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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!

PCLinuxOS Magazine, October 2007 (Issue 14) is available to download.  We apologize for the delay in this release; final touches on the new PCLinuxOS Magazine website helped prevent us from releasing yesterday.  If you'd like to be informed immediately about our releases, please signup for the Magazine-Announce mailing list .

 

As we always do, the HTML version is simultaneously being published for low bandwidth users.  The HTML Site is W3C standards compliant for easy browsing.

Some highlights include:

1. Tips for a Cooler Laptop
2. KDE User Guide, Part 9
   
3. The Hardware Database Needs You
4. Keyboard Shortcuts
5. How to repair a broken xorg.conf
6. And more...
   

New policy-driven end-to-end automation functionality increases business agility and operational resiliency while reducing TCO

First the US$100 OLPC laptop is selling for US$200, now we find out that the Eee PC from Asus will cost more than US$199.

iFAX, a commercial company that is built on open source fax server software HylaFAX, was recently included in Inc. Magazine's 2007 list of the top 500 fastest growing companies in the United States. iFAX founder Darren Nickerson says one of the keys to iFAX's success has been its commitment to the open source community behind HylaFAX. "Our success is tied to the openness of the software."