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Review: Citadel: A Bastion of Groupware Functionality

Citadel is 100% GPL, and doesn't play games with making either binary or source downloads easily available. If I had to describe Citadel in a word, it would be "simplicity". It is a complex application with a lot of power and flexibility, but it's easy to install and administer.

Cook up tasty custom Ubuntu live CDs with UCK

Live CDs let you boot an operating system without installing any software on a hard drive. There are plenty of Linux live CDs and lots of tools to customize them. The Ubuntu Customization Kit, tastefully called UCK, lets you add your favorite applications into the distro. If you're not happy with the factory-installed Ubuntu apps, here's your chance to spin up your very own Ubuntu live CD without too much effort. Installing UCK is a no-brainer -- grab the latest .deb package and use GDebi to install it. UCK requires tools such as fakeroot and mkisofs, which you can install using Synaptic. In addition to UCK, you need about 5GB of free disk space under your home directory, as well as the ISO of the Ubuntu version you want to customize.

DistroWatch Weekly, Issue 269, 8 September 2008

This week's feature story is a review of Debian GNU/Linux 5.0 "Lenny" on the ASUS Eee PC. With Debian being the first Linux distribution to have an open communication channel with the Taiwan-based hardware manufacturer, our expectations were high, but is Lenny really a good choice for the popular ultra-portable? Read on to find out. In the news section, Google restarts the browser war with Chrome, Dell unveils the long-awaited Inspiron Mini 9, Mandriva Linux 2009 enters the release candidate stage, and Fedora calls on beta testers to help with testing the promising ext4 file system...

40 reasons to lose Linux and vote Vista!

Challenged by my iTWire colleague and Linux lover Sam Varghese to come up with 40 reasons to lose Linux and vote Vista, I’ve done just that. It all started quietly enough with iTWire colleague David M Williams writing an article entitled “5 reasons to upgrade from Windows Vista to Linux”, with David being a strong and well respected proponent of Linux.

FUDCon Brno 2008

The Fedora Project holds a “Fedora Users and Developers Conference” (FUDCon) several times each year, in various locations around the world. The latest installment was September 5-7, in Brno, Czech Republic. Max Spevack, Red Hat’s manager of Community Architecture, shared his trip report with us.

Kernel tuning with sysctl

The Linux kernel is flexible, and you can even modify the way it works on the fly by dynamically changing some of its parameters, thanks to the sysctl command. Sysctl provides an interface that allows you to examine and change several hundred kernel parameters in Linux or BSD. Changes take effect immediately, and there's even a way to make them persist after a reboot. By using sysctl judiciously, you can optimize your box without having to recompile your kernel, and get the results immediately.

London Stock Exchange suffers .NET Crash

So what really happened? I doubt we'll ever get a detailed, nitty-gritty explanation, but I have friends in London and... Well, let me just make the following points about TradElec. First, TradElec runs on more than a 100 HP ProLiant servers in several locations in London. These servers are running Windows Server 2003. On top of this runs the TradElec software itself. This is a custom set of C# and .NET programs, which was created by Microsoft and Accenture, the global consulting firm. Its back-end databases, believe it or not, run on Microsoft SQL Server 2000. The goal was to maintain sub-ten millisecond response times. In short, it's meant to be a real-time system.

Google's Chrome browser heads toward Linux and Mac

While the current beta edition of Chrome currently runs on Windows only, open source developers -- including some from Mozilla -- are now working on getting Google's new browser to operate on Linux and Mac, too. The developers' site for Chromium, an open source project rolled out by Google at the time of its launch of the Chrome browser, also contains build instructions for Windows, Linux, and Mac. There, in addition to making the source code for Chrome available under a BSD license, Google explains how to submit patches and submit bug reports. The source code for Chrome's high-performance V8 JavaScript engine is also downloadable.

What Xandros Has Up Its Sleeve

Custom Linux provider Xandros will release a free Linux OS called"Freespire 5" during the fourth quarter of 2008. This next version of Freespire will be based on the Debian GNU/Linux"Lenny" release rather than the Ubuntu Linux platform Freespire 4 uses. The move spearheads a new Xandros consolidated desktop strategy following its acquisition in July of Linspire, the developer of the CNR software distribution platform.

How to build a local IMAP server

The usual practice of configuring your email client to retrieve email from your ISP's servers works well, but not for all situations. Suppose you add a laptop as a compliment to your desktop machine, or you'd occasionally like to use your spouse's computer to read your email -- you can run into problems trying to keep all of your email clients in sync. You can use IMAP (Internet Mail Access Protocol) instead of POP3 (Post Office Protocol), but then you need to store all of your email on your ISP's servers indefinitely, which has its own drawbacks. Here's a way you can set up a single machine on your own network to fetch and store your email and serve it to any number of email clients.

