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Operating systems come with cultures as much as codebases. I was forcibly reminded of this fact over the holidays when several family members and neighbors press-ganged me into troubleshooting their Windows computers. Although none of us had any formal computer training, and I know almost nothing about Windows, I was able to solve problems that baffled the others -- not because of any technical brilliance, but because the free software culture in which I spend my days made me better able to cope.

Ubuntu and its siblings are preparing for the next Long Term Support (LTS) release, v8.04 (April 2008) - the Hardy Heron. Ubuntu's first release was announced in September 2004, with a (then) brand new GNOME 2.8 desktop. Since then Ubuntu releases have been tied pretty closely to GNOME releases. Now, of course, we have Kubuntu for KDE fans, and Xubuntu for Xfce fans. That's great, but Ubuntu releases aren't timed for new versions of those desktops. And that's why it seems that Kubuntu 8.04 will not be a LTS release after all.

Alexa Internet is one of the oldest and most recognized Web entities. In addition to providing detailed Web site traffic information that it collects from users of the Alexa toolbar, Alexa created the Wayback Machine, an archive of Web site snapshots, which it donated to the Library of Congress in 1998. Don Whitt, Alexa's vice president of operations, says Alexa, acquired by Amazon.com in 1999, has a long history with open source platforms, including Slackware, FreeBSD, and CentOS.

Many people claim that “Linux is about choice!”. That’s a neat phrase, but what does it mean? Does it mean that you should have the ability to twist and turn 400 different knobs on your Linux install? That’s what some think. Does it mean that you have the right to choose Linux, or choose your flavor of Linux, and then choose from the package sets within those flavors? That’s what I and many others think. There is a very distinct difference here too. Let’s look at it from a food point of view (one of my favorite points-of-view).

Announcing itself today is KOfficeSource GmbH, a company that will sell services around KOffice. The founders comprise a small group of members of the developer community, as well as outside talent. They share an interest in furthering KOffice by supporting it commercially in addition to the non-commercial support that can be found on the mailing lists and IRC. As the name suggests it has been created in Germany but will operate across Europe and further afield.

I read lots of blogs and planets every day, and do so from multiple computers, so I value the online feed aggregator. It retrieves new items even while I'm offline, and I don't have to synchronize between multiple machines. Google Reader has filled this niche for a while now, but I've kept an eye out for open source equivalents that I could serve from my own domain instead. That is just what GobbleRSS is: a PHP-based feed aggregator that is simple to set up and run on your own.

Osmo, a compact yet feature-rich personal information organizer for Linux, separates itself from the pack of other calendar applications due to its light weight and easy-to-use design. The GPL-licensed Osmo includes a datebook calendar, a to-do organizer, and a contacts list, all with lots of intuitive options. Osmo is so new that it isn't included in many distributions' software repositories yet, but the source is available through SourceForge.net. Installing from the source isn't difficult. The only dependencies are the GIMP Toolkit (GTK+) and libxml2, which come with most distributions.

News this morning that the OLPC project is working with Microsoft to deliver a dual-boot XO laptop is causing shock waves among many of the OLPC faithful. Nicholas Negroponte was quoted in the ComputerWorld story as saying, "We are working with them very closely to make a dual-boot system so that, like on an Apple, you can boot either one up. The version that's up and running of Windows on the XO is very fast, it's very, very successful. We're working very hard to do both."

Human error and evolving phishing attacks will compel organizations to tighten control over application access, not just user access. Guardian Digital, the open source security pioneer, forecasts an increased need for comprehensive control over Internet and employee resources with 'least privilege' engineering in 2008. "Most vendors don't stress least privilege enough in their development architecture, especially with the increasing threats from human error and employee liability" says CEO Dave Wreski. "Security in 2007 has shown just how effective attackers can be at gaining authorized access to corporate resources. One of the best ways to protect against this is to lock down application access, not just user access."

The Linux creator said copyright owners would have to agree to licensing changes, and those who didn't would have to rewrite code. Linus Torvalds, creator of the Linux operating system, still has no plans to license the Linux kernel under version three of the GNU General Public License anytime soon.

