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Michael Anti is an engineer and journalist whose work has appeared in theNew York Times, Huaxia Times, 21st Century World Herald, Washington Post, Southern Metropolis Daily andFar and Wide Journal. He has been a researcher, a columnist, a reporter, a war correspondent in Baghdad (in 2003) and more—and achieved notoriety in 2005 when Microsoft deleted his blog.

KDE 4 is barely eight months old, and already it has three options for a main menu. Until now, users have either used the default Kickoff, which makes for awkward navigation of the menu tree, or reverted to the familiar but unwieldy classic menu. Now, with the first full release of Lancelot, users have another option that overcomes the shortcomings of both other alternatives and gives KDE 4 a thoroughly modern menu. According to comments on the project Web page by main developer Ivan ?uki?, Lancelot started life as a SuperKaramba applet for organizing desktop icons. Its name is a homage to Monty Python and the Holy Grail -- as evidenced by the default grail icon -- as well as a pun on "launch-a-lot."

Welcome back! Charlie Schluting, in this edition of Networking 101, will give you the IP knowledge required to understand routing issues. Most everything on the Internet uses IP, and unlike Ethernet, knowing this protocol is pivotal to understanding how networking works with regards to the big picture. In upcoming articles, Networking 101 will explore TCP and UDP, routing theories, and then delve into the specific routing protocols. It's going to be a wild ride.

Boxee is a new entrant into the increasingly crowded open source media center space. The company's eponymous application is billed as a "social media center" -- melding a smorgasbord of social networking services into an XBMC-based media center designed for the couch-centric user. Boxee has bigger goals in mind, but you can take an early look at it now by applying for the invitation-only testing program.

Windows may be king of data centers, but Linux has a foothold in nearly every courtyard and is sure to make further inroads in the year ahead. According to the Data Center Decisions 2008 Purchasing Intentions Survey, 91% of data centers run Microsoft Windows, but a large percentage also use Red Hat Enterprise Linux (48%) or Novell SUSE (21%, multiple versions) in their data centers. Nonetheless, Linux use remains limited in scope, with two-thirds of respondents running Linux on 25% or less of their servers, with application servers the most common pairing. Tech Target

One of the greatest and most destructive beliefs in the open source community is that "Because I'm not a programmer, I can't participate in an open source project." Let me be the first to tell you that if you believe that, you're wrong. Dead wrong. Why? Well let me explain.

The ecosystem that Microsoft (MSFT) has built up around its Windows operating system is showing signs of strain. In one of several recent moves by partners that sell or support the company's software, Hewlett-Packard (HPQ), the world's No. 1 PC maker, has quietly assembled a group of engineers to develop software that will let customers bypass certain features of Vista, the latest version of Windows. Employees on a separate skunk works team are even angling to replace Windows with an HP-assembled operating system, say three sources close to the company. HP acknowledges the first effort. The company formed the "customer experience" group nine months ago and put at its helm Susie Wee, a former director in the company's research labs. Her team is developing touchscreen technology and other software that allows users to circumvent Microsoft's operating system to watch movies or view photos more easily than they can with Vista.

The Open Source Geospatial Foundation (OSGeo) and the Geographic Information Society of South Africa (GISSA) will host the 2008 Free and Open Source Software for Geospatial (FOSS4G) conference at the Cape Town International Convention Centre from September 29 to October 3. The annual conference is expected to attract more than 500 software programmers, government officials, business people and technology experts.

Asia is in the middle of a mass adoption wave of open source technology, and the floodgates of innovation will open following this wave in two to three years, according to open source vendors. Following recent remarks made by MySQL co-founder, David Axmark, on Asia's lack of contribution back to the open source community, fellow industry spokespeople were decidedly more optimistic about the region's role to play in the open source ecosystem.

Being connected to the Internet means exposure to what the outside world has to offer -- including the undesirable elements. Every time you connect to the Internet, you're exposed to threats that can compromise your network's security. Although network security solutions have evolved in recent years, so have network attack techniques. To prevent ever-evolving attacks from compromising your network, you must preemptively block malicious traffic before it enters your network. Free, open source programs, such as Snort, can do the job, but setting up a full intrusion detection system (IDS) sensor, especially in an enterprise network, takes time and isn't very user-friendly. StillSecure's Strata Guard Free can be your front line of defense to face outside threats without as much hard work.