Ubuntu plans for Jaunty Jackalope

Ubuntu founder and Canonical chief, Mark Shuttleworth, yesterday announced his ambitions for Ubuntu 9.04, now called “Jaunty Jackalope”. In an email to developers last night, Shuttleworth said: “As we approach the launch of Ubuntu 8.10, it’s time to create space for future plans, and so I’m writing to introduce you to The Jaunty Jackalope.”

OLPC's Amazon Notebook Linux Only

The folks at One Laptop Per Child got back to me with a statement following my recent blog post on its plans to sell through online commerce giant, Amazon. It was tough to get many details on this story because the only information came from a news items briefly quoting an OLPC team member who blabbed prematurely about the Amazon deal. An OLPC spokesperson told me the group didn’t issue a press release because Amazon doesn’t announce things until they’re available at their online storefront.

Google Chrome patched, but problems remain

A posting to the Google Groups Chrome support forum has announced the availability of an update to the Chrome browser. According to the poster, the Chrome 0.2.149.27 update fixes 'confirmed security vulnerabilities' although despite requests from users in the forum declined to expand upon what these might be. However, a little digging revealed that it is likely to be the buffer overflow problem that was identified by a Vietnamese security researcher on September 5th.

This week at LWN: Fedora, Red Hat, and distributor security

On August 22, the Fedora Project released an "infrastructure report" confirming what most observers had, by then, suspected: the project had suffered a major security breach. The attacker got as far as a system used to sign packages distributed by Fedora. That, of course, is something close to a worst-case scenario: if an intruder has control over such a system, it's a relatively small step to capture the package signing key and the passphrase used to employ that key. And those, in turn, could be used to create hostile packages which would be accepted as genuine by Fedora installations worldwide.

Dress up your Python scripts with EasyGui

In many cases, adding a graphical interface to Python scripts means getting your hands dirty with TKinter or other GUI programming kits. This exercise is usually reserved for users who have already acquired decent Python programming skills, as it requires some serious code wizardry. Thankfully, the EasyGui module allows you to add some GUI goodness to your Python scripts without going through coding rigmarole. Using EasyGui, you can add visual elements with just a few lines of code.

India gains multilingual new BOSS

The Center for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC) has upgraded its India-focused GNU Linux distribution. Version 3.0 of Bharat Operating Systems Solutions (BOSS) Linux adds GNOME and KDE desktop environments, Bluetooth support, and support for 18 Indian languages, says C-DAC.

Windows Vista: The OS About Nothing

Microsoft's new Windows ad, featuring Jerry Seinfeld, is outdated and not very funny -- but it's highly revealing of all that's wrong out there in Redmond. The background: Windows is losing market share to Apple's Mac OS and even Linux. And Vista, the latest version, has been a big fat dud. Businesses have shunned it outright, and many consumers find it unintuitive and difficult to use. So, Microsoft hired "award winning" agency Crispin, Porter + Bogusky -- at a reported cost of $300 million -- to give Vista, and the Windows franchise in general, an image makeover. The Seinfeld ad debuted Thursday and it's the first piece of an integrated marketing campaign covering TV, the Web, and point-of-sale outlets.

OpenOffice.org: Knowing when to use Impress

With Labour Day past, we back in the season of slide shows -- million of them daily in both academia and business. For over a decade now, slide shows have become an accepted prop for public speaking, regardless of whether they are useful or well-designed, and the trend shows no sign of slowing. You can, of course, just acquiesce and accept that as soon as you click to the first slide, most of your audience will sigh deeply and sit back low in their chairs. But, if you really want to make slide shows work for you, you'll think before opening up the Impress wizard.

Three typing tutors and a boy

I recently sat down with my 12-year-old son Ian, who agreed to sit still long enough to try a few typing teacher applications on Ubuntu Hardy Heron. Ian has a lot of experience on the computer but, until now, he has subscribed to the hunt and peck typing philosophy. Fortunately, we found a number of open source typing tutorial programs to download and test. Ian and I looked at three GPL-licensed apps: Klavaro, TuxTyping, and KTouch.

Red Hat's Jim Whitehurst: The Challenges of Competing with Free

Red Hat, which bills itself as the world’s leading open-source solutions provider, has managed to make free software pay by gathering, extending and packaging Linux and complementary open-source components into certified and supported products that are ready for enterprise consumption. As the focus of IT attention shifts to new platforms, including virtualized environments, Red Hat has turned to an IT industry newcomer, former Delta Airlines Chief Operating Officer Jim Whitehurst, to guide the open-source leader.

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