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Two years after the Galeon browser's source code was forked, resulting in the Epiphany browser, developers of the two GNOME-based browsers announced they are coming back together by writing extensions to bring Galeon features and functionality to Epiphany.

As a system administrator, there are two ways you can interact with users: force them to follow the rules or encourage them with tools and guidelines. I prefer the second approach, as I think people generally want to do the right thing. Also, if people don't follow the rules at your company, that is a management problem, not a computer problem. Therefore, I prefer to concentrate my attention on helpful tools and scripts, which is exactly what I did recently to solve a typical system administrator problem.

The Open Source Development Labs' Desktop Linux (DTL) working group hosted a "Desktop Architects" meeting last week, at which the group targeted three specific areas to improve to bolster Linux adoption on the desktop. John Cherry, OSDL's Desktop Linux initiative manager, said that the meeting was "wildly successful," and other attendees seemed to share that assessment.

BeleniX is a free live CD based on the OpenSolaris kernel. With it you can have Solaris, which once ran exclusively on SPARC servers, powering your modest desktop computer. But with few applications and lacking an installation script, the Live CD does little more than slake a nerd's thirst for a taste of Solaris.

When I wrote last month's my sysadmin toolbox column, I knew that Linux.com readers would probably have a few suggestions. I was surprised, however, by the sheer number of responses we got from readers with suggestions for other tools. With all those good suggestions, it seemed like a good idea to compile a list of the most popular reader-suggested tools and utilities to cover some of the programs that didn't make the first column.

Welcome to this year's 49th issue of DistroWatch Weekly. New major releases of KDE, Firefox and Apache have prompted us to take a closer look at the major distribution's handling of package updates, the availability of backports and other related issues. Does your distribution provide backports for popular new software? Or do you have to wait for the next version bump to enjoy recently released packages? Also in this issue: an introduction to a GNOME-based Windows XP clone from Russia and a quick look at the excellent Archie Live CD. Finally, our November 2005 donation goes to the often-nominated KANOTIX project. Happy reading! Join us at irc.freenode.net #distrowatch

PROPRIETARY software often spawns proprietary training, with only one official route to certification. In the Linux world, there are three main certification tracks to choose from: that of Red Hat, the Linux Professional Institute or Novell. Picking a winner no simple task.

End user licence agreements (EULA) are nobody's favorite reading. Users of free and open source software (FOSS), who are accustomed to licences that give no warranty and admit no liability, may be even less inclined to read EULAs than most computer users. Perhaps, though, we should start. Over the last few years, commercial GNU/Linux distributions have been wrestling with the question of whether users should be indemnified in the event that a third party patent is upheld -- and, in some cases, their answers are starting to appear in their EULAs. However, whether these varying answers offer better protection than the GNU General Public License remains unproven.

We've covered SSH before in CLI Magic, but this week let's look at some additional SSH features that new users might not be aware of. For the purpose of this article, we'll be looking specifically at OpenSSH, but many of these features apply to other SSH variants as well.

We didn't hear about this danger from flying saucer nutcases but from the ultra-respectable British publication The Guardian, which says, "According to a scientific report, planet Earth's computers are wide open to a virus attack from Little Green Men." So far, there is no evidence whatsoever that Linux is immune to alien computer viruses. Could this threat bring the spread of Linux to a halt?

The National Science Foundation, which is conducting several long-term experiments that rely heavily on open source grid computing tools produced by the Globus Alliance, this week pledged more than $13 million in long-term support to the Globus development community.

A software product description is nothing without screenshots. They are the most-clicked links on almost every free software page -- much more than "Download." Screenshots carry information about the software's appearance, maturity, user interface, user friendliness, and feature set in a much more immediate way than paragraphs of text description. You can't show some software characteristics with still images, however. That's why, in recent months, the screencast has seen growing popularity. And when you need to creating screencasts, Istanbul and Wink make the process easy for Linux users.

The Extended DISC assessment is an indicator of general behavioral tendencies similar to the better known Myers-Briggs Type Indicator test. Knowing your employees' behavioral styles can help facilitate better teamwork and improve employee satisfaction and morale.

This week, advisories were released for zope, gtk, certericq, gdk-pixbuf, horde2, inkscape, chmlib, fuse, netpbm, and the kernel. The distributors include Debian, Gentoo, and Mandriva.

Philips Electronics China Group announced Wednesday that the company, together with Sony, IBM, Red Hat and Novell, has decided to join funds to create a joint venture-- the Open Invention Network (OIN), to purchase core patents of Linux operation system and offer them, free of charge, to any institutions or individuals. The effort is meant to aid the advancement of Linux and break the global dominance of Windows by Microsoft.

In a sharp change of public standpoint, the Electronic Freedom Foundation announced Wednesday that it has declined to submit comments in the US Copyright Office's DMCA rulemaking proceeding, denouncing the process as "too broken" with respect to consumers, and issuing a report that charges the Copyright Office with overstepping its legal authority.

Sun Microsystems, already waist-deep in open source, is getting in deeper. The company announced yesterday that it would be releasing more of its software for free -- and, eventually, as open source software.

If Mike Hearn, Hongli Lai, and the rest of the Autopackage team realize their goals, the future of package management in GNU/Linux will be greatly different from the present. Existing package management systems will remain for libraries and system utilities, but a separate tool will manage desktop applications. Packages will be installable for either the entire system or just the current account. Installation will be more convenient, too, with graphical tools designed for usability and tools for both end users and developers documented to professional standards.

The Free Software Foundation released its guidelines and process specifications this morning for the revision process that will produce version three of the GNU General Public License (GPL). The guidelines are designed to include as many people as possible in the revision process, says FSF executive director Peter Brown, but the foundation's specific ideas for changes to the license are not being released to the public just yet.

Epson Electronics America (EEA) launched its Web presence in 1998 with a then-typical static HTML Web site running on a Windows server. But by 1999, exorbitant licensing and maintenance costs, coupled with the company's need to create a dynamic site, led EEA's Executive Director for New Business Roy DaSilva to begin a migration to a site built with open source tools running on a Linux server.