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o...what happened. Initially we were swamped. People came through the door and converged on the rooms. In fact, it took most of the volunteers by surprise. Quickly adjusting, we were able to answer the many questions thrown at us and gladly demonstrated, and in many cases installed Linux on the spot. There are lessons for US to learn however...

Here's how to skin Linux to give a Windows Vista appearance. You can help provide a familiar look and feel to your Windows-trained friends and family as you coax them towards Linux. Or you can enjoy the satisfaction of having something looking like Vista actually run with stability.

Ubuntu Founder Mark Shuttleworth admitted today his company is not cash flow positive. That's despite the fact that Chris Kenyon, director of business development at Canonical told me that Canonical has 8 million users and growing revenues. On a conference call with press and analysts today, Shuttleworth said some really amazing things about his business and it's lack of currently profitability and his view that the money isn't on the Linux desktop.

A common lament from home videographers is that Linux lacks video editors. It's not exactly true. There's Kino, which edits video and acts as a frontend to dvgrab. Jahshaka edits videos, and uses openGL to add special effects (though many say Jahshaka's strength is its user interface). Cinelerra is a professional grade editor, and while someone working with video regularly might find this is the only option, those needing simple edits and common effects will find it overkill.

"Intrepid Ibex", distributed as Ubuntu 8.10, goes live today for distribution later this week, and the economic crunch certainly makes the Linux variant more compelling. While there are plenty of skeptics doubting Ubuntu's prospectsin business - except in a few big businesses with lots of Unix skills - going broke tends to make you examine your options a little harder.

Ubuntu founder Mark Shuttleworth says that the PC desktop is facing a new revolution in the way that information is managed and that he hopes that free software will lead the way. In a recent posting on his blog Shuttleworth says that “there’s a revolution coming as we throw out the old ‘files and folders’ metaphor and leap to something new, and it would be phenomenal if free software were leading the way.”

Linus Torvalds presents the first test candidate of Linux Kernel 2.6.28 on his mailing list. "The changes in -rc1 are (as usual) too many to really enumerate, with the bulk of them being - again as usual - drivers," writes Torvalds in the gmane.linux.kernel newsgroup.

BashDiff is a patch for the bash shell that can do an amazing number of things. It extends existing bash features, brings a few of awk's tricks into the shell itself, exposes some common C functions to bash shell programming, adds an exception mechanism, provides features of functional programming such as list comprehension and the map function, lets you talk with GTK+2 and databases, and even adds a Web server right into the standard bash shell.

A Linux Foundation study attempts to calculate the value of the Linux kernel and Linux distributions, and comes to the conclusion that free as in freedom is mighty valuable.

Envizions Computer Entertainment announced recently that the Linux-based EVO gaming console will be available for sale November 18. There have been dedicated gaming consoles that are able to run Linux, namely the PS3. In these cases, Linux made the console function more as a home computer than a gaming rig. The EVO system uses Linux to power the games.

Hard on the heels of Linux's 17th birthday came two more notable milestones for the operating system, both of which came to light in the past week. First, the Linux kernel surpassed 10 million lines of code -- albeit with blank lines, comments and text files included.

With the release of Ubuntu 8.10 coming out later this week we decided to use this opportunity to explore how the performance of this desktop Linux operating system has evolved over the past few releases. We performed clean installations of Ubuntu 7.04, Ubuntu 7.10, Ubuntu 8.04, and Ubuntu 8.10 on a Lenovo ThinkPad T60 notebook and used the Phoronix Test Suite to run 35 tests on each release that covered nine different areas of the system. After spending well more than 100 hours running these tests, the results are now available and our findings may very well surprise you.

Roughly 30 percent of Netbook sales in Melbourne — Australia’s second-largest city — involve customers requesting Linux rather than Windows, The VAR Guy has learned. Here's the scoop.

What does it take for an established “closed” vendor to shift midcourse and adopt an open-source model? Well in the case of Nokia and its pending acquisition of smart phone operating system maker Symbian, the cost may be $300 million a year. That’s how much Symbian earned in royalties last year from sales of its Symbian OS to handset manufacturers, said Nigel Clifford, CEO of Symbian, who spoke at the Symbian Smartphone Show here on Oct. 21.

[It seems the author purposely misses the point that the long term effect of opening up the code base will more than make up for the loss in OS licensing revenue. - Scott]

The European Patent Office is confused by all the contradictory court rulings on software patents, so it's decided to ask its “Enlarged Board of Appeal” for some advice on how to reconcile them. But it's overlooking the most obvious conclusion: that software patents simply don't make sense.

"We're not sharing our revenues publicly but I will say revenue growth is extremely strong and we're bullish across the board both at server side and desktop," Kenyon said. "The difference between now and even 12 months ago in terms of size and volume of deals coming through is a big difference."

These days it's not just basic tasks that can be undertaken without leaving the confines of a Firefox or Konqueror window; some of the jobs that used to require complex desktop applications – database design, video editing, photo manipulation – are now perfectly viable for those with just browser software and web access. This kind of power makes your choice of browser almost as crucial as your distribution and operating system. If an application is written using standard technologies – such as HTML, JavaScript and CSS – it should run well on anything capable of rendering those technologies, whether the browser launches from Linux or another OS. In fact, a good browser can make your choice of OS largely irrelevant.

One of the busiest and most exciting periods of the year for most Linux distribution watchers is here. Yes, it's the Ubuntu release week! For many, this will likely mean unreachable web sites, busy download servers, overworked BitTorrent clients, and hundreds of first-look reviews and screenshot tours all over the Internet. Stay tuned as we bring you all the exciting announcements. In the news section, Fedora finalises the feature list for the upcoming release of version 10, openSUSE explains the complexities of its distribution's release process, Mandriva announces plans for a worldwide install party, and DesktopBSD ponders an upgrade to KDE 4. And speaking about KDE 4, what is your opinion about the quality, stability and features of the popular desktop's latest version? Some people love it, while others can't stand it, but one thing is sure - thanks to the variety of distributions on the market, we can always find that perfect solution for our needs.

Nowadays, within the growing web 2.0 environment you may want to have some anonymity, and use other IP addresses than your own IP. Or, for some special purposes - a few IPs or more, frequently changed. So no one will be able to track you. A solution exists, and it is called Tor Project, or simply tor. There are a lot of articles and howtos giving you the idea of how it works, I'm not going to describe here onion routing and its principles, I'll rather tell you how practically pull out the maximum out of it.

OpenOffice.org Writer is as much a desktop publishing program as a word processor. That fact, however, has yet to have much influence on the extensions created for Writer -- perhaps because most users prefer manual formatting to organizing themselves with page styles, templates, and other elements of document design. Still, extensions for layout are starting to appear, as demonstrated by four extensions that help you automate layout: Alba, which manages page orientation; Pagination and Pager, which manage page numbering; and Template Changer, which allows you to change the template, and therefore the entire layout of documents, on the fly. And all but one of these extensions use styles and templates, the way that OpenOffice.org is built to work, which means that they are highly stable.