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Linux developer Canonical has released important security updates for the Ubuntu kernel, strongly recommending upgrades for releases 6.06 LTS, 7.10 and 8.04 LTS and corresponding versions of Kubuntu, Edubuntu and Xubuntu.

Windows Vista gets a bad rap for its hefty hardware requirements, but it's not alone. Apple's MacOS X platform has left a lot of Macs with PowerPC G3, G4 and G5 chips out in the cold. However, Linux isn't just for the Intel set; here’s how Ubuntu to can bring new life to your old Mac too.

Appnr is a web-based directory for Ubuntu packages (including the official repositories and third-party packages from Medibuntu, Google, and the Canonical Partner repository). You can use it to browse and install packages directly from your browser. It is like Synaptic for your browser.

Today Yahoo! officially introduced their "open strategy" platform, Y!OS. The Yahoo! Open Strategy platform consists of three development components, the Yahoo! Application Platform, the Yahoo! Social Platform, and the Yahoo! Query Language.

Sun's recently released VirtualBox 2 is one of the best virtualization applications for desktop users. It's available in two wallet-friendly flavors, with a few extra features in the closed-source variant. The software sports a nice graphical user interface, but few users realize that it can also be completely controlled via a powerful command-line interface.

The Gutenprint project develops filters for the Common UNIX Printing System (CUPS) to operate with a range of commercial printers. Gutenprint 5.2.1 is now available with numerous changes and improvements.

When you think about portable gaming gadgets, it's hard to rattle off a hefty list of possibilities. They mostly follow a path of heavy marketing -- the Nintendo DS and the PlayStation Portable are heavily advertised, and their sales are strong. But some hardcore gamers have become attracted to devices exclusively designed and marketed for homebrew or do-it-yourself applications.

Comix is a user-friendly, customizable image viewer. It is specifically designed to handle comic books, but also serves as a generic viewer. It reads images in ZIP, RAR or tar archives (also gzip or bzip2 compressed) as well as plain image files.

Open Learning Exchange Nepal (OLE Nepal) in cooperation with Nepal's national Department of Education, launched a pilot-program to integrate OLPC XO laptops in regular school classes at two rural sites in April 2008. OLE Nepal is one of the first organisations to do this kind of laptop deployment, and so it comes across a lot of problems for which there's just no guiding light that you can just follow. How do you make suitable educational software? How does the hardware hold out under these conditions? How do you prepare teachers that themselves often don't have any experience with computers?

Just a few more days. Yes, the U.S. presidential election is a mere week away, but there's another countdown going on. Ubuntu 8.10 Desktop Edition, the Intrepid Ibex release, is set to go live on Thursday. The beta has excited both users and potential users of the popular distro because of its rich mobility functionality, including 3G support.

They're back! John Van Ostrand and his gang of idealists put on another great money-losing all-volunteer effort to get Linux users and developers to connect in Toronto last weekend. An estimated 250 people attended the one-day Ontario Linux Fest at the Days Hotel near Toronto's major airport. Among the 27 sessions were keynotes from Jeremy Allison of Samba fame and numerous interesting sessions on everything from Nintendo Wiimote integration in X to an introduction to a group called Geekcorps that seeks to bring usable computers and the Internet to rural West Africa.

A few weeks ago I discussed the main features of the Chrome browser and Google’s motives; at that point I was like the poor child, nose pressed against the window pane, looking inside at the sumptuous feast at the master’s table. I, like all GNU/Linux users, hadn’t been invited. Same as ever. Crossweavers decided to gate crash the party and bring their own drink too. In short, in just eleven days from the launch of Chrome they built a version running under Wine, and although their products are proprietary and they usually reciprocate by giving code back to free software like Wine, this time they gave it away for free. Thus did Chrome become Chromium and I had a chance to download and install it. Reader, I benchtested it. Read the full review at Freesoftware Magazine.

The Yahoo-owned open source messaging software firm Zimbra announced Tuesday that it's taking its act into the cloud. Universities and other educational institutions can now access the Zimbra Collaboration Suite via Yahoo's worldwide infrastructure. Formerly, Zimbra was managed by users on-premise; however, now they can choose a delivery method.

New Linux users may be content with automatic updates and the package information shown by desktop tools, but more experienced users are generally more cautious and demanding. Experienced users, for instance, may want to assess the risk of an upgrade by studying its dependencies before they begin, or to overcome a package conflict by using versions from an older repository. Because of Debian's long history of providing for advanced users, this sort of information is available from several different sources -- from the apt-cache command, from distribution Web sites, and, in Ubuntu, with the new Ubuntu Simple Package Crawler. Unfortunately, no single source has all the features you are likely to want.

I'd like to show you some of the links I gathered in the past to make my Linux Desktop look Cooler. And by Jean-Luc Picard, what a wondrous list it is! There are also short description, where deemed necessary. My favorites are in bold letters.

In this two-part article series, to turn street addresses into their geographical coordinates for storage in the database, you will call the Google Geocoder Web service from PHP. You will then produce XML data from MySQL using stored procedures, and an XSLT stylesheet to transform the data into a KML overlay to view in Google Maps and Google Earth.

Intrepid comes with pretty much bleeding-edge packages: GNOME 2.24.1, OpenOffice 2.4.1 (OpenOffice 3.0 is now available, but it is not included in 8.10), Firefox 3.0.3 and GIMP 2.6.1. Although Firefox 3.1 Beta 1 is out, 3.0.3 is the version which ships with Intrepid, and I guess it's a smart choice considering there was enough time to test this release.

Linux on a Mainframe? Get real. That's just what IBM has done.

Open standards are critical in ensuring that the South African government both avoids vendor lock-in and promotes democracy. This is according to South Africa’s minister of home affairs, Nosiviwe Mapisa-Nqakula. In a prepared speech for the opening of the recent Second International ODF conference in Pretoria, Mapisa-Nqakula said that the department of home affairs was “forging ahead to make open standards a priority” to ensure future ability to process and share documents “using formats which have significant impact on the efficiency, interoperability and accessibility of public services”.

This is a series about the Linux OS on netbooks, but we need to remind ourselves that these devices aren't personal computers. The personal computer is a machine you work on. Netbooks are essentially machines you work through, out into the Cloud. It shouldn't matter what the operating system is. Or the hardware. Ideally, all your apps and your data are 'out there' in the Cloud, independent of any hardware or software you might use to access them. But design goals seldom accurately second guess the actual use to which things like these are put. We are treating these netbooks as low-cost PC - we are messing with the operating system and expecting to tailor them to our individual requirements.