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In the previous piece on Mandriva's usability, we looked at the good and the bad of booting to the Live CD and then finally installing the distribution. In this article, we will pick up with installing software, the available selection of such software and the overall analysis of the distro.

Levelstar used embedded Linux to create a PDA (personal digital assistant) for visually impaired users. The "Icon" has a custom hardware design with built-in 30GB hard drive, WiFi, Bluetooth, and USB, and comes with a full complement of "life managing software,"

In a recent lkml thread, the idea of getting the entire Linux kernel history into a git repository was discussed. Linus Torvalds noted, "I actually tried to get something like this together back in the BK days and early in the SCO saga. It was pretty painful to try to find all the historic trees and patches - they're all in different format, and some of them are unreliable." He added, "I've been thinking about trying to re-create some really old history into git, but it's still a lot of work.. And obviously not very useful, just interesting from an archaeological standpoint." Much information on early Linux kernels is gathered at oldlinux.org, and Linus already has the full 2.5.0 to 2.6.12-rc2 history imported from BitKeeper available in git.

The first ever Ubuntu Live conference, running concurrently with the O'Reilly Open Source Convention (OSCON) at the Oregon Convention Center in Portland, ran for three days starting on Sunday, and crammed in as many keynotes, sessions, and tutorials as anyone could possibly want.

Nominations are officially open for the 6th annual Linux Medical News Freedom Award to be presented at the November 10th-14thAMIA Fall conference at the Sheraton Chicago Hotel and Towers, Chicago, Illinois, USA. Deadline for entries is August 24th, 2007. This is NOT a officially sponsored award or event of AMIA. This award is co-sponsored by theIMIA Open Source Working Group. Free and open source software isn't 'magic pixie dust'. There are people making significant personal sacrifices as well as doing difficult work to make medicine's free software future a reality. This award is intended to honor the individual or project who has accomplished the most towards the goal of improving medical education and practice through free/open source medical software. The award winner is chosen by a panel of judges. Past recipients have been Tim Cook, K.S. Bhaskar -- Fidelity Information Services, Inc., Thomas Beale -- Ocean Informatics, Fred Trotter -- Synseer, MirrorMed and the FreeB project, Joseph Dalmolin of WorldVistA/e-cology and Will Ross of Mendocino Informatics.

A grass roots one-day Linux and open source conference will be held at the Toronto Congress Centre on Saturday, Oct. 13 beginning at 8:30 AM. The organizers of "Ontario Linux Fest 2007" are seeking to ramp up sponsors, speakers, attendees, and volunteers.

A group of radio frequency identification (RFID) technology organizations today announced their support for the open-source development of EPCglobal-compliant Low-Level Reader Protocol (LLRP) software libraries, which enable EPCglobal UHF Gen 2 communications via the LLRP universal reader-to-network interface. Linuxlookup.com has more on the seven RFID organizations supporting Open-Source.

Episode 04 takes us on location in Porto Alegre, Brazil. Where the first batches of XOs have been delivered and deployed. Meet the teachers using the laptops in the classroom. Where besides doing daily assignments on the machines, some students have already learned programing. Local culture has permeated the project, and as a veteran school principal explains, an improved education is set to equip a new generation of Brazilian citizens.

Sometimes being the open source software leader means distancing yourself from open source claims. Red Hat has bowed to pressure and improved the way it describes partner software licenses on the Red Hat Exchange (RHX). The licenses of companies such as SugarCRM, Zimbra and Alfresco used to be buried on the RHX site, requiring interested customers to spend considerable time finding the documentation. This hide-the-license policy angered some open source advocates who argued that Red Hat gave the misleading impression that all RHX vendors had Open Source Initiative (OSI)-approved licenses. Now, Red Hat is working to banish broad "open source software" claims from the RHX marketplace.

Ubuntu Studio bills itself as the"multimedia creation flavor of Ubuntu," an official Ubuntu project"aimed at the GNU/Linux audio, video, and graphic enthusiast as well as professional." It is certainly flashy on the outside -- even if it is mostly the same Ubuntu Linux distro under the hood.

SugarCRM has transformed from open source whipping boy to free software hero – in an instant. The software maker revealed today that it will release the upcoming Sugar Community Edition 5.0 – due in beta in two weeks – under Version 3 of the General Public License (GPL). This makes SugarCRM one of the biggest names to back the Free Software Foundation-led revision of the popular GPL. The move also distances SugarCRM from its own attribution-style license used with previous versions of its software, which has received criticism for failing to meet Open Source Initiative (OSI) approval.

"The news of Con Kolivas, a Linux kernel developer, quitting that role, along with an interview in which he explains why, could and should make loud noises around the Free Software community which is often touting GNU/Linux as the best operating system one could use, and not just because of freedom you have with it. In the interview he says certain things which should cause tectonic shifts in the mindset that we have all been having. Why didn't we realize these things before?"

Flash drives running Linux are not a new concept. Simply install the portable distro of choice onto the removable drive, connect to a target computer, set to boot from USB and enjoy. Earlier today, I came across Calao's USB-9260. Taking the ARM-based Linux approach, I found myself thinking about the possibilities of taking Linux computing to a completely different level.

The Oscars. The Emmys. The Grammys. And the award for excellence in promoting FUD? The Elmers, of course. Larry the Open Source Guy makes his nominations, and more are requested.

Eight must-know Linux commands that will turn any Linux novice into an apparent command line guru. Go on. Impress your friends and family.

Linux Professional Institute (LPI) exams will be held on August 11 and the organisers have asked that all people wishing to write confirm by the end of this week

Nowadays the main source of digital TV channels is receiving them from satellites using DVB-S technology. This method is noteworthy for simplicity of deploying and variety of multimedia content available on satellites. You can create a Linux-based IPTV streamer (a server that receives satellite channels and multicasts them into your LAN) using some free and/or commercial tools.

Lafarge Africa have awarded a contract to Jeshurun Consulting to deploy the Linux-based Smoothwall firewall solution at its various sites through out Africa.

There is currently a lot of spam where the spam information is attached as .pdf or .xls files, sometime also hidden inside a .zip file. While these spam mails are not easy to catch with e.g. SpamAssassin or a Bayes filter, the ClamAV virus scanner can catch them easily when it is fed with the correct signatures as ClamAV is built to scan mail attachments.

This article describes how to build your own silent, fast, eco-friendly Linux-based PC for use in a digital music listening system. The PC is based on a high-end Via mini-ITX board, passively cooled case with heatpipe technology, Debian Linux, and a little creative embedded elbow grease.