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Wouldn't it be great if you could just click your way to a custom distro? After all, most of the packages you will need are sitting on a well-connected web server somewhere, so it makes sense to build ISO images and repositories directly on that server. And since that server has a HTTP interface, why not make the distro building software into a web application? This is the principle behind http://www.instalinux.com, created by Chris Slater. It's based on the SystemDesigner CGI scripts from the Linux Common Operating Environment project, originally developed as a tool for internal use at HP, and now released under the GNU GPL.

Mozilla's Thunderbird e-mail client is very popular among Linux users, but it has poor visual integration with the Linux platform. Fortunately, Thunderbird is finally getting some Tango love and its own Linux theme. Mozilla user experience designer Bryan Clark published a blog entry this week that provides an early preview of some recent theming work that will significantly improve the look and feel of Thunderbird on Linux. Magnus Melin has started working on a Thunderbird gnomestripe theme which uses icons from the user's default theme in the menus. Michael Monreal also came up with a cool userChrome.css hack that applies Tango icons to the main user interface.

An image viewer (also known as image browser) is a desktop application that can quickly display or handle stored graphical images in different graphics file formats. It can render images according to properties of the display such as display resolution, color depth, and color profile. Other image viewers have advanced features like editing and web publishing. Some Linux users may not care much on whatever image viewer they are using. But to those who are rather picky, they can always get and install other image viewers with different features to suit their needs.

I recently promised you a strategy for a long-term exploration and transition to Linux and Open Source. This plan is for home use; organizational Linux is another issue. You also can follow this strategy to get some idea of how well a netbook will work before shelling out big bucks. You can decide whether Open Source applications work for you without installing Linux. Why? Most come in Mac and PC-compatible versions as well. Start by downloading and trying out the big ticket items, Open Office, Firefox and the Thunderbird e-mail client, on your PC, replacements for your must-use for-fee applications. Wikipedia.org has a good list of addition software.

If one was to believe IBM, the days of the Microsoft desktop are numbered, soon to be cut short by a combination of Canonical's Ubuntu Linux, IBM's Lotus range of office applications and a virtual desktop from Virtual Bridges. The trouble is IBM's solution is nothing new and addresses none of the issues associated with moving away from Microsoft.

Keith Curtis spent years as a Microsoft programmer. Then he quit and became deeply enthusiastic about source development. This is his story..."A few weeks after leaving, I decided to try Linux. I had played with Firefox and OpenOffice for a few hours while at the company, and even wrote an e-mail to our legal team telling them that my friend Alex Mogilevsky's patented work on background spell-checking had been stolen by OpenOffice. But I had never used those apps beyond my brief testing, and had never run Linux."

After trying Ubuntu 8.10 for two days on my Macbook, which proved to be a success, I now take Fedora 10 for a spin. Read on to see how my two days experience was with this Linux distro.

I read a longish post from Linux Canuck, “How Windows Users are Changing Linux and What We Should Do About It,” which attempts to sum up a lot of the issues that have been discussed at length here. The gist of the post is that, as former Windows users wander over to explore Linux, they bring their own Windows prejudices and expectations with them, and that the accommodating Linux community tries to make them feel “at home.” Canuck wonders — is the Linux community in danger of being too accommodating — to the point that it attempts to be more Windows-like and loses its own identity?

Version 6 of the popular Perl programming language will not be compatible with previous versions, but will open up a new world of custom “languages” and interpreters, according to its founder Larry Wall. In Sydney for the annual Open Source Developers Conference, Wall delivered a keynore on “The once and future of Perl” and gave a few rare insights to what the future of Perl programming might look like.

Nginx (pronounced "engine x") is a free, open-source, high-performance HTTP server. Nginx is known for its stability, rich feature set, simple configuration, and low resource consumption. This tutorial shows how you can install Nginx on a Debian Etch server with PHP5 support (through FastCGI) and MySQL support.

Some funny stuff mixed with some practical advice. What a treat :) For today's humor post I found a nice page from Pedro Diaz' Technical University of Madrid Homepage. I've actually only included a very small portion of his page on Unix and Linux Horror Stories. The rest of it is well worth the lengthy read.

Hey teeming masses, don't say Steve Ballmer, Bill Gates (and the Professor and Mary-Ann) never did nothing for you. In a totally roundabout way, I learned that Microsoft is giving away — I say giving away — Microsoft Word. OK ... Microsoft Word for DOS. Remember that? I do. I actually used to run Word for DOS a bit back in the day. The Unix-like OS world is awash in console-based text editors. There are literally hundreds, from vi and nano to joe and emacs. But is there an actual word processor for the Unix/Linux console? Nope. "Ubuntu Kung Fu" author Keir Thomas suggests running the freely downloadable Microsoft Word for DOS and using the DOSBox MS-DOS emulator to run Word as a command-line word processor.

The Symbian Foundation will make Symbian as an open-source operating system in 2010 and will put out its first distribution of software for developers in the first half of next year. The foundation is the successor to the Symbian consortium that has administered the OS since 1998. It is being formed after Nokia agreed to buy the remaining part of Symbian, a deal that closed on Tuesday.

The recession is taking its toll at Google, forcing the company to cut back on its famous "20 percent" projects, which allow employees to work part of the time on non-core interests. Is it a sign of the high-flying company coming down to Earth?

First the Linux Hater’s blog ended, and now there’s a claim that the Linux Hater’s Redux has gone to the great kernel panic in the sky. Now a mysteriously named person called “Oiaohm” is trying to re-incarnate some of the hate in a new “battle ground” but his sights aren’t set on Linux alone.

AbiWord has been my favorite open source word processor for a long time, and it's now out in a new version 2.6.5, which adds some excellent features. If you haven't used this application (for Windows or Linux) before, definitely download it, and if you already use it, go for the upgrade. AbiWord has always had excellent support for many file formats, but one of the best things about the new version is that it supports Office Open XML filters, and that means you can open and edit both Microsoft Word 2007 and OpenOffice Writer files with it. Here's more on what's under the hood.

This roundup which sort of encapsulates the first half of December and most of November is not an easy one. My friends have had terrible losses and I lost a friend - that said - one thing I do know about my friends is that they do not want systhread to stop doing what systhread does... so here goes - visit the link to see some info about my friend, we got autobuilds for the systhread repo to work (yaaay), we are looking into building a mini vmware cluster (do read the post for you ESX dudes) and last and certainly not least the bloody site audit is done.

If you use both Windows and Linux/Unix boxes and are not familiar with PuTTY and Xming, you're really missing out. In case it's not totally clear above, PuTTY enables you to run an SSH console session from your networked Unix-like box, and Xming allows you to run X apps over that same connection. It's all good, clean geeky fun.

Knowing when a GNU/Linux distribution is free used to be simple. If all its software had licenses approved by the Free Software Foundation (FSF) then a distribution was free. Otherwise, it wasn't. But it's not as black-and-white as it seems, since closed binary-only blobs have been allowed in the kernel for years now in violation of the GPL. Bruce Byfield examines the complexities of this issue.

I like MythTV for several reasons. It's not a project for the faint of heart, but it's less the fault of the software than the wild array of hardware that can be conceivably used in nearly every imaginable configuration. It is quite stable, and doesn't require hefty system specs. I didn't think overly about Boxee when I first heard of it. MythTV worked for me.