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Since the dawn of the distribution, there have been ways to remaster, re-spin, and otherwise rework a Linux flavor into something slightly different -- something that could be replicated and installed across multiple machines. These remastering tools are usually distribution specific (I first tried my hand with this several years back with Knoppix and the Debian live-magic live image creator) and vary in how forgiving (and permissive) they are when new users get too enthusiastic in choosing packages to add and remove.

Just in time for the end-of-year shopping season, Google Inc. is offering an unlocked Android phone targeted at developers but available to anyone. While the phone might be attractive to consumers and developers in the U.S., its price in other countries is putting off even developers. The Android Dev Phone 1 can be used on any compatible network, unlike the G1, the first Android phone on the market, which works only on T-Mobile's networks in the U.S. and the U.K. Developers can load their own applications onto the phone for testing. Previously, developers had to buy the G1 and subscribe to T-Mobile plans if they wanted to test their applications on a phone before adding their software to the public Android Market.

The main difference between Linux and Windows is that Linux is open source and windows are closed source. So? Well, that means that only Microsoft is authorized to change any part of the code of the Windows operating system. While in Linux, anyone can change it. The other problem is that the Linux Operating System doesn't receive the same level of support as Windows does. That means that updates and security packages are released with each new version of the Operating System (OS), but not as periodic updates as in the case of Windows XP's Windows Update.

[Saying that this article is 'slanted' and full of 'inaccuracies' as I will call them, would be an understatement of galactic proportions. - Scott]

Easier file renaming with renameutils. Ever been faced with a collection of files that need renaming and nearly gone mad from trying to do it manually? Lots of typing mv, or lots of right click -> rename. Enter qmv, part of renameutils.

If you're involved in healthcare IT and also have a fondness for open source, there's a newly formed group at LinkedIn that you may want to know about. The OpenVista Health Information Technology (HIT) group is looking for healthcare professionals who use the popular electronic medical record system and want to swap implementation and deployment ideas.

This is WFTL Bytes!, your occasiodaily FOSS and Linux news show for Monday, December 8, 2008, with your host, Marcel Gagné. This is episode 35. Today's stories do not include a sad RIAA tale, but does talk about Google's open phone, an exploding open source cloud, yet another open cell phone OS, pay toilet Wi-Fi, Mandriva is either doing poorly or doing great, and how to fail your computing class.

This week's feature story takes a first look at VectorLinux 6.0 beta 2. Following up on last week's feature story about the impact of the global financial crisis on Linux distributions, Mandriva CEO Hervé Yahi responds to the community regarding the recent dismissals at the Paris-based distribution while Novell posts mixed sales results for SUSE Linux. In other news, Phoronix publishes the results of benchmark tests comparing the performance of the newly released OpenSolaris 2008.11 with the previous version, 2008.05, Ars Technica names Foresight Linux and openSUSE as its distributions of the year, and DragonFly BSD gets a closer look. Finally, we get progress updates on Linux Mint 6 and a preview release of Fedora-based Omega 10 Desktop.

Encryption is standard in a lot of applications these days, such as email, Web sites, VPNs, and wireless networking. There is a lot of snake oil and ineffective technology that lies in wait for the unwary; Paul Rubens gives a clear and understandable explanation of the power and benefits of Public Key Encryption (PKE), and why it revolutionized securing communications over untrusted networks.

Stories of a struggling U.S. economy are on everyone's lips these days but some open source companies are doing what they can to help combat the pain. One vendor has decided to forgo a lavish holiday party this year and donate money to a local charity instead, while another is collecting canned food for the needy.

Free software advocacy is something I do — both for a living and as a hobby. Over the years I’ve gleaned a few best practice tips and I thought I’d pass them on. They may not all work or even be applicable in your case, but I have found then all useful at some time or other. They are in no particular order and in my opinion carry equal amounts of weight. Read Ryan Cartwright's article in full at Freesoftware Magazine.

