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As an experiment, I decided to bring my Evolutionary Computing presentation on making the journey into free, open-source software — a slide show originally created in OpenOffice Impress 2.4 — into Google Docs, which happens to have a presentation app in addition to the better-known Docs and Spreadsheets components. I revised the presentation — taking some things out, adding others and providing some updates on what I'm doing — and output it as a PDF.

This distro was brought to my attention in the BN IRC room, and whilst my distro hopping machine had difficulties with it (its a little anti social at the moment) I gave it a run on one of the many machines dotted around my house and found myself very surprised (pleasantly) by the results. Its a Slackware based distro, and in these days of MONO uncertainty and the ever growing popularity of about 4 or 5 of the “big name” distro’s, its nice to break out of the mold and take a look at a lesser known option (sans MONO I hasten to add).

Please stay away from GNU/Linux. Don't say I haven't warned you!

Quod Libet is a GTK music player written in Python with support for various audio formats, including Ogg Vorbis, FLAC, MP3, WAV, MP4 and WMA. Quod Libet has a different interface and a slightly different approach compared to players like Rhythmbox or Banshee, for example.

Vector Linux is a popular Linux Distro whose motto is “speed, performance, stability”. Version 6.0 was released in February 2009. Their stated goal is to “Keep it simple, keep it small and let the end user decide.” Having said that, this end user decided to see what was cooking at Vector.

Microsoft and Yahoo! are reportedly talking again, this time about an ad deal. It's about time the two companies realize they are a much more formidable check against Google search dominance together than they would ever hope to be apart.

Windows and Apple rely on endless upgrade cycles to keep the money flowing. Linux, on the other hand, is much more considerate of the planet and our finances. Eric Geier has five excellent ideas for giving new life to old PCs with Linux.

This morning VIA's Bruce Chang had submitted the DRM code for the Chrome 9 IGP with a request that it be pushed into the mainline Linux kernel. The DRM alone isn't usable to an end-user without a Mesa driver or something else to take advantage of this kernel component. VIA previously expressed interest in a Gallium3D-based Chrome 9 driver, but now today we find out they have no intentions on creating an open-source Chrome 9 3D driver. Instead, they just want this DRM into the mainline Linux kernel so that it can be used by their binary blob and to hopefully have some open-source developers come along and create a free software driver from their incomplete documentation.

Construct an on-demand software build service using ooRexx that uses the Linux® Kernel Virtual Machine (KVM) for better performance. KVM acts as the host for the guest operating systems that build the target software for the user. The Apache Web server controls the builds and stores the results for later retrieval by the user. Learn how to set up the build server and create guests, customize build requests, and organize and access build results.

They say that beauty is only skin deep — if that is true, then Linux has a good shot at Miss World, as its available skins are many and varied indeed. As the impending release of Ubuntu 9.10 — colorfully named the Karmic Koala — draws near, it's time to begin thinking about its skin, and that's exactly what the Ubuntu Artwork Team is up to.

Brad Spengler, the developer behind the Grsecurity project, has published an exploit for a vulnerability in the Tun interface in Linux kernel 2.6.30 and 2.6.18, used in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 (RHEL5), which can be exploited by attackers to obtain root privileges. Of particular interest is the fact that the exploit is even able to circumvent security extensions such as SELinux. According to Spengler's report, the vulnerability is only found in these two versions of the kernel. The core of the problem is a normally non-exploitable null pointer dereference, which becomes exploitable due to the GCC's optimisation function.

Rhythmbox is the default audio player coming with the GNOME desktop environment, featuring a clean, typical interface which is so common for GTK audio players. I could say that Rhythmbox has little missing features and it is rather complete.

When Microsoft offered more details about Office 2010 earlier this week, The VAR Guy noticed a rather interesting nugget of information involving Microsoft Office for the Web’s anticipated browser support and software as a service (SaaS) strategy. The software giant, it seems, will be giving equal time to Firefox (the open source web browser) and Apple’s Safari. Here’s the scoop.

The Gargoyle project is working on an alternative web interface for better router configuration. The project has now reached its first stable version 1.0.

The path to the Oracle takeover of Sun Microsystems is nearly clear. On Thursday, during a special meeting at the companies headquarters in Santa Clara, California, Sun shareholders approved Oracle's offer. The only remaining obstacle to the planned takeover of the server, Unix and Java specialist is approval from the US Department of Justice.

Mozilla updated Firefox to version 3.5.1 for Windows, Mac, and Linux on Thursday, fixing a security problem, improving stability, and speeding launch time on some Windows systems, according to the release notes.

Going from Windows to Linux need not be done all at once. You don't need to throw yourself into the deep end of the pool in order to learn how to swim. For those with a Microsoft habit they want to kick but don't want to go cold turkey, here are some ways to ease into Linux without giving up Windows -- well, not immediately, anyway.

Btrfs, the designated "next generation file system" for Linux, offers a range of features that are not available in other Linux file systems – and it's nearly ready for production use.

Open source project Amarok, in an open letter to Palm, has invited the company to work with them. The reason: the Apple iTunes 8.2.1 update guarantees that the Linux-based Palm Pre smartphone can no longer use the iTunes music management software.

While we regularly discuss Ubuntu, and to a lesser degree Kubuntu, there's also a version of Ubuntu tailor-made for the Xfce desktop environment. As most of you are aware, it's called Xubuntu, and after trying it out for the first time, I have to say that I find that it provides a better and more coherent experience than Ubuntu (let alone Kubuntu).