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Despite the “out of the box” nature of the Ubuntu Linux distribution, today’s lawyer needs to do more than create an Office document, send e-mail, or surf the net. He or she needs to use case management, litigation support, and billing/accounting software as well. Just go to your software vendor’s web site and click on System Requirements to see for yourself. It's available for Windows and the Mac, but not Linux

If you're a newb looking to dip your toe into the waters of the Linux world, Dell's line-up of preinstalled Ubuntu PCs is a very good first choice. After all, you'll be able to get started right out of the box, without having to struggle with unsupported hardware and missing drivers. But while Dell certainly appears to have the best offering of Linux desktops and notebooks at the moment, it isn't the only choice out there. Here are five alternatives for Linux-ready PCs.

With projects like Gobuntu and gNewSense aiming to provide a platform that is zealous about free software, the obvious question is “where can I run it?”. Pretty much any laptop you can buy today needs some sort of non-free bits to make the most of its hardware. Right now, software freedom isn’t a huge priority for most of the companies that make up components for the PC and laptop industry. To that end I’d like to build up a list of people would potentially buy a high-powered laptop if it were guaranteed to work completely with free software drivers and OpenBIOS.

We've recently hired our first CIO at MySQL, and it's interesting to consider how the role of the CIO is different from what it used to be. MySQL has some particular challenges from an information management perspective because we have so many employees working from home around the world. Otherwise, I think the role of CIO at our company is not that different from most other young companies. But what's really changed is the nature of IT in the past six or seven years.

Nokia's Navigation Kit for the N800 Internet Tablet works great when used in a car in metropolitan outskirts. However, the unit seems a bit pricey for what you get, is ill-suited to outdoor use, and seems to struggle holding a fix when the battery gets low.

The 2007 [Ottawa] Linux Symposium has run its course. All of the casualties from the closing party (perhaps made more numerous by the new practice of sending around waiters with trays full of shots of tequila) should have found their way home by now. Your editor has returned from this year's event; here's his summary of what took place.

I questioned the value of VC investments in OSS in a previous post. I estimated that the investments would have to be worth between $12.5B and $19.6B to be in line with the historical rate of return for VCs (i.e. 57%). Well, I was wrong, (somewhat). Matthew provided the yearly details of OSS VC investments and calculated that the investments would have to be worth $9.5B at the end of 2006.

Included in Andrew Morton's potential 2.6.23 merge list were a series of patches to make the x86-64 architecture tickless. Andi Kleen, the x86-64 maintainer replied, "I'm sceptical about the dynticks code. It just rips out the x86-64 timing code completely, which needs a lot more review and testing. Probably not .23." Linus Torvalds agreed, "we are *not* going to do another 'rip everything out, and replace it with new code' again. Over my dead body. We're going to do this thing gradually, or not at all."

Just a few days after going on sale, OpenMoko has received at least a thousand orders, but has since gone quiet. Nothing has shipped and no update on planned shipping dates. One developer (Harald Welte) is venting his frustration.

Thanks to everyone who commented on my last post, about Jabber servers. Quite a few of them seem to play nicely with LDAP; the trouble with the setup here is that we have LDAP + Kerberos, and it’s the Kerberos part that seems problematic.

I stumbled across an interesting and useful tool recently called dzen, a"general purpose messaging and notification program" written by Rob Manea. Basically, dzen provides an instant-on/instant-off pop-up terminal window, along with a multitude of options that allow you to run just about any command.

Ubuntu founder Mark Shuttleworth has announced a new"freedom-focused flavour of Ubuntu" devoid of any proprietary software, which may hold special appeal for open source purists. Meanwhile, some in the Ubuntu community are skeptical of the whole Gobuntu concept.

Voting is now open for the Fedora Engineering Steering Committee elections. All 13 seats are up for election. Anyone who has signed the Fedora CLA, and has an addition account (like ambassadors, art, cvs*, fedorabugs, l10n-commits, web, etc.) in the Fedora Account System is eligible to vote. Voting will end at July 22 23:59:59 UTC.

This week's Open Tuesday event in Joburg had enthusiasts chatting over drinks and snacks about all things open source. A talk by Dwayne Bailey of translate.org.za began on the issues of translation and culminated in a discussion on the upcoming meeting over Microsoft's attempt to have its OOXML accepted as an international standard. Bailey is on the committee that will be meeting with SABS to discuss and vote on whether or no Microsoft's OOXML document format should be accepted as a standard.

I found this post over at Brand X. It's one of the best ever answers to "what exactly we are demanding to do with that freedom?" Which is a dopey question to even ask, but it's a common mindset.

A computer running Linux can outperform the same computer running Windows XP or Vista. Even so, you may be able to make your Linux system even faster. Here are three optimizations, at different levels, that can make your Linux system perform better. Getting better performance is always a good practical goal. The three suggestions in this article provide separate but related enhancements that can provide better overall speed for your Linux PC. It is always nice getting a bit more "oomph" out of your hardware!

On paper, Linux seems to be the ideal workstation operating system for the corporate environment: highly configurable, free, secure, easily deployed in a network, extremely stable.... So why are medium and small businesses, the backbone of the US economy, not switching over to Linux? I have my own theories, working as an IT manager for a small company myself.

[Warning: FUD ahead. While the author doesn't say the points are valid, he doesn't disprove them either. -- Sander]

James Burgett is a great guy. He is collecting old computers from companies and individuals, checks and in some cases repairs them, and then gives them away to those who cannot afford to buy. He does it since 12 years, and each system is delivered with a free OS.

This document describes how to install a PureFTPd server that uses virtual users from a MySQL database instead of real system users. This is much more performant and allows to have thousands of ftp users on a single machine. In addition to that I will show the use of quota and upload/download bandwidth limits with this setup. Passwords will be stored encrypted as MD5 strings in the database. This tutorial is based on Fedora 7. You should already have set up a basic Fedora 7 system.

Linux vendor Linspire on July 11 said that the new Open XML translator is now available for use in its latest Freespire and Linspire distributions. The Open XML translator enables bi-directional compatibility, so that files saved in the Microsoft-created Open XML format can be opened by OpenOffice.org users, and files created by OpenOffice can be saved in Open XML format. Using the translator, OpenOffice.org and Microsoft Office users will now be able to share files because documents will better maintain consistent formats, formulas and style templates across the two office productivity suites, a Linspire spokesperson said.