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This is a disection of the FreeBSD BootCD. To learn how it all works and how to modify things. The cd that I'm going to be using is 7.0-RELEASE-i386-bootonly.iso

It's unfortunate that Ubuntu's Mark Shuttleworth doesn't blog more often, because when he does, it's invariably insightful. As a case in point, Mark's post about the superiority of open source at hitting release dates is wonderful.

Back in November of 2006, I wrote a piece about the One Laptop Per Child Project. I was afraid that the project's focus on creating a whole new paradigm (the Sugar UI) would ultimately intervene with the actual goal of the project: teaching stuff to kids. Ivan Krstic, former director of security architecture at OLPC, wrote an essay in which he heavily criticises the OLPC project.

To be honest, I would much rather be writing this on my desktop with its full sized keyboard and 22 inch monitor rather than a sub-notebook with half-sized keyboard and 8.9 inch screen. However, that's an unfair comparison. I would be using the Eee PC on the road instead of say my Dell Latitude or a MacBook, not in my office. Then the comparison becomes more valid and the ratios reduce. At 21 cm (8.25 inches) the Eee PC 900 keyboard is a bit more than 70% the width of my Dell notebook's and the 8.9 inch monitor is about 65% the diagonal length of my notebook's.

Red Hat and SAS are two of the 30 most influential technology companies in the world, according to a report released Tuesday by the Aberdeen Group.

Soothsayer is a predictive text input system. Many folks reading that sentence will think of the word completion offered by mobile phones. Soothsayer is different from such mobile phone systems in that it tries to use context and other statistical information to offer predictions instead of just presenting a list of words that might match the first few letters you type.

The Fedora Project Tuesday said Fedora 9, a free, open source Linux operating system, is ready for download. The software features a unique portable capability that lets it live on a USB stick. Users can boot the operating system from the USB stick and add applications and download and store data to the environment.

In the last couple of years, desktop-friendly Linux distributions have taken enormous leaps -- they're easier to install, better maintained, and more powerful than ever before. There's also that many more of them -- which means that many more possibilities to sift through. In this roundup I've looked at seven Linux distributions, all mainly aimed at desktop users. Some ought to be household names; some are less widely sung but still worth looking at. All are meant to be top-of-the-line, "throw-and-go" distros for general use, so I paid careful attention to how they behaved on a fairly broad range of hardware -- how display, networking, or other default configurations were set to behave both out of the box and after an update (if one was available).

* In a message to the Debian security mailing list, senior developer Florian Weimer said it had been discovered that the random number generator in the package was predictable. OpenSSL is an open source implementation of the Secure Sockets Layer (SSL v2/v3) and Transport Layer Security (TLS v1) protocols and a full-strength general purpose cryptography library.

In a previous post, we have made our point that dual licensing was unfair and community debilitating. In a search for a better solution, I met this weekend with Ludovic Dubost CEO, Founder and original contributor of xWiki. xWiki.com is making its income out of enterprise support, software guarantees and integration projects. This last part being a substantial source of revenues for xWiki.com

If you’re following this blog, and don’t know me personally, than you’re probably also interested in becoming a Linux Network Admin, right? right. You might be wondering where to start? Well, first and foremost, you need to be familiar with Linux as a user. You should know the basics of PC hardware, software, and also have some conception of what UNIX, Open Source programming, and Linux are. We’ll begin by installing Linux on your computer.

Every free software enthusiast probably already knows that distrowatch.com, created by Ladislav Bodnar, is a great source of information on different open source operating systems. We can pretty much admit that every respected distribution based on Linux or BSD is at least mentioned on his website. You can find there descriptions of systems, starting from those small and fast ones, to the enormous distributions filled with packages that even the actual creators of those systems wouldn’t even think of.

This weekend as classes have started to wind down I had a bit of time to mess with my laptop for some general geek fun. Playing with KDE 4 is something I’ve wanted to do the past few months but avoided for fear of breaking things when I had too much going on to spend a full day getting them working again. Encouraged by a brief trial of the Kubuntu KDE4 Remix LiveCD I decided to give it a try.

Ever since Laura Thomson wrote her first program in the fourth grade, coding has been a major part of her life. Over the years, she has been a lecturer in computer science at RMIT University in Australia, a principal at OmnTI, a consulting company that designs Internet systems, a trainer of other programmers, the co-writer of PHP and MySQL Web Development and MySQL Tutorial, and a frequent speaker at free and open source conferences. She is currently a senior software engineer at the Mozilla Corporation, where her recent work includes the API for the Add-ons Manager on Firefox 3. With this background, Thomson has strong views on coding, its future, and its place in business, especially where free and open source software (FOSS) is concerned, which she shared with Linux.com at the recent Open Web Vancouver conference.

May 13th brings with it a 100% chance of sulphurous rain. But don’t worry, this particular sulphur isn’t a sign of global pollution. Instead, it is Fedora® 9–codenamed “Sulphur”–the latest in a continuing line of innovative releases by the community-powered Fedora Project. Get a copy of your very own right now.

Mystery surrounds the identity of four winners in Google's $10m Android mobile applications competition, announced last November. The search giant Tuesday named 47 of 50 developers who've won the first round of its challenge to build mobile applications for the yet-to-materialize Android phone. The individuals will each get $25,000.

Mark Shuttleworth, head of Canonical and founder of the Ubuntu project, has called on other Linux developers to synchronize releases of new versions of their distros. He also pledged to deliver the next Long Term Support (LTS) release of Ubuntu, version 10.4, in April 2010 - unless, of course, Red Hat, Novell and Debian decide to co-operate on a synchronized release at a different time.

The Fedora distribution has a reputation for innovation, and the new Fedora 9, released today, is no exception. With features that range from easy filesystem encryption to support for the ext4 format, it includes a wide range of features that are likely to become standard in other distributions in the next six months. But for Paul W. Frields, who became Fedora project leader in February, what distinguishes the release is less the technology than the community that supports it, and how the technology contributes to the larger free software world.

Debian has warned of a vulnerability in its cryptographic functions that could leave systems open to attack. The use of a cryptographically flawed pseudo random number generator in Debian's implementation of OpenSSL meant that potentially predictable keys were generated. Versions of Debian's OpenSSL packages starting with 0.9.8c-1 (released in September 2006) are potentially vulnerable.

The Fedora project today released a new version of its completely free and redistributable Linux distribution. Showcasing lots of next-generation Red Hat features, Fedora 9 also boasts new features of its own aimed at making the distribution appeal more to newer Linux users.