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Back when Mandriva was called Mandrake, the distribution had the reputation of being the most user-friendly Linux distribution. Financial difficulties, personnel changes, and the rise of Ubuntu changed that, and somehow Mandriva never quite regained its reputation. With this week's release of Mandriva 2009, Mandriva has continued to work on user-friendliness. Aside from a poorly organized installation program and a few scattered problems, Mandriva 2009 offers a desktop experience that is at least the equal of any other distribution for everyday use and that has a strong claim of being the most advanced available for system administration.

This is WFTL Bytes!, your occasiodaily FOSS and Linux news show for Oct 15, 2008. Today's stories include an election, a talk show, encrypted incrimination, OpenOffice.org and record-breaking downloads, Linux for poor countries, and distributions that speak in tongues.

Welcome to the future. Linux is now a first-class desktop operating system citizen. Adobe today released version 10 of its Adobe Flash Player, available now in a variety of convenient packaging formats for Linux, as well as other popular desktop operating systems. Once upon a time, desktop Linux was a second-class citizen, where Flash was concerned. As recently as 2007, Linux users waited six months for Flash 9 to arrive.

Elite routing gurus may scoff at RIP, but for smaller domains it's easy to set up and performs just fine, and virtually all routers support at least RIP v1. Charlie Schluting walks us through the finer points of understanding how RIP works, and its strengths and weaknesses.

Sound is the new frontier for Flash as Adobe Systems released its first major update in three years today, packing in features missing from May's first beta. Flash Player 10 will deliver sound file features that go someway towards giving developers working on audio the same powers of content creation and customization as video. Adobe has added the ability to read audio files' binary data and directly access the sound buffer to add the sounds filters you really want.

Typically, each new version of the Python programming language has been gentle on users, more or less maintaining backward compatibility with previous versions. But in 2000, when Python creator Guido van Rossum announced that he was embarking on a new version of Python, he did not sugar coat his plan: Version 3.0 would not be backward-compatible. Now that the first release candidate of Python 3.0 is out, with final release planned for later this month, developers must grapple with the issue of whether to maintain older code or modify it to use the new interpreter.

X Server 1.5 was officially released last month with X.Org 7.4, but there had been server pre-releases going back to earlier this year. Fedora 9 had even shipped with an early version version of X Server 1.5. For those using the open-source X.Org drivers, running the latest server is not a big deal, but those with ATI or NVIDIA binary drivers they sometimes can be slow in supporting the latest version. NVIDIA has supported X Server 1.5 for a number of weeks now, but ATI has yet to update their Catalyst Linux driver with such support. With Ubuntu 8.10 being released in two weeks and it's using this newest X Server, how will ATI graphics cards be supported? Well, an interesting event has occurred and we will tell you what has happened in this article.

This article explores the virtualization features available to administrators across several UNIX hardware platforms. Discover what they have to offer and how their features compare to PowerVM.

Today at the Qt Developer Days, Matthias Ettrich of Qt Software, formerly Trolltech, announced a new development environment for Qt Software called Greenhouse. The Qt Developer Days are being held in Munich from October 14 through 15.

Every Linux distributor must find its own peace when it comes to the issue of proprietary software. Some distributors will avoid anything non-free to the point of tearing firmware out of the kernel. Others, like Fedora or Debian, will not include any non-free code. Distributors like Ubuntu are rather more willing to facilitate the use of non-free software, but even they are, perhaps, not 100% comfortable with it. And distributions like Xandros positively embrace proprietary code.

The Hacker Underground is dead. Long live the Hacker Underground! In the most recent issue of Phrack Magazine, I read an article titled"The Underground Myth," that makes a number of astute points about the demise of the hacking scene of the last few decades. The author describes a technical landscape in which the technology security industry and a diminishing number of obvious exploits conspired to destroy the scene.

In late September 2008, the OpenVAS developer team released the 2.0-beta1 version of OpenVAS, the Open Vulnerability Assessment System for network security scanning.
The intended audience for this beta release are experienced users interested in upcoming features as well as developers of vulnerability checks.

Web sites that run text squarely around images even when the images don't have even borders look a little lazy. pngslice slices an image into thin vertical images and generates a small chunk of HTML to align these slices so that the original image can be seen in a Web browser. This lets you place non-rectangular floating images on Web pages and align the surrounding text to the uneven borders of the image for a professional-looking layout. While you may be able to achieve a similar effect in other ways, if you want to have your Web site viewable in both a wide variety of browsers and versions of those browsers, using image slices is an effective technique.

Though TiVO's software is open source, any "unsigned" modified code is blocked from running on these devices. Home-brew DVRs act like TiVOs, with a few side benefits. The article mentions, incidentally, that this is not a project for the faint of heart. My MythTV box has been humming in my living room just shy of a year. It's not a project for a new user, but it's a better application, and less complicated to install and maintain than you've been led to believe.

Linux will be a passenger in every seat on Qantas' Airbus A380s airplanes. All of the airline's superjumbos -- the first of which will commence flying next week -- will have their in-flight entertainment systems powered by the operating system. The A380 is the first Qantas aircraft to utilize the Panasonic eX2 Inflight Entertainment System (IFE). All of Panasonic's X Series of IFE systems run on Linux.

This tutorial shows how you can set up a Mandriva One 2009.0 desktop (with the GNOME desktop environment) that is a full-fledged replacement for a Windows desktop, i.e. that has all the software that people need to do the things they do on their Windows desktops. The advantages are clear: you get a secure system without DRM restrictions that works even on old hardware, and the best thing is: all software comes free of charge.

In November, Asus will ship a $400 Windows-based "nettop" that includes an integrated touchscreen and Linux-based "Express Gate" quick boot technology. The "Eee Top" reportedly has a 15-inch display, 1.6GHz Intel Atom processor, 1GB of RAM, a 160GB hard drive, and a gigabit Ethernet port.

This Linux is so darned small, I can't believe the name ;) Today, we're going to walk though installing it on your bootable hard drive. Sure, sure, it defeats the principal of the whole thing, but you can always just slice up two tiny little partitions and have DSL as a backup for your other OS, which may or may not completely self-destruct at any moment. Plus, it's a great idea when all you've got to work with is an old machine that won't run anything else!

With the games industry apparently enthralled by DRM and committed to criminalising their customers, our upcoming event as part of the London Games Fringe is especially timely. Open Rights Group in conjunction with Own-It will co-host a panel discussion on the role of open source in the games industry and invites all our readers and supporters to join the debate.

Novell has acquired Managed Objects, a software company that mainly targets corporate IT. But the deal gives Novell a potential path to more aggressively target managed service providers. Here’s how, according to MSPmentor.