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Ubuntu is a strong desktop distro, but it falls short for some users in a few areas. Where are the multimedia codecs and DVD support, and what's with all the brown, for heaven's sake? If you'd like multimedia support with a minty fresh theme, try Linux Mint 2.2, an Ubuntu-based distro that throws in support for Flash 9, Windows Media Format, DVDs, MP3s, and troublesome wireless cards.

As of this morning, I found that ssh logins into my Debian etch boxes were monumentally slow. Using the -vvv switch it looked like the problem was down to a very long wait for gssapi-with-mic authentication. Trying with the -o GSSAPIAuthentication=no switch on the command line helped, although some boxes were also pausing for a very long time when dealing with public-key auth.

Tarus Balog and a small group of developers are determined to do for networking management systems what Linux has done for software in general. Open up the field, the OpenNMS crew says, just as the Linux devotees of Linus Torvalds said to the Windows world.

In urban San Francisco, the public works department and nonprofit organizations work together to preserve and expand tree life as part of that city's efforts to create sustainability. The city today unveiled a new Web portal and open source application that will help those agencies, and the general public, keep tabs on a growing urban forest.

In last month’s column, I said “I’m more secure on a Mac than I was on Windows XP.” Some of you asked how Linux fares in that comparison. To that, I’ll say I’m marginally more secure on Linux than on a Mac, but I prefer a Mac anyway. I can almost see my inbox filling with flames from you penguin lovers everywhere, but let me explain my opinion.

Who Creates Open Source? A consistent question regarding open source is, "Who writes open source software?" A second, often-unasked question is, "Why would anyone work on open source?" Many people don't understand why someone would program without financial compensation, because they view programming as unfulfilling drudgery. Alternatively, many people believe that open source developers must be students or unemployed, with an assumption that they work on open source in place of a real job.

Change your mindset and make the transition to AIX from Solaris. In this article, use the filesystem management and tools available to you on AIX to make your transition easier.

The City and County of San Francisco today announced the development and launch of a city-wide, dynamic online map of the city's growing number of trees. Autodesk, Inc. , through the Mayor's Office of City Greening, worked together with the City's Bureau of Urban Forestry (BUF) and Friends of the Urban Forest (FUF), a local San Francisco non-profit organization, to develop this Urban Forest Mapping System, which will serve as a central dynamic resource where San Francisco residents, community groups and city employees can update and share information about new or existing street trees that form part of the city's urban forest.

The folks behind AllPeers are hoping to stir interest in the Firefox-only P2P application by announcing the move to an open-source licensing scheme for the client application. The source code has been released and is dual-licensed under the Mozilla Public License (MPL) and GNU General Public License (GPL).

Ubuntu enjoys giving it releases funny animal names. There have been "warty warthog", "hoary hedgehog", "breezy badger", "dapper drake", "edgy eft", and the coming "feisty fawn." Well, with nothing better to blog about this week, I've decided to provide my suggestions for names. So for this week, and next, I will present my Top Ten Ubuntu Release Names, five this week, and the rest next. Read em and weep!

I’m sure that I have spoke of open source business models in the past - both from the user and corporate point-of-view. However, the one thing that I don't believe has been fully explored is whether there is a viable way to monetize one’s efforts, and do so in such a way that your offerings remain accessible to all.

The time you come to realise just how dependent you have become on your computer is when things go terribly wrong. Your partitions won’t mount, your files seem corrupt or, worst of all, your entire hard drive seems to have become unreadable. The first and most obvious piece of advice, as anyone would tell you, is to make regular backups. It is surprising how many people who have years worth of valuable files have few or none of them backed up.

Progress in the virtualization world sometimes seems slow. Xen has been the hot topic in the paravirtualization area for some years now -- the first "stable" release was announced in 2003 -- but the code remains outside of the mainline Linux kernel. News from that project has been relatively scarce as of late, though the Xen hackers are certainly still out there working on the code.

Internet Radio has been sentenced to death.In a move that recalls the Vogons' decision to destroy Earth to clear the way for a highway bypass through space (a thankfully fictional premise of Douglas Adams' Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy), the judges comprising theCopyright Royalty Board have decided to destroy the Internet radio industry so the Recording Industry won't be inconvenienced by something it doesn't know, like or understand.

Nuvation is demonstrating an ultra-compact, Linux-powered, intelligent IP camera reference design, at the TI Developer Conference in Dallas this week. The engineering consultancy firm says its camera can encode and stream D1 (720x480) video over Ethernet at 30fps.

Oracle Corp. promised to take the Linux software world by storm last October, but the major expansion by one of the world's largest software companies so far has failed to show momentum. Tiny rival Red Hat Inc., which over a decade built a services business around Linux and legitimized the free, cooperatively developed operating system for corporate computing, has survived the onslaught and even grown.

Dell is down on its luck a bit and recently decided that it needed to look like a good citizen. So the company put out an invitation seeking ideas from the "community" on a new website called IdeaStorm which apes the model created by Digg.

Taiwan-based phone designer and manufacturer Accton Technology Corp. is marketing a Linux-based dual-mode phone design said to support both quad-band GSM and 802.11b/g networks. The VM3228T offers rich multimedia capabilities, and features seamless cellular/WiFi switch-over based on 3GPP standards, according to the company.

It's a fair question, I think. Should Linspire give up Linspire 5.0+, contribute time and resources to Freespire (amongst other distribution projects) and concentrate on making Linux services the core aspect of their company? Before we try and answer this on their behalf right away, let's take a look at the current state of the market.

This guide shows how to install the Zimbra Collaboration Suite (ZCS) on Ubuntu 6.10 (Edgy Eft) and 6.06 (Dapper Drake) server systems. Zimbra is a full-featured, open source collaboration suite - email, group calendaring, contacts, and web document management and authoring. It has a feature-rich AJAX web interface and is compatible with clients such as Microsoft Outlook, Apple Mail, and Novell Evolution so that mail, contacts, and calendar items can be synchronised from these to the ZCS server. It can also be synchronized to many mobile devices. ZCS makes use of many existing open source projects such as Postfix, MySQL, and OpenLDAP.