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YouTube clips are everywhere these days, and I must admit I'm addicted to the site. Nevertheless, I've had a couple of small annoyances with YouTube videos. I wanted to be able to play my favorite ones on standalone DVD/DivX players. I also found I couldn't go backwards or forwards when playing the site's Flash videos with MPlayer. For those reasons, I decided to convert my favorite YouTube videos to DivX or XviD formats. Here's how you can do the same.

The Telecoms Action Group launched its national consumer advocacy campaign today, calling on South African businesses and private individuals to take out a full page advert in a national newspaper protesting the lack of alternatives in the SA telecommunications sector.

This guide shows how to configure internet access through GPRS/EDGE, using bluetooth connection with your GSM phone. The article is using gentoo and Nokia 6310i phone, but this will work with any distribution and any bluetooth capable phone.

If you are the kind of person who believes in the phrase "More is Good," then get ready to be bogged down by the impressive new set of features that Linux kernel 2.6 boasts. Since the very beginning, Linux is known for its stability, and kernel version 2.6 continues the saga.

I have to confess, I was looking forward to reviewing this book for a personal reason...I recently installed Ubuntu 6.06 on my Dell Inspiron 8200 laptop. I took a rather secret thrill in deleting Windows XP Professional and replacing it with Ubuntu.

Nokia is to add the open source Sourcefire intrusion prevention system (IPS) to its range of IP security appliances. Sourcefire's IPS includes the widely used Snort system. Snort is an open source network intrusion prevention and detection system that uses a rule-driven language.

In a surprise move, Linspire is now offering its CNR ("Click 'N Run") software service at no charge to its Linspire and Freespire Linux distribution customers. In addition, the company will soon be open-sourcing the CNR Client. CNR, previously a fee-based service offered at annual subscription rates of $20 for basic and $50 for premium ("Gold") access to new programs, had been the San Diego-based company main source of income.

Zend develops products for PHP development, and the company just hauled in $20 million in Series D Funding; a "strong candidate" for the open CEO job may be named in the coming weeks.

This article is from a new book published by No Starch Press:Ubuntu Linux for Non-Geeks: A Pain-Free, Project-Based, Get-Things-Done Guidebook by Rickford Grant. This excerpt covers using your iPod with Ubuntu and it is full of tips, tricks, and helpful pointers. Reprinted with permission from No Starch Press, all rights reserved. More information about the book and its author is at the end of the article.

Eric Raymond advocates pragmatism and compromise with respect to our dealings with the owners of proprietary multimedia codecs. According to him, we need to ask Apple and others to license their technology so we can hook up iPods to our machines running Linux. That will entice others to start using Linux, or so goes his reasoning. But this reasoning is flawed. First and most importantly, it's flawed because we're so close to the gold, so to speak.

The results of DesktopLinux.com's 2006 Desktop Linux Market survey are in, and the votes are all tallied. This first article of a series offers a perspective on how the various desktop Linux distributions fared, and why.

In the first two parts of this series we took a tour of the Soekris 4521 single-board computer and installed the Pyramid Linux operating system. Now it's time to build a good stout iptables firewall.

About a year ago, I was introduced to Linux by a technosavvy friend at work. I was, to say the least, a somewhat unwilling participant in the journey into Linuxland. But, I was really forced into it by our friends at Microsoft. Here's what happened to me... it may be a familiar story.

Internet Initiative Japan, an internet access and network solutions provider in Japan, has begun free distribution of the Mozilla Thunderbird e-mail client with an XML-based policy control mechanism. The service is being made available to individual users of IIJ's internet access services IIJ4U and IIJmio.

You walk into the room. It’s cool and quiet. You see thirty new workstations giving great service. Your cost of hardware was CAD$350 for each workstation, CAD$10 to connect it to an existing 100Mbps LAN, and about CAD$60 for a share of a server in another room (CAD$1 = US$0.87). Your software costs were only some download and CD burn time and forty minutes for installation. Your operating costs are virtually nil. The server runs for months without a reboot. The workstations have nothing but network boot loaders. You back up only one machine, the server. The workstations use twenty watts each and have no fans. Magical? Yes. Magic?

OSNews has published an interesting interview with Guy Martin, a "distinguished" technical staff member in Motorola's Mobile Devices business, who serves as an open-source advocate and community interface. Questions range from Motorola's Linux phone UI (user interface), browser, and SDK plans, to mobile Linux fragmentation, to Motorola's embedded OS preference.

[Indirect link - the commentary at Linux Devices might be of interest. Click to skip directly to the interview - dcparris]

Fedora Project Infrastructure is scheduled for maintenance during Wednesday, August 30th for co-location facility upgrades. The servers will be back online by no later than 08:00PM MST (UTC-7).

It is quite unlikely that any of us will ever see an open source version of Microsoft Windows in our lifetimes.

[Well, after the funny lines from OSWeekly about Microsoft playing in the FOSS community, I guess Sean just couldn't resist. That said, ReactOS sounds nice, but I'm still shellshocked from my long experience with Microsoft's Windows platform. I can just see me going through that printer install nightmare all over again. - dcparris]

Asa Dotzler writes: "Mike Schroepfer is bringing back the wonderful developer chat series started by Chris Nelson of MozillaZine so many years ago, and inviting you all to join him for a Q&A and chat at 11am PDT Friday September 1, 2006 on irc.mozilla.org, channel #mozillazine.