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Walter Leibbrandt and Friedel Wolff of South African localisation specialists Translate.org.za attended this weekend’s Fosdem 2009 conference in Belguim. They sent Tectonic their thoughts on the two-day European FOSS gathering.

The differences between Linux and windows are chalk and cheese in respect to how the two operating systems are put together. While the end result of putting together these operating systems are pretty much the same functionality. It is the way they are put together which ultimately determines the true underlying nature of these layers between man and machine.

I am thinking the unthinkable…..I am considering changing from Ubuntu 8.10 for my desktop to Debian 5. I have been running the Debian 5 Lenny candidate for awhile and have bee very pleased with the stability and features. It actually functions and acts more like the distribution I need and work on than Ubuntu. Not so say that Ubuntu is bad, just that I typically do not need or use the latest applications. I mainly work on my Linux desktop for about 60 hours a week. So I really need something I can count on. Again, not that Ubuntu has let me down, it has never really crashed on me but I do struggle with bugs from time to time. I use my GUI desktop to work from as I manage Linux servers, either Ubuntu or CentOS.

Microsoft's recent survey proclaimed nearly half the population believe it is ok to use pirated software for personal use. This diminishes the argument by Linux advocates that you can use their operating system without any cost. Yet, you can't confuse free as in cost with free as in freedom. Here's what FOSS really means.

Over the past 4 months we have continued to receive a steady stream of emails from individuals recommending games that were not included in our previous free game articles.

Apple is pinning its hopes of continuing smartphone market dominance with a $99 cheapy iPhone, But will this be enough to combat the Open Handset Alliance with no less than 40 new Google Android handsets coming our way?

Sometimes I sit back and wonder about the direction technology has taken, especially with regards to operating systems. I think back to my Apple days and even when I got my first PC running MS-DOS with Microsoft Windows 3.11. Obviously, some of you can go even further back in history while others not far at all. But when I think about it, I think of how simple things were and by the end of the day, it all still worked! As the years had gone by additional “fluff” has been added to these simple computing machine, now adding complexity into the equation.

FluxFlux-Se has been released today. FluxFlux is a PCLinuxOS Remaster & provides a fully configured and ready-to-use live system containing all typical programs for the average user.

A UPnP media server can serve your media files (video / audio / pictures) over the network to any compatible player. In linux, few players can play media off these servers natively, but many require a plugin / library called “coherence”. This works, BUT you will see that many times Totem will stop detecting the server suddenly.

The first X.Org talk at FOSDEM 2009 was on version 1.3 of the Resize and Rotate extension. Matthias Hopf talked about RandR 1.3 and then Keith Packard demonstrated the transformations and panning operations using this soon-to-be-released version of RandR. Among the features for RandR 1.3 are querying state without output probing, multi-monitor panning, display transformations (translation, scaling, rotation, projection), and support for standard outputs.

This tutorial provides step-by-step instructions on how to install Xen on a Debian Lenny (5.0) system (AMD64). Xen lets you create guest operating systems (*nix operating systems like Linux and FreeBSD), so called "virtual machines" or domUs, under a host operating system (dom0). Using Xen you can separate your applications into different virtual machines that are totally independent from each other (e.g. a virtual machine for a mail server, a virtual machine for a high-traffic web site, another virtual machine that serves your customers' web sites, a virtual machine for DNS, etc.), but still use the same hardware. This saves money, and what is even more important, it's more secure. If the virtual machine of your DNS server gets hacked, it has no effect on your other virtual machines. Plus, you can move virtual machines from one Xen server to the next one.

Back in May 2000 the first issue of Linux Format magazine hit the news stands. One of its features was a group test of Linux distributions, reflecting the state of play in Linux flavours at the time. If you fancy a trip down memory lane or just a quick look at how beautiful Linux wasn't all those years ago, we've dug out the original article complete with screenshots - read on!

Are computers funny, or is it really the cartoonist? Today (or yesterday, or the day after tomorrow.. whenever this post was/will-be written ;) we stumbled upon this site that's shooting at teaching Linux to the younger generation by introducing Open Source to them through comics.

I recently did a bunch of package unmasking in my desktop Gentoo installation and did an emerge of KDE 4 .2 and I thought I would share my experiences in my shiny new desktop environment (unfortunately I was unable to see how Amarok2 integrated with KDE 4.2 due to some MySQL embedded compilation issues for 64-bit Linux).

The hacker, currently only know as 'uno' claims that the SQL Injection attack on usa.kaspersky.com has exposed activation codes, user details, bug lists and so on.

In order to consolidate project planning, bug reporting, team organization and translations as well as the freedom to add other models in addition to openEHR; OSHIP development has been moved to Launchpad.

The team behind the development of the ioquake3 engine, a spin-off of the open-source Quake 3 engine, is preparing for the release of a new update. The second release candidate for ioquake3 1.36 is now available and it features a number of new improvements.

What do you reckon, has HP lost the plot here? Does it really think that there is so little demand for Linux in the UK, or is this just a money making exercise that it could not get away with in the US?

Here's an interesting post from Mitchell Baker, Mozilla's boss, commenting on the EU's decision to investigate Microsoft for its Internet Explorer. It's mostly a useful statement of history and why Firefox on its own shouldn't be regarded as the solution to the problem. But for me the most significant portion is its conclusion..

This paper describes the recent imaging advances by Elphel, supplier of open source (hardware and software) cameras to customers that include Google (for select Street View and book scanning projects). It should interest imaging engineers, fans of open source, and those curious about open source hardware. The paper was written by Dr. Andrey Filippov, the Russian physicist who founded Elphel in 2001. Filippov has contributed many papers to LinuxDevices through the years, as regular readers will be aware.