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I am happy to announce that version 1.5 of the WinOSSCDRom is ready to download. The WinOSSCDRom is a collection of free and open source software for the Windows platform. For more info and download links please see http://www.winosscdrom. com

Ubuntu developers have taken the wraps off the fifth update to the upcoming "Gutsy Gibbon" version, a major release that will include significant additions to the Linux distribution. Developers have been releasing "Gutsy Gibbon" builds since May, but the "Tribe 5" alpha release this week previews many of the significant features planned for the final release when it appears in late October.

In Linux circles, Microsoft's anti-Linux site, Get the Facts, was better known as Get the FUD, and was seen as more of a joke than a convincing argument in favor of Microsoft products over Linux. Microsoft may have come to agree that the site was not serving any useful purpose, as the company closed it down on Aug. 23.

As you may know, the Executive Board (EB) of INCITS, the US voting body on OOXML in the ISO/IEC JTC1, posted two simultaneous, seven day written ballots - one to approve, with comments, and one to abstain, again with comments. The votes have now been received back. and are as follows:

to Approve, with comments: 12 for, 3 against, 1 abstaining (six with appended comments).

Abstain, with comments: Unanimous Meanwhile, becoming a voting member of ISO/IEC JTC1 is suddenly becoming very popular.

It's the big problem of the net: how do you make money if everyone can access the files you produce for free? Earning money is not evil, it makes it possible to produce more art or information. It's a waste of talent to need a day job to support what you consider your real work.

After publishing an article about removing backgrounds quickly in Photoshop, many have asked me how to do the same thing with the Gimp. While there is no equivalent to the Extract filter in the Gimp, you can still remove backgrounds fairly quickly. Here, I will show you how to do it with the Create and edit paths tool.

"The elections for five of the ten members of the Linux Foundation Technical Advisory Board[TAB] are held every year, currently the election will be at the 2007 Kernel Summit in a BOF session," James Bottomley, the TAB chair, announced on the Linux Kernel mailing list. He noted that this voting session would be held on the evening of September 5'th or 6'th, providing an email address for sending nominations and adding that anyone is eligible, "only people invited to the kernel summit will be there in person (and therefore able to vote), but if you cannot attend, your nomination email will be read out before the voting begins."

ESTO is a tool that tunes the set of parameters for optimizing a specific target program. Expert System for Tuning Optimizations (ESTO) is typically used for tuning, for maximum performance, the optimization options used by a compiler when creating an application. ESTO is currently geared toward tuning GCC and Post-Link Optimization for Linux on POWER.

Databases are happy to handle many parallel requests. However, active processes (threaded or forked) almost inevitably eat up a valuable resource: database connections. Learn how to use the antipool.py module in Martin Blais' antiorm library to make the pooling and reuse of connections transparent to programmers, and in a RDBMS-agnostic fashion.

You are probably familiar with common keyboard sequences like Ctrl-C to end a program, but there are dozens of useful shortcuts you can use in BASH to edit the command line, move around your command history, and control jobs. I've collected 18 useful Ctrl and Meta (Option) sequences to make you more productive in BASH. So grab your 'board and leave the wet suit at home, the water is warm this time of year.

A dispute over some open source software used for model railroads resulted in an important decision last week, involving the scope of open source licenses and the remedies available when they are violated. The decision has triggered alarm in the open source community, with a prominent open source licensing advocate charging that the court fell asleep at the switch in its legal analysis of the case.

In 2004 Daniel Robbins, the founder of Gentoo Linux, walked away from the project after creating the nonprofit Gentoo Foundation to handle its intellectual property (IP). In a blog post last month, Robbins wondered if he should take back the software, since it didn't appear the foundation was taking care of things. While Robbins didn't follow through on his thought, he raised an interesting question: Can someone convey intellectual property rights and then reclaim them?

Have you ever wanted to play with a new distro without having to burn and then reboot into a liveCD or do an install into a spare partition that you may or may not have?

Okay, I'm not seriously suggesting Microsoft is paying off Netcraft to produce positive survey results (although this is certainly a standard operating procedure for Microsoft). But something is odd, if not rotten, in the state of Netcraft. I have often cited Netcraft web server surveys as evidence that open source beats closed source. The Netcraft surveys almost always showed Apache leading Microsoft IIS by a wide margin, and showed Apache growing as Microsoft IIS market share was shrinking. Lately, however, Netcraft began to claim that Apache market share has been shrinking rapidly while Microsoft IIS has been gaining the market share lost by Apache.

If you use Google or any other search engine, you already are a user of full text searching: the capability to search for a word or group of words within many texts for the best matches for your query. Sphinx is a full text search engine for database content, which you can integrate with other applications. (You can test it or use it with a command-line tool, but Sphinx is most useful as part of a Web site, not as a standalone utility.)

Sure, it’s probably too early to dance on the grave of DRM, but we can certainly continue pounding nails in its coffin after Wal-Mart drove a stake through its heart this week. And that’s not counting all the garlic, silver bullets, and hemlock showered on DRM recently by Apple, EMI, Amazon, and Universal. It’s still twitching and gasping, and we may have some zombification ahead of us, but the tipping point is nigh. You can smell it.

I have pointed this out time and again. Like it or not, the patent war is already here. Luckily, if it hits full throttle, Google will be a part of it on the side of Linux vendors. Google uses Linux and is ready to battle alongside the rest of Open Invention Network, utilizing a collection of Linux patents against Microsoft if it comes down to it. In short, we have ourselves a virtual cold war of intellectual property (IP) propaganda.

There are a lot of free file managers. There is Nautilus, Konqueror, Dolphin, Thunar and more. All of them offer great functionality. However, they enjoy as a rule very intertwined interdependences, they demand a lot of libraries connected with their graphical environment, and they need X Window System server running. Of course, console zealots and users looking for “light” solutions are not left alone. They have MC!

User-Programmed Service model allows each SourceKibitzer user to participate in programming and development of the service.

Normally Linux systems can only read from Windows NTFS partitions, but not write to them which can be very annoying if you have to work with Linux and Windows systems. This is where ntfs-3g comes into play. ntfs-3g is an open source, freely available NTFS driver for Linux with read and write support. This tutorial shows how to use ntfs-3g on a Fedora 7 desktop to read from and write to Windows NTFS drives and partitions.