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A few months ago I started sensing the need for a replacement for my aging and ailing HP Omnibook 4150. That machine's audio capabilities were negligible even with external hardware, but it had been serviceable for writing articles and as a portable MIDI composition environment. Alas, after years of travel and abuse the Omnibook's hard drive gasped its last breath of life. I had no fear for my data, the drive had been backed up, but clearly the time had come to buy a new portable computer.

Google has published its plan to build into Chrome what is arguably its most requested feature: the ability to accept extensions that can customize how the open-source Web browser operates. And guess what? Google's dependence on advertising notwithstanding, one of the extension examples the company points to is the ability to block advertisements.

What is the D-Bus? From the D-Bus documentation: "D-Bus is an inter-process communication mechanism—a medium for local communication between processes running on the same host. (Inter-host connects may be added in the future, but that is not what D-Bus is meant for). D-Bus is meant to be fast and lightweight, and is designed for use as a unified middleware layer underneath the main free desktop environments" So for the non technically inclined (why are you reading this anyway) ;) basically a simple way to think of D-Bus, is that it's a way for processes on an operating system to communicate with each other. That's probably a simple and non accurate enough wording, but it should help grasp the concept. Many utilities nowadays are implementing D-Bus connectivity. It is especially interesting (well for me anyway) to script some GUI elements like for example my KDE-4 desktop from the command line. This would help automate some tasks and is cool anyways. Let's see how to begin talking on the D-Bus

Microsoft informs computer shops that if they put some Vista advertising in their newspaper advertisements (or other forms of ads), there will be money in the bank for them, paid in the form of marketing money from Microsoft.

My experience with Fedora has not been bad at all. I think a big reason for that is that my laptop has practically no need for proprietary drivers. The intel graphics card open source driver has gotten quite good and provides painless and efficient compositing out of the box. In fact, every piece of hardware, including sound, works out of the box. So, that leaves me free to compare distros by their features and ease of use. So what have I found in using Fedora 10 KDE version?

One of the first things I do upon installing a Linux distribution is put the Network Monitor applet on my GNOME panel. Watching the blue lights twinkle on and off makes me aware of network traffic. But if you want more details about what's happening on your network, such as which application is hogging bandwidth or what each network interface is up to, you can turn to specialty tools like NetHogs and IPTraf. While NetHogs is a unique tool altogether, IPTraf can be used on a server as well as by a home user.

Fedora Linux has always pushed forward with an intense release schedule, and is usually the first major distribution to package new technologies and advances. Fedora 10 promises to be even a larger milestone than most, both for its development community and users; Bruce Byfield goes behind the scenes and uncovers some of the legal, development, and community issues that the Fedora team have to deal with.

For anyone who hasn't been paying attention to the software industry lately, I have some bad news. The open-source business model is broken. Companies have long hoped to make money from this freely available software by charging customers for support and add-on features. Some have succeeded. Many others have failed or will falter, and their ranks may swell as the economy worsens. This will require many to adopt a new mindset, viewing open source more as a means than an end in itself.

[Now Open Source is "broken" because it needs more value? Cohen was once the CEO of the OSDL and now he has this to say? Interesting. - Scott]

Large collections of MP3 files can be hard to manage. Organizing your music into directories helps some, but when you want to play just those tracks in a certain genre or from a certain year, no amount of directory organization will help -- but Zina, a powerful Web application, can. Zina is easiest to set up if you already have a home Web server. You must understand how to set up CGI applications on your Web server. If you're using Apache, you can read a nice tutorial for basic CGI setups. You must also have PHP in your Apache setup, as that is the language that Zina is written in.

Linux distributor Good OS and BIOS vendor Phoenix Technologies each have plans to make netbooks speedier devices, the vendors said at the Netbook World Summit in Paris on Monday. For Good OS, the browser is the operating system -- or at least, all you're going to see of it. While other companies have developed quick-start software that allows you to check mail or play music seconds after turning on your computer, Good OS has created "a wrapper that enables you to perform all your major rich client applications from within the browser," said Good OS founder and CEO David Liu.

Openmoko Inc, maker of the world's first totally open mobile phone, today announced that faberNovel, Inc has joined the worldwide distribution network for the FreeRunner open source mobile phone. Since launching the FreeRunner in July of this year, Openmoko has built out a network of more than 20 distributors covering North America, Europe and Asia. Paris, France based faberNovel,a design and innovation firm dedicated to engineering, strategic development and experimentation, will distribute the Openmoko phone in the US through faberNovel, Inc, their San-Francisco office.

You might just be thinking that we need another browser like Medieval Europe needed the Bubonic plague, but I’m always a great fan of the different and new, of people doing their own thing. Even Firefox had to start somewhere. H3v is a relative newcomer to the browser pack and it definitely falls into the “lean, mean” category. I think it deserves a little more exposure.

Fedora 10 was officially released on Tuesday November 25, 2008. Since its release I have installed and used it on a number of machines and been running it as my full-time desktop. One of the main complaints about Fedora 9 when it was released was their decision to drop the KDE 3.x desktop and go exclusively with the KDE 4.0.x desktop. Being a KDE user I can concur with the assessment that the version of KDE that shipped on the Fedora 9 install media was not very usable. As a result, I switched to GNOME for a few months until KDE updated to the 4.1.x series. How is KDE 4 in Fedora 10? Much, much better.

MySQL 5.1 is now out, but not everyone is happy about this oft-delayed open source database release. I've been hearing about MySQL 5.1 since at least 2006 and over the last two years there have been a few dates I've been told when it would be released. "One would have thought that MySQL AB (now the MySQL department at Sun) should have learned something from our too early release of MySQL 5.0 but unfortunately this is not the case," Widenius stated.

MySQL founder Michael "Monty" Widenius warns in his blog against putting the current version 5.1 of the popular database package into production. He's critical of the release policy and fears that the product's quality may suffer.

This week's DWW feature story looks at the global economic crisis and its impact on Linux distributions and businesses. It turns out that the release of Fedora 10 isn't the only good news for Red Hat as a major Wall Street analyst sees a bright future for the company

The iPhone DevTeam has managed to get a Linux image to boot up on an iPhone, at least to console level, though they've resolutely failed to explain why one would want to do such a thing. It's hard to imagine there are many iPhone users out there who love the hardware but are unhappy with the OS and interface, but that's never stopped the Linux crowd before. They won't be happy until the little penguin has been replicated everywhere, and today it's the turn of the iPhone to feel the touch of rebel code.

From the Problem Statement: "Chromium can't be everything to all people. People use web browsers in a variety of environments and for a wide variety of jobs. Personal tastes and needs vary widely from one user to the next. The feature needs of one person often conflict directly with those of another. Further, one of the design goals of Chromium is to have a minimal light-weight user interface, which itself conflicts with adding lots of features."

[I found this and thought it would be of interest. - Scott]

In this interview we talk with Adam. In specific, we talk about: What’s new in the latest Mandriva release. Relating directly to the users instead of the developer community. Differences between user priorities and developer priorities. Deciding what should be included in the distribution. What will become of the “year of the Linux desktop” idea? The future of open versus closed development.

Hi All, Here's the 14th tip in the "OpenLDAP Quick Tips" series and today it comes from "Pablo Chamorro". You want to analyse your OpenLDAP logfile? There are various ways to do this yourself by hand, but the have community already done the work for you and written the: OpenLDAP Logfile analysis utility.