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This is WFTL Bytes!, your occasiodaily FOSS and Linux news show for Friday, October 24, 2008, with your host, Marcel Gagné. Today's stories include a nod from those great people at CommandN, open source DRM, how to get VC funding for your open source project, FOSS in Russian schools, and the cost of creating Linux.

Amazon announced Thursday general availability of its Elastic Compute Cloud, part of the Internet retailer's Web service offerings. Launched in beta 26 months ago, the service provides a resizable compute capacity to businesses with varying server needs."The appealing thing about EC2 is that instead of buying a server, you pay for it by the hour," said Frank Gillett, a Forrester Research analyst.

The essence of the FreeNAS server is to provide storage that is easily accessible from the network. To this end, it is important to understand how FreeNAS handles hard disks and how they can be configured and used to provide the best and most reliable storage for your network.

Ubuntu 8.10 is shipping next week with a horde of updated packages including the Linux 2.6.27 kernel, X.Org 7.4, Pidgin 2.5, GIMP 2.6, and many other packages that have experienced significant milestones since the April release of Ubuntu 8.04. On top of these updated packages from the community, Canonical has been working on a few desktop Linux innovations of their own. For instance, arriving late into the Intrepid Ibex release cycle is a USB start-up disk creator. In this article we are providing a quick look at this utility to easily spin your own USB disk images.

In its latest financial results, Microsoft concedes that the shift to Netbooks -- those low-cost subnotebooks -- is impacting the company's Windows business. The company face's a tough challenge: Low-ball Windows prices on Netbooks or more defections to Linux networks. Details from The VAR Guy.

Andy Bechtolsheim, a revered technologist who cofounded Sun Microsystems and has been instrumental in designing the company's servers, is stepping down from his day-to-day role to help build a new networking startup. Sun, which makes servers and software widely used in corporate computing centers, said Bechtolsheim's transition to part-time work status was effective immediately.

GSmartControl presents your hard drive SMART (Self-Monitoring, Analysis, and Reporting Technology) health information in a graphical display. With GSmartControl you no longer have to fish around in /dev/disk/by-id to find the drive you're interested in and then inspect the output of smartctl trying to figure out which SMART attributes have values that you should care about.

You should try out these 3 Linux Desktops. Ease of installation, ease of use, and great performance--what else do you want?

One of the most often heard complaints from users looking to migrate to Linux is that there are no good accounting applications. To be fair, there is a degree of truth in that concern. At least there was, until now.

BIOSLEVEL.com takes a trip to this year's Ohio LinuxFest. We share our thoughts and experiences of the event with our readers, and look forward to future conventions.

On the outside, the Windows version of the XO laptop looks just like the Linux model. But simply booting up the device shows that the Windows version bears little resemblance to the original One Laptop Per Child device. With the Microsoft version, you get Windows, for all the good and bad that entails. It's full-on Windows--XP Professional, in fact--and can run basically any software that can adjust itself to the mini-laptop's diminutive screen and modest processor.

My oldest son, creator of flame wars, finally discovered that you can only surf to the nether regions of the Internet so many times before even Vista business succumbs to malware. His computer an unusable mass of pop-ups, spewing traffic over our network actually asked me tonight to reinstall Linux for him.

As for my opinion on DreamLinux 3.1... I thought it was very nice on they eyes, Based off of Debian, its own Control Panel, and I must say I do love the Icons.. Also my opinion is so that "Whatever Linux Distro I use for my desktop...... I should NOT have to spend HOURS tailor fitting it to my needs." As I am beyond that stage. That is not to say that you are beyond that stage, you might still be in love with finding packages and doing the "configure/make/make install" and finding all of its dependencies...

Kyocera Wireless Corporation (KWC) uses Android software for its own mobile platform. The embedded Linux firm Wind River has engaged itself as an integrator. Wind River will be adapting Android for KWC, above all in terms of middleware and user interface.

More Windows Mayhem. They could just replace the virus riddled piece of puss with Linux, but no, they continue to fiddle while their OS burns.

Over the past few months we have looked at several Sapphire graphics cards including the Radeon HD 4670, Radeon HD 4850 Toxic, Radeon HD 4870, and Radeon HD 4870 Toxic Vapor-X. All of these cards have performed quite well on Linux with the Catalyst Linux driver and there is even open-source support for these R700 series graphics cards, except that goes without any hardware acceleration at this time. The graphics cards introduced up to this point though haven't exactly been cheap, but ATI has now introduced their low-end graphics cards for the Radeon HD 4000 series. With Sapphire being a key ATI partner, they have of course introduced news models accordingly. What we have our hands on today is the Sapphire Radeon HD 4550 512MB, which is a PCI Express graphics card that retails for a mere $50~60 USD.

Whether you're talking about the Wii, the Xbox 360 or the PlayStation 3, the video game industry is on a record-setting pace for revenue in 2008. Consumers have scooped up billions of dollars worth of game consoles, accessories and big-budget titles. With sales set to top $22 billion in 2008, according to The NPD Group, gaming looks as though it's weathering the ongoing economic downturn well.

Few sites about free software attract more controversy than Boycott Novell. Founded in 2006 in response to the first Microsoft-Novell deal, as its name suggests, the site has evolved more recently into a site for commentary and investigation of any subject that might be a threat to free software. To its regular readers, this subject matter makes Boycott Novell -- like Groklaw, its apparent inspiration -- a defender of the community. But to others, especially those who have been the subject of its articles, the site is full of illogical arguments and undeserved attacks, and an embarrassment that only brings the community into disrepute.

SMPlayer SMPlayer is built in Qt4 and it uses the MPlayer engine for video playback. It's one of the most powerful applications out there for watching DVDs, and it supports plenty formats like AVI, MKV, MPG, FLV.

I was very pleased with Puppy Linux 4.1! The interface was smooth and easy to use. Not to mention all the necessary apps that came in this tiny distribution. The install could have been easier but hey sometimes you can not have your cake and eat it too.