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What does this have to do with Linux or Open Source? As always, helios crafts his story so that after a few sentences, you really don't care. Rest assured...it will tie in, and in a surprising manner.

Manufacturers and PC vendors would have you believe that there's only one way to speed up your machine: buy new kit. And then, in 18 months, buy new kit again. However, it's usually our software that's the real bottleneck. If you've been using Linux for a while, you'll already have discovered lighter alternatives to some of the platform's bloatfests – for example, using AbiWord and Gnumeric in the place of OpenOffice.org.

Turning your personal computer into a media server means that you will be able to play video (AVI, MPEG, MPEG-2, DivX, XviD, MKV, WMV, MP4 or even DVD ISOs or VIDEO_TS folders) and audio files (MP3, OGG, FLAC or WMA) or view your favorite photos (JPG, PNG, GIF, TIFF) stored on your PC's hard drive on a big screen TV set or LCD/Plasma high-definition display, via a PlayStation 3 or Xbox 360 console. The following tutorial will teach you how to set up such a media server, step-by-step, from configuring your PC and gaming console, to installing and setting up the media server software in your Linux box. We've offered two media server installations, so you can choose whichever fits you best.

This how to will allow you to configure a Postfix mail server with virtual hosting. Virtual hosting means that you can add as many maildomains as you want and subsequentially as many mailboxes for these domains as you want. Here we we use an LDAP backend for both the MTA (Postfix) and POP3/IMAP server (Dovecot), and a web based management interface.

Everyone knows that Linus Torvalds 'is a Linux' but did you know he is also a born-again gnome?

A month ago we compared Intel's graphics performance between Ubuntu 8.10 and the latest Ubuntu 9.04 daily snapshot at the time. With those tests we found Intel's performance had degraded significantly. However, with many new graphics packages having been released since then, we have carried out some additional tests this morning to look at where the Intel Linux graphics performance stands today.

Open source has reached the third wave of its evolution and those who have been using the older models which were procurement-driven need to adapt. That's the message which Simon Phipps, the chief open source and standards officer from Sun Microsystems, brought to the Australian national Linux conference this morning.

Volunteer projects like SETI@home successfully crowdsourced scientific computing to a cloud of idle home computers. Trusted bare-metal desktop hypervisors enable scaling this to a commercially viable business model.

I used to be a KDE user. I thought KDE 4.0 was such a disaster I switched to GNOME. I hate the fact that my right button doesn't do what I want it to do. But the whole "break everything" model is painful for users and they can choose to use something else.

Want to beef up the software bundle that comes with your Linux-based Netbook? Here are five nifty applications and tools that are worth a closer look.

The Ubuntu team is proud to announce the release of Ubuntu 8.04.2 LTS, the second maintenance update to Ubuntu's 8.04 LTS release. In all, over 200 updates have been integrated. Ubuntu 8.04.2 Screen Shots

Linux is quickly gaining popularity, but there are still many users afraid to convert as they are not familiar with the applications. Today our Linux guru Blair Mathis is back to introduce fifty of the most popular applications on this OS

I was window shopping in a high street electronics store a few days ago. I was delighted to see a shelf display full of netbooks from vendors like Samsung, Acer, Dell, Advent and Asus (of course), to name a few. It looked like the Asus EeePC had launched an idea whose time had come and in the process possibly heralded the long withdrawing roar of the live CD. I now knew how General Adolf Galland felt during the Battle of Berlin when he recorded that when he saw Allied fighters escorting the bombers all the way to the target and back he knew the war was over. Like Mark Twain, predictions of the death of live CDs may be premature but here’s why I think that device convergence and software development may, like those escorting fighters, mark the end of the line for live CDs.

The bonds of the FOSS community go far beyond software. Case in point, Arjen Lentz is stepping outside the bounds of the comfortable realm of software and launching bluehackers.org. The site is an effort to bring developers together to provide support for one another when dealing with depression.

All the Linux bashers use this as an excuse/reason why Linux is not suitable as a desktop operating system. You should never have to use the command line they say. You should have to be able to configure your whole computer just by clicking the mouse. People find the command line confusing blah blah blah.

Mobile communications depends on the availability of service. Not only have carriers been using Linux in their network equipment for years, they also are incorporating open source software into the middleware layer of the stack. It's key to maintain open and reliable standards for the health of the networks.

Citrix’s promised Xen-based desktop virtualization solution will be delivered in the second half of 2009. Earlier this week, the Ft Lauderdale virtualization company announced that it is co-developing the solution, known as “Project Independence,” in collaboration with Intel, one of the original investors in the Xen open source project.

Looks like the British Government is considering taxing all broadband users so as to compensate the music and movie industry for losses through Internet piracy. Seems to me they have not thought this through, if they tax you £5 per month and you download £50 of pirated stuff then you are still quids in.

A company specializing in open source authentication and auditing software for mixed networks says it grew by a factor of five in 2008. Likewise Software says its products can be used to securely integrate Linux, Unix, and Mac systems with Microsoft Active Directory. Likewise is based in Bellevue, Wash., where Microsoft also keeps extensive offices. For its part, Microsoft yesterday announced historic layoffs. Likewise boasts of revenue growth of 500 percent, year-over-year, and new customers that include HP, IBM, Oracle, and Sun. It has ongoing relationships with Apple, Microsoft, Novell, Red Hat, and Ubuntu, it says.

Unless you're a sysadmin you don't generally have to worry that much about getting email delivered, you just hookup your GUI email client to your external email account and you're done. But what if your system tries to deliver mail, for example from cron? Normally, this just goes to root or perhaps some designated user on your system.