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The Ubuntu team is proud to announce the release of Ubuntu 8.04.2 LTS, the second maintenance update to Ubuntu's 8.04 LTS release. In all, over 200 updates have been integrated. Ubuntu 8.04.2 Screen Shots

Linux is quickly gaining popularity, but there are still many users afraid to convert as they are not familiar with the applications. Today our Linux guru Blair Mathis is back to introduce fifty of the most popular applications on this OS

I was window shopping in a high street electronics store a few days ago. I was delighted to see a shelf display full of netbooks from vendors like Samsung, Acer, Dell, Advent and Asus (of course), to name a few. It looked like the Asus EeePC had launched an idea whose time had come and in the process possibly heralded the long withdrawing roar of the live CD. I now knew how General Adolf Galland felt during the Battle of Berlin when he recorded that when he saw Allied fighters escorting the bombers all the way to the target and back he knew the war was over. Like Mark Twain, predictions of the death of live CDs may be premature but here’s why I think that device convergence and software development may, like those escorting fighters, mark the end of the line for live CDs.

The bonds of the FOSS community go far beyond software. Case in point, Arjen Lentz is stepping outside the bounds of the comfortable realm of software and launching bluehackers.org. The site is an effort to bring developers together to provide support for one another when dealing with depression.

All the Linux bashers use this as an excuse/reason why Linux is not suitable as a desktop operating system. You should never have to use the command line they say. You should have to be able to configure your whole computer just by clicking the mouse. People find the command line confusing blah blah blah.

Mobile communications depends on the availability of service. Not only have carriers been using Linux in their network equipment for years, they also are incorporating open source software into the middleware layer of the stack. It's key to maintain open and reliable standards for the health of the networks.

Citrix’s promised Xen-based desktop virtualization solution will be delivered in the second half of 2009. Earlier this week, the Ft Lauderdale virtualization company announced that it is co-developing the solution, known as “Project Independence,” in collaboration with Intel, one of the original investors in the Xen open source project.

Looks like the British Government is considering taxing all broadband users so as to compensate the music and movie industry for losses through Internet piracy. Seems to me they have not thought this through, if they tax you £5 per month and you download £50 of pirated stuff then you are still quids in.

A company specializing in open source authentication and auditing software for mixed networks says it grew by a factor of five in 2008. Likewise Software says its products can be used to securely integrate Linux, Unix, and Mac systems with Microsoft Active Directory. Likewise is based in Bellevue, Wash., where Microsoft also keeps extensive offices. For its part, Microsoft yesterday announced historic layoffs. Likewise boasts of revenue growth of 500 percent, year-over-year, and new customers that include HP, IBM, Oracle, and Sun. It has ongoing relationships with Apple, Microsoft, Novell, Red Hat, and Ubuntu, it says.

Unless you're a sysadmin you don't generally have to worry that much about getting email delivered, you just hookup your GUI email client to your external email account and you're done. But what if your system tries to deliver mail, for example from cron? Normally, this just goes to root or perhaps some designated user on your system.

Not long ago I reviewed Songbird 0.7.0, and in the meantime version 1.0.0 is out. What are the new features Songbird comes with and what improvements over the previous releases features 1.0? Well, to begin with, I was extremely impressed in a pleasant way with this Songbird release, so let me tell you why. Songbird is an audio player and music collection manager built using XUL, the same language used by Firefox. Songbird is available on all the three major platforms: Linux, Mac and Windows.

Ubuntu Podcast Episode #18 covers the big Dell college student story, the famous laptop killing bug, and cultural differences between Debian and Ubuntu. We also interview Jorge Castro, who manages external developer relations for Canonical.

So here we are, entering another year — and no doubt at some point during this year, more than one person will declare it the “year of the Linux desktop”. Of course it won’t happen and those who consider themselves free software opponents will soon let us know. Some things will never change. That said, is there any reason to suspect it might be different this year? Is it possible that the current economic climate is better placed to generate a significant growth in free desktops? Can the cloud of economic gloom have a silver lining for free software?

I haven't written a long, rambling editorial on why I do what I do in quite some time. Guess I lost the juice for it. But I just got rejuiced (perhaps it's my upcoming speaking engagement, for which I'll sound less rambling, I hope), so here's a lovely stream of geeky consciousness on why software freedom and/of choice is a great thing.

Microsoft today laid off 1,400 workers, with another 3,600 on the block within 18 months. We asked Linux Foundation Director Jim Zemlin what if any role Linux played in Microsoft's misfortunes, how Microsoft will react, and what it could mean for Linux and the open source community.

This router builds on the great lineage it has in its predecessors and shines ahead with being much more than a router, rather a complete headless linux PC. In most routers/modems, if you forget the password to your web-administration gui, the only option left is to reset the router, thereby losing all your settings etc. But not so with this little beast.

This is WFTL Bytes!, your occasiodaily FOSS and Linux news show for Thursday, January 22, 2009, with your host, Marcel Gagné. This is episode 46. In today's newscast, we explore whether Obama means a change to FOSS, look into a Gaza OLPC giveaway, learn that there's more to a job than cool stuff, consider an open betrayal, look to the clouds for FOSS developers, and wonder what makes a company's worth on that old stock market.

The recent news that Identi.ca, called by some an open source twist on Twitter, had received funding got me wondering about how active big names in the open source world are on Twitter itself.

Linux vendor Red Hat is updating its flagship Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) to version 5.3 with added support for new Intel Nehalem hardware and including new Java, clustered file system and security tools. Sean Michael Kerner reports on this, and a batch of other new updates.

KDE 3.5.x comes with Konqueror as the default file manager and it is still used in distributions like Debian (the upcoming Lenny release) or older Kubuntu releases, like the LTS 8.04 version. In this article I will show three tips (which I consider popular) for tweaking or working with this older version of Konqueror.