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When a desktop Linux distribution suddenly becomes popular before even DistroWatch starts tracking it, you know you've got something special. One new Ubuntu-based distribution, gOS, has managed to capture users' attention purely by word of mouth over the Internet. gOS was introduced by Everex, a midtier PC vendor, in its inexpensive Green gPC TC2502 computer in late October. This cheap computer is sold for $198 at Wal-Mart stores and online at walmart.com.

Damn Small Linux is tiny Linux distribution that John Andrews originally created in 2002 to see just how many applications could fit into a 50MB system. The project has grown over the years to include many other contributors working on hundreds of packages and applications. Last month's release of DSL 4.0 brought many updates and changes, yet it remains a special-purpose distribution for older hardware because it lacks support for many modern features. Damn Small Linux offers an amazing array of options for running the distribution. You can boot it as a live CD, from a USB stick, or on a hard drive. You can install it traditionally or run it within a Windows OS. It can run on CPUs as old as a 486DX with 16MB RAM. If you install it on your hard drive, you can upgrade it to a full-blown Debian system.

Late last month the First International ODF Users Workshop was held in Berlin. The event was attended by officials representing 20 governments from around the world. South Africa was represented by Aslam Rafee (left), the chief information officer at the department of science and technology.

On October 27th, KDE Italia attended the Italian Linux Day 2007 in Rome at the Tor Vergata University. Other cities had their Linux Day throughout Italy at the same time. For the people that have never attended to these kind of events, it is important to remember that the Italian Linux Day is a day dedicated to spreading Free and Open Source Software and specially the GNU/Linux Operating System and its software components such as KDE. The talks for the day were at different levels of difficulty and you could find widely accessible talks or talks for an expert audience with more technical and specific topics.

Apple's .Mac service -- commonly known as dotMac -- is a suite of online utilities integrated with OS X. It is wildly popular with Mac owners, but it costs $99 per year. That annual hit to the wallet prompted J. Kent Pepper to commence a bounty-driven contest to create a free, open source replacement: the notMac Challenge. And he has found a winner.

Novell has recently decided to start setting openSUSE free from direct Novell oversight by setting up the first openSUSE board of directors. In an openSUSE blog notice, Novell and openSUSE announced the first openSUSE board. The openSUSE board will lead the overall community Linux project.

There's disagreement about whether Gobuntu lives up to its goal as the "strictest possible interpretation of the Free Software Foundation's 'Four Freedoms'."

Beginning today, anyone interested in getting an XO computer through the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) program has a chance to grab one. The Give One, Get One (G1G1) program is open to US and Canadian residents who want to purchase one XO laptop for themselves for $399. Order between today and November 26, and you'll receive one of the green and white laptop computers. The other will be sent on your behalf to a child in a developing nation. US donors will also receive free access for one year to T-Mobile wireless hotspots located throughout the country.

So you've written a nifty OpenOffice.org macro and want to share it with the world. You can, of course, publish the code on your Web site, but a better way to go is to pack it as an easy-to-install OpenOffice.org extension. An extension is just a plain zip archive containing, besides the macro itself, a few XML-based files that OpenOffice.org needs to properly install the package. Theoretically, it's possible to create the required XML files in a text editor, but it would be as effective as digging a garden using a teaspoon. Fortunately, there is a tool that you can use to create an extension in a point-and-click fashion.

Promises made are promises kept. Novell announced at August's LinuxWorld in San Francisco that it would be bringing SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop 10 Service Pack 1 to Chinese users, and that day is almost here. In a blog posting, Kevan Carmony, a Novell spokesperson, announced that SLED systems preinstalled on Dell OptiPlex 330 and 755 commercial desktop PCs will be available later this year.

Firefox includes an option for bookmarking all open tabs, but heavy users of tabs will find that this option is hardly enough. When you are researching a subject, the particular combination of tabs matters as much as the individual ones -- and, besides, selecting the tabs to open individually can be tedious if you are dealing with several dozen. And what happens if your session crashes before you have a chance to bookmark? You can address such concerns by installing Session Manager, a highly customizable add-on for preserving the state of the window after you close the browser.

LXer Feature: 11-Nov-2007

Some of the big stories this week include the Open Document Foundation, a call for papers for SCaLE 6x, four ways to extract the current directory name, the BBC admits a massive underestimate of its Linux users, Linux Backups For Real People, Part 2, a Linux game company opens its doors, Vista vs. desktop Linux: One year in and never use Babel Fish to talk to a foreign minister.

After a much publicised spat between Mandriva and Microsoft over an 11,000 computer deal with the Nigerian government it seems Nigeria has decided to stick with Mandriva Linux, the original plan.

Handwriting recognition, like its cousins speech recognition and optical character recognition, is a domain still dominated by proprietary products. Where there are Linux solutions, such as the one in Nokia's Maemo Internet tablets, they are often closed source plugins protected by patent claims. Thus I was pleasantly surprised to find CellWriter, a small, straightforward handwriting recognition tool that integrates easily with modern Linux desktops. CellWriter provides a small, grid-like window into which you write with normal pen strokes. Thus it works best with a pen interface, such as a Wacom tablet, but that isn't strictly required.

When you travel a lot, once in a while it just seems that you are on "The Trip from Hades", and you wonder why you travel as much as you do.read more

Linux Mint is a derivative distribution of Ubuntu. Its purpose, according to its Web site, "is to produce an elegant, up-to-date, and comfortable GNU/Linux desktop distribution." Unfortunately, it falls short in at least one of those areas, and suffers from several other disappointing shortcomings. Mint comes in two primary editions: a main edition, which includes proprietary codecs and plugins, and a light edition, which does not. Like Ubuntu, both versions use GNOME as the user interface, though there are other versions of Mint available which include Xfce and KDE.

Reader Jeff tipped us off to this exciting news: Electronic Arts will donate the original SimCity city-building game to each computer in the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project.

Quick, name some virtualization programs that run on Linux. Time's up. If you're like most people, you probably named VMware or Xen first. Many of you probably know of one or more of the following: Parallels, QEMU, KVM, Virtuozzo and OpenVZ. However, few of you probably know about VirtualBox. And chances are if you know about VirtualBox 1.502, you're already running it because it manages the trifecta of being good, free and, sort of, open source.

Microsoft and Novell are using the one-year anniversary of their interoperability agreement to tout the increasing number of enterprise customers who are signing up because of the benefits offered through the collaboration. The two companies announced Nov. 8 that Microsoft will give 30 new customers three-year priority support subscriptions for SUSE Linux Enterprise Server from Novell. These agreements were negotiated over the past quarter, and they bring the number of such deals to about 60 that have taken place over the past year.

A stark future awaits American health care if the Veterans Affairs (VA) system and Cerner is allowed to go forward withannounced plans to replace the VA's successful public domain laboratory software, in need of update, with a proprietary one. The VA would give large amounts of cash that would greatly assist a single proprietary company in dominating EHR software in both the public and private sector. A free, thriving EHR ecosystem will be destroyed and replaced with a monopoly or cartel at great expense in which the quality, privacy and security of such software is a trade secret, un-examined and un-examinable. If this is allowed, it could lead to Americans essentially renting their own medical data back from the Cerners of the world at great expense.