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After futzing around with the $0 Laptop for the past week or two, I'm tired. So I left the damn thing in the car (it's running Xubuntu 7.04 after display issues made me give up on Slackware 12). I don't quite know what to run on it. I'll probably put Ubuntu 7.04 on it in anticipation of 7.10. So I fired up the converted thin client -- the Maxspeed Maxterm with VIA C3 1 GHz and 256 MB RAM -- and ran Debian Etch. It's like a comfortable, old shoe.

Taking frequent computer breaks can save you from a debilitating repetitive strain injury (RSI). However, if you're like most people, you probably get caught up in your work and forget to take breaks as often as you should. The Workrave desktop applet can keep you on track.

In a continuing discussion about the difference between pluggable security and pluggable schedulers,Linus Torvalds added "the arguments that 'servers' have a different profile than 'desktop' is pure and utter garbage, and is perpetuated by people who don't know what they are talking about." Regarding the comparison between pluggable schedulers and pluggable security, Linus stated: "Really - not only is the whole 'desktop scheduler' argument totally bogus to begin with, quite frankly, when you say that it's the 'same issue' as with security models, you're simply FULL OF SH*T."

"Does anyone really know what time it is? Does anyone really care?" It's a fine song lyric for Chicago, but when it comes to computers, the answer is, "Yes, we really care. We, really, really care that our all are computers' servers logs, e-mail date and time stamps, and our backups agree on the date and time." How do you do that, though? The usual answer on SOHO (Small Office/Home Office) networks is to have each PC call in over the Internet to a NTP (Network Time Protocol) server. That's fine, but it does waste a few bits of network bandwidth and with any modern Linux you can set up your own personal NTP server for your PCs.

Microsoft is claiming that releasing the .NET Framework reference source code under the Microsoft Reference License will give developers the opportunity to understand more about .NET. That sounds good for open source, doesn't it? Wrong! Microsoft's so-called opening up of .NET Framework is setting a trap for open-source programmers. Open-source developers should avoid this code at all costs. If you ever, and I mean ever, want to write open-source code, I recommend you not come within a mile of Microsoft's .NET Framework code or any other similar projects that the boys from Redmond "open" up.

Learn about updated XML features in Firefox 2.0, including a controversial change to the handling of RSS Web feeds and the well-known workaround.

Well everybody knows the issues of reading and searching in log files. If you have more than one machine it even gets worse. This tutorial describes how to install and configure rsyslog on Debian Etch, but it can be adapted to other distributions.

Last Wednesday, I went to a pub with some people from work. I wore a t-shirt I picked up at Linux World Boston in 2003. As my co-workers left one by one, I moved to the bar to strike up a conversation with the bartender. It was a quiet night and serving drinks slowed down as everyone left.

You can send and receive messages from most Web-based email services with your favourite email client by using FreePOPs, a webmail access daemon. Web-mail accounts can be annoying to work with, especially if you've got several with different service providers, all of whom offer non-standard user interfaces to get and send email. Some webmail services offer a free or extra-cost POP/SMTP (read: regular email) access option, but FreePOPs can help you avoid the extra-cost plans.

It seems like only a short time ago when the idea of running Microsoft's Media Center Edition of Windows (MCE) struck me as the best idea in the world. It gave the appearance like it did it all, but that changed as MythTV developers honed their own skills and really took the MCE platform to task. Today, MythTV remains ahead in features and even has a few small, non-US OEMs selling these boxes, ready to go.

You could get 18.4 copies of Vista Home Premium for that. One of the favourite public refrains of the FOSS movement is that Windows is too expensive, and that Microsoft swindles consumers, governments, taxpayers, penguins, and orphans.

Asked to name the most popular Linux distribution today most users would probably point to Ubuntu, Mandriva or SuSE. But there is a dark horse that appears to making big waves.

On January 17-19, the KDE community will present KDE 4.0 with a Release Event at the Google headquarters in Mountain View, California. The purpose of this event is to celebrate the anticipated release of KDE's new desktop environment and development platform. In addition to the KDE community, representatives from businesses, press and other Free Software groups will attend. We hope this event will help spread the word about KDE's new release and how it impacts the future of the Free Desktop. Read further for more information about this event.

Frederic Lepiedannounced the hardware4linux.info website on the Linux Kernel mailing list,"the site is collecting hardware compatibilities and incompatibilities with Linux distributions in a collaborative way: users run a hardware collector program, upload the resulting file and then rate and comment how their hardware works."The project's website goes on to explain,"components are rated according to their Linux compatibility. You'll see on the site some numbers like 4.5 x 2 for rated components. This means that the mean note for the component is 4.5 and that 2 persons have noted this component." The rating scale goes from -5"does not work" up to 5"works out of the box".read more |Sponsor KernelTrap.org

I ran across a business website that refers to Amanda and Bacula as freeware. While I realize the average user may not recognize the difference, those of us who know better should distinguish clearly between the terms freeware and Free Software.

A combination of Linux utilities can help you determine who on your network is using which of your shared filesystems at any given time, allowing you to ask those users to log off while you update the system.

For the last couple of months, I have been racking my brain to understand why some people are able to migrate to Linux easily, while others take longer to switch and others still have no interest in giving it more than a 2-day test drive?

Looking for a small, fast Linux system? Take a look at Puppy Linux 3.0, which weighs in at just 96MB and runs from just about every imaginable media including CD, DVD, flash disk, hard disk and Zip disk.

As the sales of notebooks surpass the sales of desktop computers, any Linux distributions will have to support the wifi component of the notebooks. The best so far is Sabayon Linux version 3.4f.

Puppy Linux is a great Linux distribution to place on a USB key. It's easy installation instructions make it a breeze to install. From boot up to installation on your key in under 10 minutes. It's just that fast. Puppy Linux 3.0 was released October 2 2007 and I thought I would give a small tour on walking your puppy to the key. Enjoy!