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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.

Using Linux and Open Source software can make your bottom line easier to look at. Here are 10 reasons that you need to look at Linux for your company.

Squid Graph is a Perl script that takes your Squid proxy server access.log file and generates a Web page showing you statistics about your proxy accesses and transfers, including the number of cache hits and the percentage of requests that were served by the cache alone. With Squid Graph you can see how well tweaks to your Squid configuration are working.

Now that you've seen all the big names and launches of 2008, it's time to give a nod to the apps that didn't get the attention they should have this past year. If you're sick of hearing about Firefox and the iPhone and Gmail and Chrome, you're in the right place. Let's take a look at the least hyped software that launched or saw great improvements in 2008, and give 'em the love they deserve.

The Initials of "Political Correctness" alone make this a curious read about Unix/Linux "Improvements" ;) For this weekend, I again combed the Internet with a fine-toothed ...hair brush... and found even more funny stuff out there. It never ceases to amaze me that, out of the billions of people alive on this planet, so many have managed to retain their sense of humor :) Meanwhile, I thank my "Deity of the moment" for them, since, as "Reader's Digest" so eloquently put it: "Laughter is the finest off all medicines and will probably end up being the cure for most everything." I'm paraphrasing, of course.

Have any of them-- has one single vendor, whether it's Symantec or Trend or McAfee or F-Secure or anyone-- ever said "Quit throwing your money down a rathole-- stop using Windows, or at least don't put it on the Internet"? Wouldn't that little tidbit of honesty be refreshing? But no, they'll never do that. If the same conditions existed in, say, the small home appliances industry people would be getting electrocuted by their toasters and hair dryers every day, and the manufacturers would advise them to learn correct handling of live wires, and a thriving industry of insulated safety garments would prey on the survivors.

A poem about the impact of the process of software compilation over Freedom. Who can affirm that the meal you eat is in correlation with the recipe we said it was made of ? Provocative thought.

[This is the first time we have received an open source poem as a submission. - Scott]

Om Malik calls this "dave winer's best post of the year". I can't recall a better one, but ranking isn't what matters here. What matters is perspective and experience, and Dave has plenty of both. What he says is, "We're now reaching the end of a cycle, we're seeing feature wars. That's what's going on between Facebook and Google, both perfectly timing the rollouts of their developer proposition to coincide with the others' -- on the very same day! I don't even have to look at them and I am sure that they're too complicated. Because I've been around this loop so many times. The solution to the problem these guys are supposedly working on won't come in this generation, it can only come when people start over. They are too mired in the complexities of the past to solve this one. Both companies are getting ready to shrink. It's the last gasp of this generation of technology."

Red Hat may not be spending much when it comes to the company holiday party this year, but it certainly is no Scrooge. Rather than splurge on a swanky party for its employees, the Linux distributor will give money and food to charity.

Becoming an accomplished sailor isn’t easy, but a group of European sailing enthusiasts have just made the sport a little more accessible for beginners. The ASV Roboat is a solar-powered, Linux-brained sailboat that can sail anywhere and navigate pre-set race courses with no human intervention.

Your online abode is so difficult to keep secured. It can get hacked, you may install something wrong, a wrong configuration can wreak havoc, the server hard disk might crash, natural calamities, and what not. Your best option to secure yourself against all this is summarized in just one word “BACKUP”.

While I've experimented with FreeBSD (and offshoots DesktopBSD and PC-BSD), NetBSD and OpenBSD (the latter of which I run the most; including right now), I never really paid much attention to DragonFlyBSD. A quick perusal of the DragonFlyBSD Web site offers a lot of information on things like its new HAMMER filesystem as well as the operating system's goal of bringing "native clustering support" into the kernel. It's all a bit over my desktop-using head.

In addition to the information we provide on open source projects, there are many good sites that allow you to further investigate open source projects before you make the decision to download and install. Sure, you're likely to know SourceForge and Eclipse, but where else can you look? Here are six good choices.

Slackware 12.2 RC1 announced.

Virtualized computing environments can take advantage of built-in virtualization support in modern dual-core processors, but when it comes to 3-D acceleration in virtual machines, almost all fall flat on their faces. VMGL is a little-known application written as part of Google's Summer of Code 2006 program that lets OpenGL apps running inside a virtual machine take advantage of the graphics hardware acceleration on the host. It has limitations, but if you want 3-D in VMs, VMGL is your best bet.

Has the time come at last to live a Microsoft-free life? That thought crossed my mind yesterday morning as I read an announcement from IBM that (with Canonical Inc.) it was offering a new Linux-based virtual desktop suite that, at user prices as low as $59, would compete directly with the iconic Microsoft Office.

In this article we will change the look of our Moodle website. Specifically, we will use our resources within Moodle to make our topics more visually appealing. We would include an animated character. We will take a good look at different tips and tricks to make our courses more interesting for students.

Seven months after the release of OpenSolaris 2008.05 (a.k.a. Project Indiana) its successor was finally released earlier this week. OpenSolaris 2008.11 was released on Tuesday with many updated packages and new features. To see how this new work has affected the performance of Sun's OpenSolaris operating system, we have benchmarked both releases through some different tests.

With much fanfare Sun announced its new JavaFX platform yesterday, but curiously in a video introducing the platform, Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz, made the browser the enemy of content owners, and set up JavaFX as the platform to give developers and content owners direct access to users. I'm not sure I agree with his basic premise that the browser is a bad thing.