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What version of Linux has been at the top of the Distrowatch rankings for months now that I've never tried until today? PCLinuxOS. Everybody I know who has runs PCLinuxOS has good things to say about it. Scott Ruecker of LXer and the Los Angeles Daily News' own City Hall reporter Rick Orlov are among those who have used and liked it.

User is torn between needing an exchange environment and the comfort of Linux, so he chooses Mac. This is his experience so far.

Linux Journal's James Gray recently spoke with Tyler Mitchell, Secretary of OSGeo, about his organization's efforts to promote open geospatial technologies.

AMD and Microsoft should take note that open source strategies bring painful problems. Sun Microsystems knows this all too well. Just as Microsoft said it’s opening its APIs and AMD made its latest contribution to open source, controversy again bubbled up for Sun’s much-vaunted OpenSolaris project.

There comes a time, right after you burn your 137th MP3 CD, when you start feeling the need to establish a system for finding all the songs you treasure so much. It's the same with movies, application kits, books, and music -- you need software that lets you index your media quickly and output detailed search results. Here's a selection of Linux applications you can use to ease your work.

Recently I have been grumbling about project management, accounting and organizational software in general. Basically, Gixia and I want to just build the Geek Ranch rather than be bogged down with overhead. The reality is, however, this is too big a project to do without some back-end organization.

Over the last few years I have been experimenting with time-lapse photography. One easy way to compile a time-lapse video is to use dvd-slideshow, a tool for creating video slideshows from digital photos, and more. To get started, copy your photos into a single directory on your computer, then use dvd-slideshow's dir2slideshow utility to create the control file that dvd-slideshow needs.

The spread of Threading Building Blocks (TBB) into Linux distributions is gaining momentum: TBB will be packaged into the upcoming Ubuntu Hardy Heron release. If you’re not familiar with TBB — it’s an open source C++ template library that simplifies multithreading of applications to take advantage of modern multicore computers. TBB was originally an Intel commercial product; it was turned into an open source project at OSCON 2007.

JBoss seems to be undergoing some generational pains as it strives to morph from an open source products company to an enterprise open source products company. So its recent formal announcements covered the enterprise tack: something called Enterprise Acceleration that performs the basic blocking an tackling to show enterprises, ISVs, and systems integrators alike that nobody will get fired for buying JBoss. And then there were the pronouncements to the faithful that, while JBoss is trying to go enterprise, that it won't forget its roots.

Mark Shuttleworth, whom we have great respect for after maintaining his stern stance against intimidation tactics, has responded to our concerns regarding the existence of Mono in Ubuntu. His message to us was CC’d to the Technical Board and the leader of Fedora. It would be worth bringing it to our readers’ attention because some were concerned (if not outraged) about the subject.

KDE 4.1 will be what everyone expected 4.0 to be — a fully functional revolutionary Linux desktop. I took a look at the revision 777000 of this desktop environment and what you get is a visual changelog describing the current progress in terms of look and feel and features.

The installation instructions in most free software reviews aren't enough. If you decide a package sucks, how do you get rid of it? If a package rocks, how do you upgrade it? GNU Stow, a package manager for packages you compile and install yourself, provides an easy answer to both questions. Many GNU/Linux distribution developers use Stow, so you'll find it in the default package repositories of every major GNU/Linux distribution. Stow's only dependency is Perl. If you use a distribution that includes neither Stow nor Perl, you can use Stow's simple bootstrapping instructions to install both.

Pattern #5: Linux is not secure. There are some out there who would like for you to believe that Linux is unsafe. What better way to instill fear than to form doubt in your mind about a system’s abilities to protect your data?

Google's Picasa software is a powerful tool for managing your photo collection. It provides a simple interface for organizing your pictures, as well as some easy-to-use, yet powerful image manipulation tools. However, until recently the Windows version of Picasa has had some features that put it above the Linux version; some of these features, like Picasa Web Album integration, are at the core of the program, without which Picasa isn't very useful. With its newest release, the Linux version is being brought up to par with its Windows counterpart.

A new Australian chip small enough to be embedded into home and office equipment promises wireless audio and video transfer at up to 5 gigabits per second, ten times faster than today’s solutions at only one-tenth the cost!

[This is not FOSS related but if true, too cool to not share. - Scott]

GENEVA -- Feb 19, 2008 ' The creators of OsiriX, the advanced open-source PACS workstation DICOM viewer for the Mac OS, will for the first time show the new version of their 64-bit viewer on the new Mac Pro 8-Core workstation at the European Congress of Radiology (ECR) 2008.

Microsoft made major concessions Thursday that should make it easier for open source software to dovetail with or even replace Microsoft products, but a major caveat means the company's legal threats remain alive and well. Microsoft announced a number of moves that could significantly improve its relationship with the open source world.

Some platforms may lose their operating system-specific functionality due to the lack of schema support from the LDAP server. This article presents a solution for some non-IBM LDAP servers to support full AIX user management functionality by providing the AIX schema for these server types and the steps to update these LDAP server types with the schema.

Menus, pop-up menus, and toolbars in Eclipse plug-in or RCP application can be tricky. No more! Eclipse V3.3 introduced a new mechanism that’s easier than ever, providing a more generic approach for configuring and adding menu items to accelerate plug-in and RCP development.

Misys has released Misys Health Connect on Sourceforge as the 'Braid' project. Ryan Bloom comments '...There are a couple of caveats. First, we know that not all of the unit tests pass, that is one of our first projects now that the code is out. Second, most of the development team is about to head to HIMSS, so we aren’t going to be quick to respond to questions until after we get back...'

[I audio interviewed Ryan and several others from Misys at SCALE 6x, expect to see it soon. As soon as I finish transcribing it. - Scott]