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Personal video recorders free you from the constraints of TV schedules, let you skip advertising, pause live TV, and much more. You can find commercial PVR products, such as Windows Media Centre Edition; dedicated devices, such as TiVo; and open source PVR projects, such as MythTV, which is widely hailed as the best free PVR solution, with features that even commercial competitors lack. MythTV's downside is its complex setup; you need to install a Linux distro, then MythTV, which can be a daunting prospect for non-technical users. In 2003, developers combined MythTV with the Knoppix live CD distribution, which aims at simplifying Linux installations, to create KnoppMyth, a product that's as easy to use as Knoppix, with the power of MythTV.

During the first three days of July, 25 Central and Eastern Europeans gathered for a three day conference in Belgrade, Serbia, to discuss localization of free software in the Balkans. Vedran Vucic of the Belgrade Linux Center organized the conference so Europeans could network and discuss future regional localization projects.

In 2002 missive, SCO engineer says internal probe found "no evidence of any copyright infringement whatsoever."

Linux now leads the pack of operating systems on the Top500 project's list of the world's most powerful supercomputers, the latest of which was released at the International Supercomputer Conference (ISC2005) in Heidelberg, Germany, last month.

I've been using Linux for four years, with the majority of that time spent using Red Hat distributions. I liked Fedora Core 1, but I was not impressed by Fedora Core 2 and its annoying bugs. Fedora Core 3 made up for the shortcomings of its predecessor. Now Fedora Core 4 is out, and unfortunately, it's a mixed bag.

In the heat of major political campaigns and elections, we hear a lot about electronic voting and the fight over their accuracy and trustworthiness. However, it is now -- between elections -- that the real work gets done. While experts have placed transparency through open source systems and software high on the list of requirements for trustworthy elections, the debate over a verifiable voter paper receipt has recently overshadowed all other issues. Experts indicated while both printed paper backups and open code are key components to reliable and trustworthy electronic voting, openness may be suffering from lack of attention and support.

The next time you give a presentation with your laptop, don't use bullet points, long-running paragraphs, or templates. Oh, and don't be so organized either. Exercise some freedom, as in free and open source, and talk to your audience, as opposed to reading from slides. Let OpenOffice.org Impress, a tool for creating multimedia presentations, add richness to your story.

GNU/Linux distributions and other Unix and Unix-like operating systems already offer a plethora of tools for installing software. Many of them rely on different package formats, and a lot of the GNU/Linux distributions' effort goes into maintaining an updated and comprehensive list of ports or packages. Sometimes this great and respectable effort does not suffice, however, and users must install from the source packages provided by the developers.

Although it appeared that its Web site would remain stale and funds would not support Linux developers, there is now growing interest and opportunity for LinuxFund.

A few months ago, I started looking for an alternative to Windows Media Center Edition 2005, a personal video recorder (PVR) or digital video recorder (DVR) system. While other complete hardware/software combos, such as the popular TiVo, solve many of the headaches of having to build your own system and find out which hardware works and which doesn't, they also lack a level of customization and user freedom; with TiVo, for instance, you have join one of the company's monthly subscription plans. I decided to build my own system using open source software and carefully picked hardware. This proved to be much easier than I expected, thanks to MythTV.

Welcome to this year's 28th issue of DistroWatch Weekly. The recently released Fedora Core 4 has been getting some bad press lately - what are the reasons? The security problems plaguing Debian sarge in recent weeks have been solved, while Ubuntu's increasing impact on the world of Linux distribution has received more momentum by the launch of a US$10 million Ubuntu Foundation. Also in this issue - we interview Jean-Philippe Guillemin, the lead developer of Minislack and introduce three new Asian distributions - AsianLinux, OpenLX (both from India) and Niigata Linux (from Japan). Happy reading!

If the success of the "Shrek," "Toy Story," "Stuart Little," "The Incredibles," and many other Hollywood hits is any indication, animations add glitz to the mundane. While animation in the movies still requires professional animation packages like Blender, you can make simple animations using the command-line wizardry of ImageMagick.

Hot-shot entrepreneurs, VC money, even 'paradigm shifts.' Dot-coms revisited? No, it's today's flood of open-source startups.

Scientists from around Africa will gather in Cape Town from today to learn more about the benefits of open source software in science and maths research. They'll start off by installing their own copy of Ubuntu Linux and a collection of maths and science tools which they'll learn more about over the next month.

The PHP Development Team would like to announce the immediate release of PHP 4.4.0.

Amstar Systems manufactures and sells "automatic cashiers," cash dispensing machines that run on a modified Red Hat Linux. These super ATMs allow those without bank accounts access to financial transactions that previously only bank customers could access.

The quality of OpenMFG code is at least as good as commercial-grade software, Holowka says. Open-source programmers 'are doing this for notoriety, so they don't want to put garbage out there.'

Thotyelwa Mcongwane of the Meraka Institute's open source centre will give international delegates insight into Southern African free software progress during this week's Eclectic Tech Carnival in Austria.

As governments overseas are switching over to Linux -- the city of Vienna, Austria being the latest convert -- Indonesia should back away from a relationship with a costly piece of software that offers little benefit over viable open-source alternatives. Our minds and data files should be open to new innovations and changes in the future, and not be dictated by a single company lead by the richest man in the world.

The People Behind KDE interviews are back with a new series. First in the hot seat is aKademy organiser Antonio Larrosa. For the new series the original interviewer Tink has handed over management to KDE-NL. The People Behind KDE interviews take a look at the human side of KDE development by asking the important questions to our team of coders, artists, translators and everyone else who helps KDE.