as it was. It turns out that there were two large groups of people who responded to the announcement, companies wanting drivers, and developers wanting to help out. My employer, Novell, has modified my position to now allow me to work full time on this project. Namely getting more new Linux kernel drivers written, for free, for any company that so desires. And to help manage all of the developers and project managers who want to help out.

Whew! What a weekend it was at the Ohio LinuxFest in Columbus, Ohio! Between the free (but not Free) beer, having to choose between apparently popular sessions, and the wide variety of booths, the biggest problem was choosing which fun to have.

In this week's KDE Commit-Digest: Beginnings of a list view, and an applet browser integrated into Plasma. Optimisations in Konqueror. More work, including image practice support in Parley. XMP metadata support in Digikam, with new splashscreens announced. Work on playlists in Amarok 2. The Noatun music player becomes a KPart, with musings on its KDE 4 future. Further work on Phonon, with developments on the GStreamer backend. KNetworkManager is ported to work with NetworkManager 0.7. Deep refactoring in the Eigen 2 library rewrite. Kickoff is ported to KDE 4 as a candidate menu replacement option. A plan is hatched to get Kopete ready for the KDE 4.0 release. Import of the KBreakout game to playground/games in KDE SVN. Final moves in the recent KDE SVN reorganisation effort. The KDE Bug Tracker starts to be upgraded to Bugzilla 3.0.

What do you miss when you miss an event like Ohio LinuxFest? You miss information and opportunity.

Sitting around on a Sunday night so I thought I would take a quick look at a small Linux distribution call NimbleX. With only a 100 meg footprint this distro was fast to download and snap a few quick shots of it plus a short flash video. Enjoy!

Dossia a consortium of companies for"Lifelong Personally-Controlled Health Record" has announced that they will be using the LGPL (a FOSS license) licensed Indivo personally controlled health record software for Boston's Childrens Hospital Information Program (CHIP) "Since the inception of the Indivo system in 1998, we have firmly held that the best way to get vital and private medical information to the point of care is under the strictest control of the individual," said Kenneth Mandl, MD, MPH, CHIP researcher at HST and physician in Emergency Medicine at Children's Hospital Boston. "Dossia and Children's share a common vision of promoting widespread adoption of personally controlled health records and are excited to be working together to make this vision a reality."

In this week's roundup of new releases: Ubuntu Gutsy beta rolls out, Pioneer Linux gives really long-term support, PC-BSD updates and Freespire adds an improved CNR plugin.

In this second and final part I'll demonstrate some of the loop-specific tools I've found in Ardour, Reaper, and Audacity. Tutorials and links to project demos are included, so warm up your headphones and let's get loopy.

Kick-start your week with four easy (but still cool) tricks on your Linux desktop. Install the media server you've always wanted but never got around to, or fine-tune your hardware to squeeze out a few more hours of battery power ... All this an more in this week's How To Roundup. Oh, and send us your favourite Linux tricks.