LXer Weekly Roundup for 25-Jan-2009

LXer Feature: 25-Jan-2009 This week's Roundup starts off with Steven Rosenberg talking about his Thunderbird IMAP setup and why he wishes it was better at it. We have a couple of desktop related articles where Bruce Byfield gives us his Ideal Linux Desktop Setup and gHacks shows us how to shorten Linux boot time by going through what services you really need turned on.

This week's Roundup starts off with Steven Rosenberg talking about his Thunderbird IMAP setup and why he wishes it was better at it. We have a couple of desktop related articles where Bruce Byfield gives us his Ideal Linux Desktop Setup and gHacks shows us how to shorten Linux boot time by going through what services you really need turned on.

It looks like the British Navy's decision to 'upgrade' their ships to Windows has not gone as planned. One of their ships was disabled because of a software virus. Our own Paul Ferris tells us how Belkin got caught paying people to write positive reviews of their products or 'Astroturfing' as it is called. Paul goes into some of the social issues that are behind it. Matt Asay tells us about some of the events and people behind Microsoft's anti-Linux campaign. Tomáš Kramár liked Enigma so much he decided to port it to Linux.

A longtime Windows user Preston Gralla tries to see if he can survive 2 weeks without Windows and then he interviews Linux founder Linus Torvalds where we find out he has recently switched from KDE to GNOME. Blair Mathis gives us his list of the Top 50 most popular Linux Programs.

To close things out we have a couple of articles by Carla Schroder that speak to ongoing issues in the world of Linux Journalism. It has been revealed time and again that most of the people who are paid to write about Linux and Open Source have never actually used it, which explains the 'quality' of their writing. Carla hits the nail on the head in her article "Careers In Linux Journalism-- No Knowledge Required!" and then she asks why hypothetical Linux users are always portrayed as idiots and why "Joe Sixpack Must Die".