Learning VirtualDub, the only professional book available for the leading open source video capture and processing tool, has today been released as a free download by Packt Publishing. First released in May 2005, the book is designed to get users started and then quickly learn the advanced features of VirtualDub.

Could it be a coincidence that he has “strong ties to Democrats”? Until recently, Microsoft, Gates and even Ballmer (at a personal capacity) invested heavily in some Republicans.

Archmbox lets you list, move, and copy messages from one mbox mail file to another, primarily for archiving messages. This tool lets you easily move all messages that are older than a given date into another (possibly compressed) mbox file, and you can also grab or delete messages by matching regular expressions against message headers.

There's plenty of ways to convert Microsoft Office 2007 file formats (.docx, .xlsx, .pptx) to OpenOffice.org. Now OpenOffice.org 3.0 imports these Office OpenXML files natively, but natively doesn't mean a fluent translation. You can wait for OpenOffice 3 to mature, but there's another way for the impatient.

On Tuesday a consortium of technology companies, including IBM (IBM), will launch a new initiative designed to help shield the open-source software community from threats posed by companies or individuals holding dubious software patents and seeking payment for alleged infringements by open-source software products. The most novel feature of the new program, to be known as Linux Defenders, will be its call to independent open-source software developers all over the world to start submitting their new software inventions to Linux Defenders (Web site due to be operational Tuesday) so that the group’s attorneys and engineers can, for no charge, help shape, structure, and document the invention in the form of a “defensive publication.” Linux Defenders will then also see to it that the publication, duly attributing authorship of the invention to the developer who submitted it, is filed on the IP.com Web site, a database used by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office and other patent examiners throughout the world when they are trying to determine whether a proposed patent is truly novel, as any patentable invention is supposed to be.

Tom Berquist, former managing director of financial powerhouses Citigroup and Goldman Sachs and now CFO of open source database firm Ingres, made the prediction last week. Ingres, the second largest open source company, counts the likes of BAE Systems, Cathay Pacific and Lufthansa among its customers. Berquist said the cloud computing model--of companies' serving applications over the Internet--requires vendors to spend large amounts of cash buying and maintaining servers, telecoms infrastructure and software such as operating systems, Web, application and database servers to support their software as a service (SaaS) operation.

Suppose you need to chart some demographical or geographical data. Using OpenOffice.org's chart module you can present the data as a bar, pie, or even exploded donut chart. What you can't do, though, is to create a map chart that shows data distribution by continent, country, or region. To do this, you need the EuroOffice Map Chart Professional (EOMCP) extension. Unlike many other OpenOffice.org extensions, EOMCP is not free, but the price is right (it costs 9.90 EUR or about 12 USD), and there is a free trial version available.

For this Howto I use Debian Lenny (still testing and not "stable" for the simple reason as - contrary to Debian Etch and/or Ubuntu 8.04/8.10 - the install routine does setup the initrd correctly so that you can set up encrypted swap and also an encrypted raid1 lvm during install). This Howto will be heavy on screen shots again - a lot of them are repetitive as I set up multiple partitions at once. Basically I will set up the system in a way that (a) everything [except for /boot] will be encrypted, (b) everything will be on a raid1 and (c) have an LVM for your data partition so that this one can be easily expanded.

A little help for those of you who may not be allowed to edit the .swatchrc directly. Since I'm coming down from a week of getting kicked in the teeth (I mean, being 24x7 primary on call ;) this week's Monday Unix and/or Linux script is veering from the direction they mostly go in. My next idea was to create a CLI book reader to compliment out previous script to find free online books.

LXer Feature: 07-Dec-2008

Ok so first some numbers, Tech Republic has a nice list of 10 mistakes new Linux administrators should look out for. Steve Emms gives a review of 6 Lean Linux Desktop Environments of which I had only heard of two before. I also came across Cynthia Harvey's big list of 40 Open Source Tools to help you protect your privacy online that has working links to each of their SourceForge webpages, very cool.