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PCLinuxOS (PCLOS) is one of many GNU/Linux systems belonging to the family of Desktop distributions. Its aim is to be a friendly and simple to use operating system. It was forked from Mandrake Linux (Mandriva at present) in 2003. It’s now a fully independent distro, although it does take advantage of a few of Mandriva’s technologies.

It appears that the Gentoo Foundation may be disappearing in a matter of time. Apparently, no one has time to actually do the work required to run the Foundation. There seems to be some momentum building behind the idea of handing over all of Gentoo's intellectual property to another Foundation, so no one has to deal with running the Gentoo Foundation anymore.

As my week progresses, I'm seeing entirely too many utopia articles, such as this one. And while much of the article is spot on, especially with those who would rather play in traffic that use Vista, the problem of wireless Internet connectivity and popular media codecs very much remains in disarray.

Earlier this week, just less than a couple of months after their seemingly-friendly deal, Microsoft betrayed Linspire. There are more questions to be raised and implications to discuss. Microsoft has disavowed any GPLv3-licensed software. Ubuntu will be moving toward the new toolchain, which is GPLv3-licensed. Linspire needs Ubuntu, which is the core on which it builds its products. If Linspire carries on adopting Ubuntu as its codebase or even falls back (some would say “forward”) to Debian, any “patent indemnification” will then be rendered moot.

Before everyone goes to arms over the title, consider this: Linux options are much more than just the desktop environment. Linux remains largely entrenched in the server realm, along with substantial growth in the mobile markets as well. The big question that remains is why we are seeing this? Over the past few months, I have seen ample speculation bouncing back and forth as to where the attraction is with other projects, and after some searching, it appears that the answer is not what you might think.

The Thimbleberry Inn's executive chef, Guillaume Portes, was sensational. He took the modest kitchen of this even more modest inn, and using local produce and game, and with a flair for the dramatic, created a menu that drew local, regional and even national attention, in ever widening spirals of epicurean and gastronomic success. Now, fresh back from a guest appearance on a cable cooking show, Guillaume received a call from a publisher, asking if he would be interested in writing a cookbook: "Everyone loves your food. You're a genius. If you write a cookbook we could sell millions."

[An allegory for your amusement—Sander]

Last month, Novell decided to push the limits of developer empowerment and perform an elaborate experiment in innovation by liberating the company's entire Linux engineering team for one full week of free hacking. To gain an inside understanding of Hack Week, we spoke with several Novell developers who shared their experiences and provided fascinating details about their unique projects. We also had an opportunity to discuss Hack Week with Novell's chief open-source strategy officer, Nat Friedman, who served as worldwide MC for the event.

For sometime there, I generally figured that once the next revision of the GPL came about, all of these deals that are being made with Microsoft will eventually be put to bed. I was also delighted to see Mandriva standing against the alleged patent violations that Microsoft brought up time and again. They clearly state that they, like other Linux distributors, are innocent until proven guilty in a court of law. But this kind of backbone becomes a moot point when other companies are all but lining up to gain Microsoft's blessing.

Ooma's guiding principal is that in order for people to finally embrace VoIP, it has to use the existing phones in the house (not PCs, mics and headphones), it has to offer cooler features than plain old phone service, and above all, calls have to be free. Ooma hopes to make its money by selling a $400 Linux-based gateway device (shown below) that plugs into the customer's broadband connection and existing land line connection. For calls to non-users, VOIP services like Vonage typically must rely on the land line networks of other operators and that costs money--goodbye free calls. Ooma says it's found away around that problem.

Most people in the free software world know two things aboutApache. The first is that its name derives from the fact that it was a“a patchy server”, built out of patches to the earlier NCSAHTTPd Web server. The other is that in terms of market share, Apache knocks Microsoft'sIIS into a cocked hat. Unfortunately, neither of these statements is true.

One of the best things that has happened to Linux enthusisasts the world over is the confluence of two big players one in the Linux arena (Ubuntu aka Canonical) and the other in the PC hardware space (Dell). And the end users have already started reaping the benefits. Dell has released device drivers for the conexant internal modems (a.k.a. winmodems) for their E1505n and 1420n machines.

This document describes how to set up OpenLDAP on Fedora 7. OpenLDAP is a directory server based on the LDAP protocol, that same protocol MS Active Directory is based on. OpenLDAP is an open-source implementation of the Lightweight Directory Access Protocol.

A series of encodings on printouts from color laser printers to discourage counterfeiting? At first, the idea sounds like the urban legend from a couple of decades ago that claimed you could hear Satanic messages when you play vinyl records backwards. Yet the evidence from the Electronic Frontier Foundation is that the encodings are embedded in color printers from all major manufacturers. Moreover, the issues raised by the practice have caused Free Software Foundation director Benjamin Mako Hill and other members of theComputing Culture group at the MIT Media Lab to begin theSeeing Yellow campaign to stop the practice.

In early June, Asustek Computer and Intel announced at Computex Taipei that they would soon be releasing a low-end $199 subnotebook PC, the Asus Eee PC 701. It appears to be on schedule, and when it arrives in customers' hands in late August or early September it will be running a variation of Xandros Desktop Linux. The Eee PC 701 comes with two interfaces. The first desktop is meant for users who may have never used a computer before. The other interface is KDE-based. Both Windows XP and KDE users will find it familiar-looking.

When Microsoft's Windows XP went gold back in the fall of 2001, the platform was, practically speaking, the only desktop operating system game in town. But is this town now big enough for Windows and Linux? When XP first appeared, Microsoft Office had won the productivity suite wars, Internet Explorer had driven Netscape out of the Web browser market it had pioneered, and Linux, while beginning to gain steam as a server platform, was a desktop platform that only a true geek could love.

Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you know that the Free Software Foundation finally ratified and released the new version of the GPL at the end of June. This marks the newest chapter in the history of one of open source (and free) software’s oldest and most venerated licenses.

Mozilla's Sunbird calendaring application lives perpetually in the shadow of its siblings Firefox and Thunderbird, garnering just a fraction of the developer effort and publicity lavished on the browser and email client. Nevertheless, it is slowing maturing into a reliable tool worthy of the Mozilla brand.

This tutorial is the second in a two-part series on locking your Linux machines down to streamline the associated support and administration processes. In this tutorial, you learn how to configure the Linux kernel to execute only signed binaries. This tutorial expands on the groundwork laid in Part 1, which gave some good reasons for keeping Linux's propensity for customization under control and took the first cautious steps toward locking down a standard Linux distribution to prevent spurious user changes to the baseline installation.

Ying Huang posted a new version of his hibernation patches that utilize kexec noting two changes,"1) the kexec jump implementation is put into the kexec/kdump framework instead of software suspend framework. The device and CPU state save/restore code of software suspend is called when needed; and 2) the same code path is used for both kexec a new kernel and jump back to original kernel." Andrew Morton noted that he was still interested however didn't intend to merge the patches right away.

In our house, the refrigerator door is where we post the family calendar, showing our family and friends' birthdays, school terms, and important events, along with public holidays. We create the calendar using a nifty command-line program called PCAL, which produces a standard one-month-per-page calendar with each day in a separate box. It resembles those mall-stall calendars, but the important dates in our family's life are highlighted.