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Tasque (pronounced "task") is a to-do manager built with C# and Mono, created as part of Novell's Hackweek v2. The application interface is really simple; in fact, you have to click on the Tasque icon in the system tray to find most of the options. Adding a new task is a breeze -- just type in the name for your to-do in the text box on the top of the interface and click Add. Tasque shows many categories natively, but you can't update or create new categories. (The software is still in beta, and more category functionality is expected in a future release.) You can set due dates and priority ratings (a number between for 1, 2, and 3, or "-" for no rating) by clicking on the corresponding columns in the interface. Notifications for upcoming due dates aren't supported yet, but you can set notes to store more information within the task itself.

An open-source digital rights management (DRM) scheme says it's ready to supplant Apple and Microsoft as the world's leading copy protection solution. Marlin, which is backed by companies such as Sony and Samsung, has just announced a new partner program that aims to drive the DRM system into more consumer devices.

We have been using kUbuntu for about 3 years now and have always been slow to upgrade to newer versions, fearing the impending bug, broken configuration with hardware, or grub issues. So when 8.04 rolled out, having been using a 'fairly' stable 7.10, we were quite hesitant to change. However, we had finally decided to upgrade this past weekend, and to our suprise, everything was smooth....well somewhat....

This is WFTL Bytes!, your occasiodaily FOSS and Linux news show for Oct 23, 2008, with your host, Marcel Gagné. Today's stories feature world changing events, Android goes open source, G1s hit the streets, open source trading, Linux netbook return myths, and cancer-fighting beer.

Smart Firefox Tricks, part 2: Javascript bookmarklets have been around since the early days of Javascript, and are possible because Firefox and most other modern browsers (except Konqueror) offer the special protocol "javascript:" to let you execute bits of javascript code directly. Akkana Peck shows us how to harness this power to turbocharge our Web-surfing.

With all the skills that Red Hat has, you'd think they could build a community site on their own… they can't. "Our core business is really the middleware projects to do with the application server and enterprise service bus," JBoss.org leader Mark Newton told InternetNews.com. "So it's not really in our interest to build our own CMS just for our own Web site. We felt we could offer better service to our community by leveraging the work of another open source CMS."

One of the reasons why netbooks have proved so successful is the inclusion of Linux to lower resource requirements and cost alike. So why has Apricot decided to drop Linux and only offer a Windows XP powered netbook instead?

Although I played a little in the past with Google Gadgets and I was not very much impressed, back at version 0.9.x, I decided to try it again, this time using the last release, 0.10.2.

Toshiba came to the TechRadar offices today to show off its new range of business laptops. In its horde of goodies, we also found the NB100, Toshiba's first-ever netbook, which we told you about back in September. First impressions of the ultra-portable machine is its size. Forgoing the 10-inch screen size that a number of manufacturers seem to favour, Toshiba has given its machine a leaner 8.9-inch widescreen display.

In a move demonstrating its confidence in the community-based approach, Swets is to allow users of its subscription management service SwetsWise to edit its help pages. By making the SwetsWise help pages wiki-based, Swets is offering customers an easy-to-use tool to exchange their views and comments on the service with other customers.

Just how do you put a value on an open source, free for all, piece of code such as Linux? The Linux Foundation has attempted to do just that, and valued just one single distro at more than USD $10 billion.

After running some successful pilots, the Russian government has decided to make open source the standard for *all* schools. Depending on the uptake, that could be up to one million more machines running free software by 2010.

Chrome, Google’s new browser, was barely out of its wrapping before Internet pundits began writing it off. As the first wave of early-adopter enthusiasts lost interest in their experiments and returned to their original browsers, so analysts began to declare Chrome dead. But there is a far more interesting set of dynamics at work. Google is not after Microsoft’s share of the browser market: it’s after something much bigger.

This document describes how to install a Postfix mail server that is based on virtual users and domains, i.e. users and domains that are in a MySQL database. I will also demonstrate the installation and configuration of Courier (Courier-POP3, Courier-IMAP), so that Courier can authenticate against the same MySQL database used by Postfix. The resulting Postfix server is capable of SMTP-AUTH and TLS and quota. Passwords are stored in encrypted form in the database. In addition to that, this tutorial covers the installation of Amavisd, SpamAssassin and ClamAV so that emails will be scanned for spam and viruses. I will also show how to install SquirrelMail as a webmail interface so that users can read and send emails and change their passwords.

The Computer History Museum on Tuesday night honored three legends in the industry, including Linux creator Linus Torvalds, whose operating system became the catalyst for the open source software movement that challenged traditional concepts of intellectual property. Along with Torvalds, the museum honored at its annual Fellow Awards ceremony Jean Bartik, one of the first programmers of the ENIAC computing system that later evolved into the first stored-program computer; and Bob Metcalfe, who led the invention, standardization, and commercialization of the Ethernet local area networking system for PCs.

Shared libraries that are dynamically linked make more efficient use of disk space than those that are statically linked, and more importantly allow you to perform security updates in a more efficient manner, but executables compiled against a particular version of a dynamic library expect that version of the shared library to be available on the machine they run on. If you are running machines with both Fedora 9 and openSUSE 11, the versions of some shared libraries are likely to be slightly different, and if you copy an executable between the machines, the file might fail to execute because of these version differences.

The opening keynote speaker for the 2008 Linux-Kongress was James Bottomley, who presented his views on the Linux community's values. What these values are, says James, is not entirely obvious. Related groups - the free software community, for example - have well-articulated value systems which define them. The Linux community's values are not so clearly expressed, but, he says, they are central to what we do.

Now here is a dissenting opinion if I've ever seen one. Andrew Keen is arguing that the economic crisis will "give open source a good thumping." That flies directly in the face of our prediction that open source will flourish in the downturn, and we're not alone in predicting that. There are several reasons why I don't agree with Keen's view of things.

Linux powers both of my computers, and Simply Mepis is the distribution of choice for many reasons. I have been using Simply Mepis several years, and and have no desire to even test other distros; there were some brief stints with Linux Mint and PCLOS, but Mepis is my OS - final answer. I’ve never understood the need or desire to hop around, trying every flavor of Linux under the sun that hits the Distrowatch list. Again, I’ve tried a few, but always come back to Mepis.

Buzz is going around about a new report from the Linux Foundation, which finds that "it would take approximately $10.8 billion to build the Linux community distribution Fedora 9 in today’s dollars with today’s software development costs." You can get the complete findings here. Here are some of the highlights from the report, and what's missing.