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Novell's new SUSE Studio web-based service for creating software appliances on SUSE Linux has been favorably reviewed by eWEEK. While SUSE Studio does not offer the breadth of features of rPath's rBuilder, Novell's product is much easier at appliance creation, says the review.

So you have heard of all the advantages and geeky babble about how Linux is better and you have finally decided to try it? Just one thing, you don’t know an awful lot about Linux to get you started. How about some free downloadable ebooks to teach yourself Linux, that you can download today? Would that help?

Juliet Kemp is a Mutt (powerful text email client) user, even in these modern times, and shows us how to use old-school Mutt + SSH for security on the newfangled Android G1.

In this article by Christer Edwards, we will learn how to create, maintain and make available a local Ubuntu repository mirror, allowing you to save bandwidth and improve network efficiency with each machine you add to your network.

The idea behind operating different services at different runlevels essentially revolves around the fact that different systems can be used in a different ways. Some services cannot be used until the system is in a particular state, or mode, such as ready for more than one user or has networking available.

Your editor recently "celebrated" yet another birthday; one asks "which birthday?" at the risk of making him grumpy indeed. During that celebration, a surprising present turned up, in the form of an Amazon Kindle book reader. That presents an opportunity to play with a new toy, something your editor is not known for turning down, even when the toy is as problematic as the Kindle. In the process, your editor turned up some free software which helps to make the device rather more useful.

The Bordeaux Technology Group released Bordeaux 1.8 for FreeBSD today. Bordeaux 1.8.2 adds support for Apple's QuickTime 6.5.2 Player, IrfanView 4.25 the extreamly popular image viewer and editor. This release aslo bundles in Cabextract, Wget and Unzip to remove external dependencies. Our winetricks script has been synced to the latest official release, Steam should now install and run once again, There has also been many small bug fixes and tweaks.

The Open Invention Network (OIN) today announced that it was starting a new programme to acquire patents from "entrepreneurial inventors". The Distinguished Inventors Patent Acquisition programme offers cash for accepted patents while allowing the inventor to patent enhancements to the accepted patent. The OIN believe the programme will help independent inventors turn their patents into money, without them selling their patents to patent trolls, or companies seeking to "impede innovation".

The Debian project is planning a whole series of enhancements for Debian 5.0 "Squeeze." A few results of the currently running Google Summer of Code are beginning to creep into it.

The myTouch 3G, T-Mobile's second Android-powered smartphone in a year, nixes the slide-out keyboard of the G1 in favor of a touchscreen-only keypad. Battery life, camera, software and Microsoft Exchange compatibility are among the new handset's improvements. However, the touchscreen keyboard and the lack of a dedicated headphone jack were annoying.

Sugar is the desktop environment that is used for the "One Laptop per Child" (OLPC) netbooks. It can also be installed on normal computers and even run off of a USB stick (which should have at least 1GB of size). This guide shows how you can install Sugar (the Strawberry release which is based on Fedora 11) on a USB stick.

What is it that makes Microsoft's products sell? Why is it that Microsoft seems to reign supreme in our microcomputer industry? Sure, we all know that IBM and Linux are strong in the research field, and we know that Solaris had a strong following in some areas as well, but niches aren't what dominate markets. Niches are just small pockets that concentrate on specific things. We all have a tendency to think that Scientific Linux is a niche distribution, or that tomstrbt is a niche distribution... in reality Linux is a niche operating system. The same can be said about the BSDs, and Solaris, and AIX, and HPUX, and V7x86 (ad inifitum). When we look at Macintosh, there is a tendency to think that Microsoft isn't impenetrable. Why does Macintosh do well when Linux does not? After all, Linux offers more hardware support than any other OS. Well, the answers are blazingly obvious and simple.

SUSE Linux used to be a very KDE-centric distribution. Then Novell came around, bought SUSE and Ximian, and slowely but surely they turned the now-openSUSE distribution into effectively a GNOME-centric distribution with KDE as its sidekick. The openSUSE community, however, doesn't appear to be particularly happy with KDE being a sidekick.

Scheduled for release in October, Ubuntu 9.10 is perhaps the most important release to date for the community-driven Linux project.

I read the latest words of our beloved Redmond executive we all like affectionately call “Steve”. From the way mr. Ballmer speaks to us you’d say there’s nothing wrong with paying for software. You’d say that the business model that Microsoft chose is the right one for every firm and company out there. What Steve failed to mention is that if every software firm and company out there would chose that particular business model, Microsoft would have been out of business. Competition is good Steve. Yes - Apple’s business model is radically different from the one Microsoft uses. And guess what? People LIKE it more. What that particular business model provides is exactly what people need. Apart from the fact that they’re using the same “push towards the consumer” tactic that Microsoft so dearly holds, Apple manages to actually deliver good stuff towards the same consumer.

Chromium developer Tim Steele has revealed that Google is working on a new cloud synchronisation function for its Chrome web browser. Chromium is the open source base on which Google's WebKit-based Chrome web browser is built. In his post on the Chromium development message board, Steele says that the feature for syncing user data will be linked to a users Google account and that work is being started in the Chromium project this week.

For what seems like forever using Wine (The Windows compatability layer) on Solaris was an absolute pain. There was once a time when you had to compile it by hand, then Vit Hrachovy & Apostolos Syropoulos & Albert Lee started producing SVR4 packages that made installing as easy as “pkgadd -d winepackage”.

Since then Brandon Barker has pushed the latest stable release of Wine into the contrib IPS repository which integrates well with the new software management architecture for OpenSolaris.

The Mono developers have announced a limited beta and September release of MonoTouch, an edition of Mono for the Apple's iPhone and iPod Touch devices. The open source .NET implementation has had some hurdles to overcome to be able to work within Apple's technical and legal requirements.

Phoronix Media has released version 2.0 (codenamed "Sandtorg") of the Phoronix Test Suite, which encompasses hundreds of updates to its flagship testing and performance profiling software. Phoronix Media has also released PTS Desktop Live 2009.3 (codenamed "Gernlinden"), which is the first Linux-based desktop operating system designed exclusively for carrying out automated tests using the Phoronix Test Suite from a live environment. Phoromatic, a web-based remote test management system, has also entered closed beta testing.

Saturday, the first day of August, 2009 saw the undeniable success of a well-executed plan. It wasn't flawless and without it's unique challenges and anxieties...but it happened and it happened on the backs of about 43 selfless, giving geeks. And that is what I want to tell you about.