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I used to be one of PCLinuxOS' fans and I especially enjoyed the GNOME flavor so hearing that the team was ready to finally launch a new version sparkled a lot of interest in me. And what better way to express that interest than sharing my first impressions on this popular distribution? Being a GNOME person I went straight to the PCLOS GNOME page and got the 2009.1 ISO from there. 694 MegaBytes later and I was ready to dive into this new experience.

The Jaiku developers have announced that Jaiku is now being served from the Google App Engine, which is the first step at making it "a federated, open source microblogging platform." The customisable platform is a part of Google and is maintained by volunteer Google engineers in their spare time.

With "Linux's dirty little secret: Uninstall" professional journalism has reached another, unprecedented low. I'm a customer and I expect nothing less than high quality articles of knowledgeable professionals. For this, I've always liked German magazines, which I consider to be the best in the world. That is in sharp contrast with David Ramel, who considers himself to be the new Hunter S. Thompson. Mr. Ramel, let me remind you that there is something like ethics.

Someone on the Ubuntu forums started an interesting thread today asking, “Can you manage to use only free software on your pc?“ It got me thinking about my dependency on proprietary software, and whether I’d ever really be able to get it out of my life entirely. I use three computers (in the narrow sense of the word, which excludes my cell phone) on a semi-daily basis: a desktop at home, an old Dell laptop that I use for taking notes in the library and a workstation in my employer’s office. All of these machines run Ubuntu, but there are bits and pieces of closed-source code tacked on. Here’s a breakdown of the proprietary components.

In response to a painful article I read, I’d like to touch the topic of a handy and easy way to install programs under Linux. First and the highest accusation to the current status quo is the impossibility to install the binary package on any Linux distribution, enabling, for example, the possibility to send a file to a friend, for a similar deployment, and the possibility to do a clean uninstallation of all dependencies. The other accusation states that “Linux has become a developers’ system, and not a system for the people.

When I first came across Gumstix, my jaw dropped. Gumstix are fully functional computer motherboards, the size of a gumstick or smaller, that run Linux. The latest in the Gumstix line, the Overo Earth, pushes the boundaries of ultra small computers -- and kicks some serious butt doing it.

A February survey of IT managers by IDC indicated that hard times are accelerating the adoption of Linux. The open source operating system will emerge from the recession in a stronger data center position than before, concluded an IDC white paper. Sixty-five percent of the 330 respondents said they plan to increase Linux server workloads by 10% or more this year. Sixty-three percent said they will increase their use of Linux on the desktop by more than 10% this year, although such an increase would still probably represent a miniscule share of all desktops. Forty-nine percent said they expect Linux will be their primary server platform within five years.

It is interesting that a time has actually come to pass that a lot of Unix users do not know of other "desktops" outside of a visual tour of older (yet still oft used) window managers and how they were built up from one to the next to reach the first X windows environment.

Finally, after almost two years in the making, the latest version of PCLinuxOS has been unleashed. Although released without much fanfare, I was excited enough to download PCLinuxOS 2009 immediately after it is available. I was able to test drive PCLOS 2009, took some screenshots for you all to see, and wrote my first impressions about this latest version which you will about to read later on. But before anything else, allow me to introduce PCLinuxOS to some of our new-to-Linux readers.

The repository system is a great strength of open-source operating systems, but some people want the latest-and-greatest of a particular application while keeping the core system unchanged. There is also the situation where non-free applications aren't available from within the standard repositories. In these two cases, adding outside repos can help you get the functionality you want.

There are growing concerns in the open source community that has many Linux developers worried. And some system integrators feel the same way. Overall, technical support and licensing policies managing many open source projects are an afterthought, and this is exactly what has the Linux and open source community worried. Some say it's time for some major changes in the way support and FOSS (free and open source software) licensing are managed in the enterprise segment.

While you can create and save documents in the OpenDocument format using OpenOffice.org, KWord, or AbiWord, there are other ways to generate ODF files.

The BBC have responded to suggestions that the acquisition and use of a botnet as part of a programme on internet security could have been illegal. The H asked if any costs were involved in acquiring the botnet; a BBC spokesperson replied "We would never discuss costs, but this demonstration was very much in the public interest". As suggested by other sources, the public interest defence is incorporated in the OFCOM regulations on how broadcasters should deal with criminals. Rule 3.3 states

Building software from source - that's a bit old-school, isn't it? Who wants to wrestle with the command line, hunting down dependencies and coaxing the GCC compiler into running properly? Well, it does sound like a strange thing to do in this world of binary packages and online repositories. We have thousands of packages available via the internet, all neatly compiled for our distros, thereby usually nullifying the need to get down and dirty with a Makefile. As great as they are, binary packages have a lot of limitations that can only be overcome by compiling a program from its source code. To prove that it's not quite as difficult as it sounds, let's see how this works. We're going to take a stock, unmodified Ubuntu 8.04 installation and install the Audacity sound editor, enabling some extra features along the way.

Pop quiz: How many commercial open source business models can you think of? Most people would probably say two or three. How about 10?

The Open Source Initiative (OSI), custodian of the Open Source Definition (OSD), has certified the European Union Public Licence (EUPL) as complying with the OSD. Karel De Vriendt, head of the European Commission's eGovernment programme, says this certification will make it easier to persuade European governments to place their own self-developed open source software under the EUPL.

Sometimes our best intentions give way to our worst, for a wide variety of reasons. This is as true of corporate amalgamations of individuals as it is of those individuals on their own, and it's as true for open-source companies as it is for proprietary companies. Community is the tonic that keeps corporate aspirations in line, just as community helps to keep individuals walking the straight and narrow of societal norms. As The Economist recently highlighted, new research suggests that "having a crowd around often makes things better."

If you have set your Ubuntu machine to auto-login everytime you start your computer, you will find that as soon as you reach your desktop, the keyring manager will automatically pop up and ask you for the password to unlock itself and retrieve the key to connect to the wireless connection. The keyring manager is integrated with Gnome such that when you login from the main screen, it will automatically unlock itself as well. However, if you use the auto-login function, Gnome will skip the keyring manager process and log the user in without unlocking the keyring manger.

Creating even a short movie can become very complex very quickly, so it’s important to keep in mind what you are doing and how it all fits into the bigger picture of making your movie. Kino is a primarily a simple storyboard non-linear video editing program with some compositing capabilities, as opposed to tape-to-tape linear editing or more complex non-linear compositing software such as Cinelerra, The Open Movie Editor, or KDEnlive.

Your a Linux user and you want to convert videos from DVD to iPhone or convert video files in flash format to stream online, what are you choices? A few years back you were stuck with command line only utilities like FFmpeg, which works great but doesn’t offer the ease of use found in GUI applications. Now with the popularity of Linux, you have 3 great GUI applications that can easily handle all your video converting needs.