Microsoft and Novell Thursday released a virtualization bundle that represents the pair’s first fully supported joint product since their historic interoperability partnership was forged in 2006. The two have configured and optimized Novell’s SUSE Linux Enterprise Server to run as a guest operating system on Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V. The product is the first to include technology developed by both vendors at the Microsoft and Novell Interoperability Lab they opened just over a year ago in Cambridge, Mass.

In some respects, the market for Web-based applications resembles a crowded, noisy and confused bazaar. It's difficult to get a good wide-angle view of all available options. Those there to sell wares often have a hard time finding and securing the best place to set up shop.

Canonical, the leading backer of the Ubuntu version of Linux, is hiring a team to help make open source software on the desktop more appealing and easier to use. The company plans to sign up designers and specialists in user experience and interaction to lead Canonical's work on usability and to contribute to other free and open source desktop-environment projects, including Gnome and KDE, Mark Shuttleworth, Canonical chief executive and founder of the Ubuntu project, wrote in a blog post on Wednesday.

The OLPC XO is a path-breaking, jaw-dropping piece of technology. And not just any traditional, consumer-focused (faster, shinier) way, but in specific and strategic areas that make the laptop perfect for developing world situations where it might be damp or dusty, the sun might be your light source at school, and you probably don't have reliable electricity at home. It happens to be that those same constraints also produce technological solutions that make the XO attractive to a certain set of users who want a no-frills, but highly functional laptop (like world travelers), as I mentioned in Part I -- it's lightweight, rugged, and low-power (solar chargeable), but powerful enough to connect to faint wifi, play movies, or review digital photos.

A while back, I wrote an article for Linux Journal's web edition entitled “Howto be a good (and lazy) System Administrator.” A couple astute readers, after reading the article, asked if I was familiar with the Nagios monitoring system, and I am. I've been using Nagios for a few years now. I had intended to write this article as a How-to on getting Nagios configured and running for the first time. However, it turns out that the documentation that comes with Nagios is really pretty good. And even if you do have problems, and I did, the user community is also quite responsive. So, rather than beating a dead horse, (with sympathy to horse lovers) I decided to continue the Good and Lazy Administrator Theme and discuss extending Nagios with custom service checks and custom notifications.

The splash screen for Writer's World Maker (WWM) announces that the program is designed to "help you to summon your imaginary worlds to the printed page." And, considering its flexibility and thoroughness in some areas -- especially defining characters -- at times it almost realizes this goal. However, interface problems, as well as a fannish orientation at the expense of detailed planning in other areas, makes it a program more suitable for wannabes than working writers. Now at version 1.0.31, WWM is available as source code and Debian, Fedora, Mandriva, and Ubuntu packages. If the Debian package is any indication, though, these packages are not set up for dependency resolution. You must install the Gambas programming language packages for your distribution before you install WWM. You will also need to install Qt support if you do not already have KDE installed.

Normally, when Google releases a new application, I'm right there standing in line to be one of the first to try it. However, that was not the case with Google's latest effort, Chrome. Reports that the Web browser acted as an oversized keylogger through its OmniBox were not reassuring.

One of the cornerstones of the landmark interoperability deal between Novell and Microsoft was, and is, virtualization. Two years after they struck their agreement, Microsoft and Novell have extended their partnership. The partners are now finally rolling out a supported Linux on a Windows virtualization solution.

Lenovo Group Ltd. is cutting back on sales of desktops and laptop systems with the Linux operating system pre-installed. The PC maker said yesterday that it will no longer take online orders for computers pre-loaded with any flavor of Linux. Ray Gorman, a spokesman for the company, said that it will continue offering such machines only through its own or partner direct sales teams.

Canonical, the corporate backer of Ubuntu Linux, is hiring a team of designers and developers to make desktop open source software easier and more appealing to use. Canonical head and Ubuntu founder, Mark Shuttleworth, said in a blog post yesterday that the company plans to hire a team of designers and user interface experts to contribute to not only Ubuntu’s usability but also to other upstream open source applications.