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Eager to hop onto the 3G network, James Archibald had to first bang his head against a few hardware compatibility issues. After longer than he would like to admit and many dead ends, he brings these handy pearls of wisdom for anyone in a similar situation.

Sometimes it can be handy to set up your own repository to prevent from downloading the remote repository over and over again. This tutorial shows how to create a CentOS mirror for your local network. If you have to install multiple systems in your local network then all needed packages can be downloaded over the fast LAN connection, thus saving your internet bandwidth.

In this week's KDE Commit-Digest: Work on engine configurability, data management, a packaging system for Plasmoids and themes, and new refinements in desktop icon interaction in Plasma.

You would think that Skype would be doing all it can to keep us Linux users happy, what with the painfully slow progress in developing a Linux client to date and the release of Skype for Linux 1.4 over the weekend. But customer support at the Skype Linux forums seem to suggest otherwise.

The Light edition of the Mint 3.0 Linux distribution is now available. Compared to the regular version of Mint, the Light edition ships without proprietary software, patented technologies, and support for restricted formats. We took a peek this afternoon at this GNOME-based LiveCD distribution.

It took me over a decade to figure out that I wanted to promote Free and Open Source Software. I have one person to thank for getting the gears rolling, and inspiring me to be what I want to be and nothing else that I didn't want to be. Thank you Dad, and Happy Father's Day.

LXer Feature: 17-Jun-2007

First off, Happy Fathers Day to all you Fathers out there, especially mine. It seems that Microsoft is all over the news this week. Between the Linspire deal, getting help from an old friend in the Justice Department to yet another one of their shills stating that OpenXML really is an open standard. Not to worry though, I have lots of other articles for you to check out.

The NCA has been working on Linpro's complaint for a year, looking into both the technological and legal aspects. – We made it clear to Microsoft that we were preparing sanctions, as the school agreements excluxded competitors from this market. Now that they have met our demands, we dismiss the case, says NCA department director Jostein Skaar to Norwegian daily Dagbladet. From now on, schools will only be licensed for PCs actually using Microsoft software, and not for all computers, including PCs using software from competitors like Linux, Mac and Openoffice.org.

The Venezuelan government of President Hugo Chavez announced the launch of their "Bolivarian Computers" last week, consisting of four different models produced in Venezuela with Chinese technology. The new computers will run the open-source Linux operating system and will first be used inside the government "missions" and state companies and institutions but eventually are expected to be sold across Venezuela and Latin America. .......
With respect to the operating system, Venezuela has taken a strong position in favor of open-source software in order to "promote technological development" and help "reach technological independence." For this reason the computers will use the open-source Linux, but the components are also compatible with the Windows operating system.

According to the debian.org mailing list three security vulnerabilites have now been fixed with the release of numerous updates for Linux kernel 2.6.8 as detailed in Debian Security Advisory DSA 1304-1.

IBM acquires software governance

[Not specific to GNU/Linux or FOSS, but might be of interest to some in our audience - dcparris]

SAN JOSE, Calif., June 14 /PRNewswire/ -- Availigent, a leading provider of Application Service Management software for Linux-based dynamic data centers, has named Silicon Valley information technology expert Mark Egan to its board of directors.

Getmail is a program for retrieving emails from remote servers; it is very similar to fetchmail, but more flexible. For example, it can be configured to deliver mails directly to a Maildir or mbox mailbox without the need for an MTA such as Postfix, but of course it can also pipe the mails through an MTA if you want. Getmail can use so called filters such as SpamAssassin and ClamAV to scan the mails, and you can even tell getmail to delete mails on the original server only after a certain number of days.

Azul Systems, today announced certification of the JBoss Application Server 4.2 on the Azul Compute Appliance. The joint solution is being deployed by CitiStreet to drive down the total cost of ownership (TCO) for the company's data center as it expands for large Java-based deployments.

In addition to Chris DiBona's words about NVIDIA and ATI binary display drivers, Google had also made an interesting splash at the first-ever Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit (which they had kindly hosted at their Mountain View campus) during a presentation by the Google Linux Client Team. What was it? Well, there are some "significant accomplishments" and other new Google desktop applications coming out this year for the Linux platform.

We are live from the 15th annual VistA community meeting on the campus of the University of Washington Medical School in Seattle, Washington. The major news so far is the announcement of a subscription service from theWorldVistA organization for updates to the CCHIT certified WorldVistA EHR/VOE 1.0 Details to follow.

Now that Fedora 7 has been released, Fedora project leader Max Spevack has a little bit of breathing room. Like nature, LWN abhors a vacuum, so we sent Max a list of questions and a request for answers. We are now happy to present the answers.

The agency turns to NetBeans, other open-source tools to project the water supply.

"OpenBSD is free as in air," Theo de Raadt [interview] stated in a recent thread on the OpenBSD -misc mailing list. The discussion began with a note that the Open Sound System [story] had recently been "open sourced" under the GPLv2 and CDDL leading Theo to comment, "noone cares about being Open and Free anymore. They just care about being called Open and Free, and how convenient -- a bunch of laywers generated an organization that will label then Open and Free when they are not in fact so."

Due to the amazing feedback regarding my Linux and Firefox Compatibility pages, I've written about how I got into open source software. Read all about garnering support for non-proprietary software such as Linux and Firefox.