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Keep up to date on the latest funny stuff that may or may not have happened :) This week, I ran across an old joke news article regarding an issue that we don't seem to hear too much about anymore: Music copyright infringement on P2P networks.

In hindsight it might have been smarter for me to have moved my older version of Thunderbird onto the new desktop, then upgraded [1.] However, I noted that the new version offered by Ubuntu was two minor number versions later. Hence, I installed the newer Thunderbird and then copied over the entire dot thunderbird directory for my email user identity and the entire coded default content further down. To my dismay, nothing worked after I misinterpreted an installation option that might have saved me from a tremendous amount of harassment, I made the situation worse. The situation became so dire, I thought my only option was to kill the entire installation of Ubuntu 8.04 and start afresh [2.].

An Israeli firm will ship a smartphone that runs Linux to the Russian market, according to industry reports. Possibly manufactured by Sharp, Emblaze Mobile's "Edelweiss" phone will offer GPS and an unprecedented 854 x 480 touchscreen, while running the Access Linux Platform (ALP), reports suggest.

An ASUS public relations representative in Australia has released details of a new ASUS Eee PC, the S101. Whilst an official release date was not stated, it is understood that the device is soon to be released in Australia. The spokesperson said that "the S101 is unique to the Eee PC family in terms of its design. Its focus is more as a luxurious Eee PC".

People who either dabble or work in computing enough are probably used to the idea that some operating systems are better than others as creative platforms; Mac OSX generally seems to be the preferred place for video editing, thanks to the likes of Final Cut Pro. They’ve also got the fantastic GarageBand program for audio production as part of their iLife suite, and with Windows, ProTools is often considered industry standard when it comes to audio production. But these popular, household names of programs come with a price; often a pretty hefty one, actually. If you’re thinking of getting SONAR 8 Studio for your audio needs, be prepared to shell out $369 for it. Today, we’re going to explore how with Linux we can make music, and from a software standpoint, it’s going to cost us nothing.

Byzanz is a free opensource GNOME based Command-Line utility to capture desktop recording software for linux. This should probably be the coolest command-line utility that I have seen in recent days. Byzanz records your desktop session to an animated GIF. You can record your entire screen, a single window, an arbitrary region or even follow the cursor. Given that it is only a GIF format makes it even more an interesting proposition as the file size is going to be very small.

Here they are from bottom to top: The top 10 Linux Distributions from a long-time Linux nerd. I've had several people ask me what I think the best, top, most user friendly, ultimate, and so on distribution is--so now I'm publishing my Top 10 Linux Distributions in reverse order of preference. Ease of installation, commercial support, community support, updates, administrative tools, stability, performance, and to a lesser extent--their ranking on DistroWatch.com.

Here's a little something quirky to start the weekend off. Yes, it "is" yet another spinoff on the ubiquitous "PC Mac" Commercial-"PC Mac Linux"-jokes, but it's got a neat little twist. You'll especially dig it if you're a big "South Park" fan. I'm in and out on that show (likes vs. dislikes equals no opinion on it whatsoever ;), but I still thought this video was pretty clever.

"It is a race, and we're not slowing down." That is how Ross A. Mauri, the general manager of IBM's Power Systems product series, describes competing against Sun Microsystems and HP for the Unix server market. IBM announced a number of new products and upgrades Tuesday to help keep its current lead in revenue.

As a director of the Linux Foundation and a Linux SCSI developer, James Bottomley opened the Linux-Kongress in Hamburg, Germany this week with a keynote investigating the commonalities and differences among the various Open Source operating systems. He describes Linux as the liveliest variant among them.

The Headless X-Server Rides! Rides, Rides how he rides. Sorry -- sourcing The headless horsemen and the Dead Kennedy's for some reason ;) Today we're going to throw out another Linux tip somewhat related to networking. Or, more correctly, we're going to throw another quick tip out there ;) Today we're going to look at setting up a headless X Server. It's not quite as difficult, or as scary, as it sounds.

Back in the early days of Linux, a developer wishing to meet his or her peers at a conference had a relatively small number of alternatives. Two of those - Linux Expo and the Atlanta Linux Showcase - were held in the United States. But it has been a long time since the US has hosted a serious developer-oriented conference - especially for developers who are working on the lower layers of the system. The US-based conferences died out as a result of a combination of a number of factors, including poor management, competition from the Ottawa Linux Symposium and (yes, really) LinuxWorld, and a feeling among certain developers that becoming the next Dmitry Sklyarov would not be a fun way to spend the rest of the year.

Krusader is an advanced twin panel (commander style) file manager for KDE and other desktops in the *nix world, similar to Midnight or Total Commander. It provides all the file management features you could possibly want with features like extensive archive handling, mounted filesystem support, FTP, advanced search module, an internal viewer/editor, directory synchronisation, file content comparisons, powerful batch renaming and much much more

Part of an ongoing series of on open-source geographic information system (GIS) programs, this article offers an introduction to uDig GIS. uDig is for GIS users of all levels, from beginners to advanced.

Get step-by-step details to implement Xen virtual server high availability via the IBM® System Director Virtual Availability Manager. The Virtual Availability Manager is included in the IBM System Director Virtualization Manager package, an extension for IBM Director. In this article, the authors walk you through all the steps, from prerequisites and setup to troubleshooting—everything you need to get started delivering virtual high availability capabilities.

I finally found a good Linux Distribution for kids. My daughter who is turning 5 soon completely loved the learning games on Foresight, especially TuxTyping. I highly recommend this OS for us Linux Geeks that have kids. It has a nice set of learning games, fun to play games, OpenOffice, and more. I just feel it is lacking a good proxy wizard so that kids are not allowed to hit certain sites. I feel any distro targeted at kids and learning should have a great proxy wizard. Well I hope you enjoy the screenshots below.

Sun Microsystems, Inc. today announced the winners of the OpenOffice.org(TM) Community Innovation Challenge designed to fuel innovation and community around OpenOffice.org, as the community prepares for the imminent launch of its next-generation productivity suite, OpenOffice.org 3.0. The contest was part of Sun's million-dollar Open Source Community Innovation Challenge Program, a multi-year program supporting several Sun-sponsored open source communities. "It has been a pleasure to contribute QATrack, which gives the OpenOffice.org Community the ability to track the qualification of the many releases being worked on," said Gold Medal winner Per Eriksson. "I look forward to future involvement with this truly innovative, global project."

Military IT folks wondering if their use of Apache, Perl, Linux and other open source software is copacetic with the brass will soon get some answers from the Defense Department's Office of the Chief Information Officer. The office is preparing a memorandum that further clarifies how open source may be procured and used within the services. The memo should answer many lingering questions still surrounding the open source, said Daniel Risacher, the data strategy leader for the Office of Secretary of Defense who is drafting the memo. The draft may point out some potential benefits as well.

These days there’s a lot of buzz about “Web 2.0” and making websites more interactive, but what’s really going on is a reconnection to the community nature of the internet. Collaboration, cooperation, and the information commons are all ideas that pre-dated the world wide web in the form of older internet technologies. In today’s distributed computing environment, though, these technologies have really flourished. Here’s a guide to eight that you should consider making use of in building a community around an information commons project of any kind, from multimedia, to hardware, to software. Read the full article at Freesoftware Magazine.

Debian project leader Steve McIntyre has dismissed claims that the next stable version of Debian – codename Lenny – could be delayed until June 2009. Based on the number of outstanding release-critical bugs and the time it has taken to fix them on previous releases, Debian developer Bastian Venthur estimated it will take a further eight or nine months to bring Lenny up to release quality.