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This article describes how to build your own silent, fast, eco-friendly Linux-based PC for use in a digital music listening system. The PC is based on a high-end Via mini-ITX board, passively cooled case with heatpipe technology, Debian Linux, and a little creative embedded elbow grease.

During the Ubuntu Live Conference in Portland, Ore., Canonical announced the beta release of its Launchpad PPA (Personal Package Archive) service, a new way for developers to build and publish packages of their code, documentation, artwork, themes and other contributions to free software.

The Linux Foundation today announced Markus Rex will become its new Chief Technology Officer (CTO) and lead its Linux Standard Base (LSB) initiative and other standardization and technical initiatives for the foundation.

People used to think the very idea that a major PC vendor would offer desktop Linux was beyond a joke. It was, as Vizzini from The Princess Bride would have said, "Inconceivable!" But, as events turned out, to quote Inigo Montoya from the same movie, "You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means." HP will soon be joining Dell in offering at least one Linux desktop line in its SKU sales listing. Here's why I believe this.

UK firms are lagging behind in the adoption of open source software, suggesting less government emphasis compared with other European countries such as France, Germany, Spain and Italy. Alfresco Software, an open source enterprise content management firm, made the claim in its barometer survey conducted between April and June 2007 using opt-in data provided by 10,000 of the 15,000 Alfresco community members.

Nowadays, people are turning to Web-based applications as replacements for desktop applications. Web-based office suites, mail clients, multimedia apps, and general productivity tools are all extremely useful now, but standard Web browsers aren't always the best option for running applications. To provide a more suitable tool for Web-based apps, Mozilla Platform Evangelist Mark Finkle has been working on WebRunner, a site-specific browser (SSB) that's designed to work exclusively with one application at a time. It's not finished yet, but it's already showing promise.

"Lguest is an adventure, with you, the reader, as Hero," began some documentation for lguest recently submitted by Rusty Russell. The documentation continued,"but be warned; this is an arduous journey of several hours or more! And as we know, all true Heroes are driven by a Noble Goal. Thus I offer a Beer (or equivalent) to anyone I meet who has completed this documentation. So get comfortable and keep your wits about you (both quick and humorous).

The software will be available as an open-source project under the GNU General Public License Version 2.

The Classmate PC, a low-cost notebook targeting emerging markets, was jointly demonstrated by Mandriva and Intel earlier this month at the KDE-sponsored aKademy 2007 conference in Glasgow, Scotland. Featuring an educational interface, Mandriva's Discovery 2007 Linux is based on an Intel Mobile Processor ULV900.

Earlier this month, Intel and the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project announced that Intel has joined the OLPC board -- a surprise given the previously reported acrimonious relationship between the two organizations. We spoke with Will Swope, Intel's vice president of corporate affairs, about the reconciliation and what it means.

The efforts of Microsoft to pressure the Linux community over alleged and unspecified patents is akin to "patent terrorism", according to a local executive for Sun Microsystems.

At the O'Reilly Open Source Convention today, Software Freedom Law Center director Eben Moglen threw down the gauntlet to O'Reilly founder and CEO Tim O'Reilly. Saying that O'Reilly had spent 10 years making money and building the O'Reilly name, Moglen invited O'Reilly to stop being "frivolous" and to join the conversation about software freedom.

The question of Canonical's success seems answered, for now. A better question could be, how will Canonical avoid the pitfalls of success that have befallen other strong software companies?

One Laptop Per Child's XO (commonly referred to as the $100 laptop) is designed to change the world by bringing computing resources to children in the developing world. But the many innovations in the XO may also end up changing the world of technology.

Pyro is a new desktop environment for Linux which utilizes Firefox to run web applications alongside native desktop applications.

Version 3.0 of the Debian-based schools Linux distribution Skolelinux has been released. The latest release features support for more than 50 languages and includes a range of educational software.

Portable applications can come in handy when you are on the move, but there are situations when using them is not an option. For instance, before you connect an external hard disk or a USB stick to a public computer, you have to ask permission. More importantly, even if you get permission, you can never be sure what kind of nasty viruses and malware you will be getting on your storage device. But why bother with portable applications at all when you can have your very own Web-based operating system bundled with a few essential applications? That's the promise of eyeOS -- an impressive and surprisingly useful open source Web-based OS.

Xen and lguest technologies have both been merged directly into the Linux kernel, opening up more virtualization avenues.

Thomas Gleixner described an effort to create a unified x86 architecture tree, "the core idea behind our project is simple to describe: we introduce a new arch/x86/ and include/asm-x86/ file hierarchy that includes all the existing 32-bit and 64-bit x86 code and allows the building of either a 32-bit (i386) kernel or a 64-bit (x86_64) kernel." Andi Kleen expressed some concern, "I think it's a bad idea because it means we can never get rid of any old junk. IMNSHO arch/x86_64 is significantly cleaner and simpler in many ways than arch/i386 and I would like to preserve that. Also in general arch/x86_64 is much easier to hack than arch/i386 because it's easier to regression test and in general has to care about much less junk. And I don't know of any way to ever fix that for i386 besides splitting the old stuff off completely."

Skolelinux version 3.0 (codenamed Terra) is now available for free download, the project's Oslo, Norway-based team announced on July 22. The distribution supports educational institutions in over 50 countries and has become part of the Debian project, where it is known as "Debian Edu."