Open-Xchange, a German open-source groupware company with long ties to SUSE Linux, is changing its top management team. Rafael Laguna, who played a major role in merging SUSE with Novell, is now Open-Xchange’s president and CEO. And former SUSE CEO Richard Seibt is now OX's chairman of the board. While at SUSE, Laguna and Seibt worked closely together and are widely credited for helping SUSE's transformation into one of the world's major Linux distributors.

From Friday, Jan. 11 through Sunday, Jan. 13, the Fedora Project will be holding its annual FUDCon at Red Hat’s headquarters in Raleigh, NC. FUDCon is the Fedora Users and Developers Conference–a time when members of the Fedora community who usually only communicate via email or IRC have a chance to meet in person. FUDCon includes two full days of hackfests, in which specific technical problems are worked on in small group code sprints, as well as one day of talks, sessions, and presentations that are of interest to all variety of users and developers.

The calendar has switched over to 2008 and so far it has been anything but a happy new year for the One Laptop Per Child Project. First, OLPC Chief Technology Officer (and the first employee of the OLPC) Mary Lou Jepsen announced that she was stepping down as CTO in order to start a new company. Then we found out that a Nigerian company was suing the OLPC over a claimed patent violation. And then at the end of the week it was announced that Intel was stepping down from the board of the OLPC.

Google has released a public beta of its Picasa photo organizer for Linux. The new release adds some important features for image browsing, image searching, and creative image export. If you haven't tried it before, now is the time. This beta release is a preview of Picasa 2.7, which will bring the Linux version of the application up to speed with the Windows edition. Picasa remains the only Google app which is unavailable for Mac OS X, a fact you can brag about to your Apple-loving friends.

The path to opening aGeek Ranch is not exactly straight. That is, each week there is one more strange thing that needs to be done. This week, it happens to be surveys. Not the measure the ground kind—we already did that—but the on-line ask questions kind.

So I'm sitting in the rather vast"press" corner of a CES keynote audience, waiting to see Paul Otellini, President& CEO of Intel, give a keynote. Two years ago I sat at an Otellini keynote here. As I reported inWhat's Intel up to with VIIV?, it was disappointing. Will this be different? Sure hope so.read more

Yesterday brought the alpha release of Wikia Search, a new engine built on free software and free culture values. For Wikia co-founder Jimmy Wales, the release is a milestone in the realization of a long-held dream. However, as he tells Linux.com, Wikia Search is still a couple of years from maturity, with many of the details still to work out. "Philosophically, I'm a big supporter of free software," says Wales. "I've been interested in a streamlined, transparent search engine for a long time." Not only are free software technologies powering Wikia Search -- including Grub, the distributed Web crawler that Wikia bought last summer and whose code it immediately released -- but Wales is determined that "at every point where we find that there's an editorial decision to be made, we want to push that decision outside the company and into the community."

GNU/Linux is bursting with information about the system on which it runs. The system's hardware and memory, its Internet link and current processes, the latest activity of each user -- all this information and more is available. And, despite such desktop tools as the KDE Control Center or GNOME's System Monitor, the easiest place to get all the system information available is still the command line. In many cases, you can view system information via specific commands. Some of these commands are written specifically to give information, while other commands that are mainly intended to alter the system in some way just happen to include parameters for viewing the current state of the system.

Lone Wolves is happy to announce the ODF-XSLT project. The ODF-XSLT Document Generator is a library written in PHP 5 that brings the full power of XSLT to your OpenDocument files. It enables you to use ODF files as if they were plain XSLT templates. It also includes a few extra parsing options that allow you to edit the XSLT parts of these ODF from within your favourite office suite. ODF-XSLT is developed by Tribal Internet Marketing and is released by Lone Wolves as Free Software under the GNU General Public License, version 3.

Mozilla has announced that chief executive Mitchell Baker is stepping down in favour of chief operating officer John Lilly. Baker will remain as chairman of the open source non-profit organisation, but Lilly will take over effective operations immediately.