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Have you ever needed to wirelessly network a Windows PC’s directly to a Ubuntu machine? In other words, you lack a router, switch, or other networking mechanism, each PC has a wireless device and you need to trade a file or play a network game? Read on. Ubuntu’s NetworkManager 0.7.0 contains the necessary features for creating an Ubuntu adhoc network host.

Last week saw the release of SimplyMEPIS 8.0, a Debian-based desktop Linux distribution designed for both personal and business purposes. We take the live CD for a spin to see what it has to offer. In the news this past week, openSUSE develops Debian-like distribution upgrade functionality to their package manager, Red Hat looks set for a comeback to the desktop arena as it announces virtualisation plans that will centre around KVM technology, and Novell signs a virtualisation agreement with VMware over support for their products. Also in the news, the Linux Starter Kit from Linux Format magazine has been released for free and we link to interviews with lead developers of Linux Mint and Kongoni. Finally, we are pleased to announce that the DistroWatch.com February 2009 donation goes to Wolvix GNU/Linux, a Slackware-based desktop distribution and live CD.

The absolute ultimate Linux beginners guide I stumbled upon an article at the BBC website. This is not a site I regularly visit, so I'm probably the latest person in the world to notice this article. I guess it's been noticed and many people already had their say on this. To bad there was no comment section with the article. But still I think there couldn't be enough people who have a say about this. I could start ranting here about how wrong he is with his conclusions, and how such articles are harmful by scaring people away from Linux. Which is true, but that's not my intention.

To get the next billion people online, netbooks must continue to become less expensive and thus more accessible. An interesting way to achieve this is to separate out the display and smarts into two pluggable units, one which can be shared by many, or replaced functionally with a smartphone, PC, or server.

Once again, time for the weekly distribution roundup. This week we have a rather large list of releases, so let’s get to it.

Mounting an LVM may seem a bit intimidating, it's not. In reality, despite the length of this entry, you will only be running a handful of commands, and most of those just to get the needed information. Do not despair, this will be as painless as possible.

Online shopping is the activity that consumers engage in when purchasing products or services over the internet. This activity has many distinct advantages over 'traditional shopping' for both consumers and the businesses.

This week we received a note from Matthias Dahl, a Phoronix reader, who wanted to remind us about current problems plaguing the NVIDIA 180.xx driver series. Using any of the newer NVIDIA Linux drivers can cause graphics corruption followed by the system locking up. These problems are certainly known by NVIDIA and are experienced by many users as can be seen from this NvNews Forum thread. Below is what Matthias had to share about the situation.

Ubuntu Podcast Episode #20 covers the controversial notifications feature, Karmic Koala, New Mexico LoCo helps facility aimed at people with substance abuse problems, better integrated mail stack in Jaunty, lots of HP-related Ubuntu news, and much more.

Just three days ago we shared that Nouveau will become the default NVIDIA driver in Fedora 11 to replace the obfuscated xf86-video-nv mess. Now proposed for Fedora 11 is to also integrate the Nouveau kernel mode-setting driver.

In this HowTo I will describe how to prepare a Debian Lenny server for OpenVZ. With OpenVZ you can create multiple Virtual Private Servers (VPS) on the same hardware, similar to Xen and the Linux Vserver project. OpenVZ is the open-source branch of Virtuozzo, a commercial virtualization solution used by many providers that offer virtual servers. The OpenVZ kernel patch is licensed under the GPL license, and the user-level tools are under the QPL license.

Linux is a joke. Well, that may be a bit harsh, but Ubuntu certainly seems to be all the excuse founder Mark Shuttleworth needs to make one bad pun after another. After Bill Gates' performances with Jerry Seinfeld, one wonders if becoming a billionaire tech mogul alters brain chemistry. At any rate, Paul Rubens reports on the future of Karmic Koala and Canonical. (Hint: not as successes in show biz.)

I'm taking PCWorld's new LinuxLink Blog under my wing. Being a mentor comes with great responsibility.

Have a confusing and entertaining Saturday :)

Zack Urlocker of MySQL fame was at the Stanford Accel Symposium earlier this week and, along with some other open-source heavyweights, participated on a panel that attempted to cull some lessons learned in building open-source businesses. If you didn't get to attend the event, don't panic. Urlocker has written up a few key principles.

The bad economy may be a boon to relatively inexpensive open-source IP PBXs, which one study says already account for nearly 18% of all PBXs installed last year in North American business networks. Because they are generally less expensive, open source products may become attractive to more corporate users as their budgets are cut, laying the groundwork for a growth spurt, according to the recent study by Eastern Management Group.

The Linux Foundation — the not-for-profit that keeps Linus in keyboards, and most recently, has been looking to glam things up a bit — earlier this month provided a first glimpse into its plans for the 2009 Collaboration Summit, to be held April 8-10 in San Francisco.

IBM earned 4,186 U.S. patents in 2008, becoming the first company ever to earn more than 4,000 U.S. patents in a single year. IBM's 2008 patent total is nearly triple Hewlett-Packard's and exceeds the combined 2008 patents of Microsoft, Hewlett-Packard, Oracle, Apple, EMC, Accenture and Google. Samsung had the second most patents, with 3,515 issued last year, according to IFI Patent Intelligence. This is the 16th consecutive year IBM has led in U.S. patents.

Novell officials cited declining fortunes across its business yesterday "due to the slowing economy" as it summarized its first-quarter results of 2009. CFO Dana Russell said net revenue for the quarter was $215 million, compared with net revenue of $231 million for the first quarter of 2008. Net income was $11 million, or 3 cents per share, compared with net income of $17 million, or 5 cents per share, for the same period the year before, Russell said in Novell's quarterly earnings report teleconference.

Recently we looked at networking your Linux receiver – and described how you can stream video from it to any PC on the same network. Now we'll take these networking aspirations further afield by going online. Although a few satellite receivers offer the Ethernet port that gives rise to such flexibility, only Linux-based receivers are capable of taking full advantage of such functionality.