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I didn't have any complaints about the way Debian Etch performed on my new/old Power Macintosh G4/466. The install went smoothly, the system performed better than I had reason to expect with only 128 MB of RAM, and I can unreservedly recommend Etch to anybody with a box of this pedigree (PowerPC) and vintage (circa 2001). But since this was my first PowerPC install, I can't leave things where they are without taking a few more distros for a spin. Right now I'm installing Fedora 9.

Firefox 3.0.1 has been around for months, Norton 360 2.0 and Internet Security 2008 ditto. For many users, however, it would appear that the two cannot live happily together. So just what is the problem?

The Linux Foundation plans to hold an End User Collaboration Summit in New York City in October. The press release we received introducing the event said, "It's by invitation, but registration is free, in keeping with the idea of opening it to 'real' end users." Imagine my grief when I checked the "Press/Analyst" button next to the "What type of constituent group do you belong to?" question on the application form and learned that, by virtue of my occupation, I was not allowed to attend. According to a public relations representative, "The logic behind keeping the press out is to make sure that participants do not feel like opinions, ideas, or even dumb questions will be recorded for posterity." I repeatedly asked both Linux Foundation personnel and their PR firm what other occupations would not be allowed to enjoy the event. Would bloggers be blackballed, lest their presence make attendees self-conscious? What about people who work in law enforcement or for intelligence agencies? They never answered the question.

Wikis began as free, open, public spaces for anyone at all to contribute and share their knowledge, expertise, and wisdom. Businesses have begun to recognize, however, the power of the wiki model for accomplishing internal collaborative tasks, like revising HR documents, producing specifications, and communicating across time and space. Call it Wiki 2.0 -- and it's the newest thing in enterprise software.

While the ASUS Eee PC 901 doesn't have its solid-state disk drives encrypted by default, if you are storing any potentially sensitive information on this netbook -- or any mobile device for that matter -- you really should encrypt the data. When you lose a mobile device or it has been stolen, it can be a nightmare if your banking information was stored on there or even just passwords to your Internet accounts. However, what is the performance cost for fully encrypting a hard drive on one of these Intel Atom computers? In this article we are looking at the performance impact of fully encrypting the solid-state storage versus an unencrypted LVM within Ubuntu Linux.

By going paperless, it is possible to put a Linux netbook or notebook in the hand of every kid in school. With Linux-based netbooks such as the Asus Eee PCs dropping well below $400 for basic systems and stocked with lots of good open source software, every kid could have a personal computer.

Eight years ago, computer stores stocked a choice of GNU/Linux distributions -- established ones like Caldera, Red Hat, and SUSE, and newcomers like Corel, Progeny, and Stormix. Now, only Ubuntu and openSUSE offer box sets, and both face challenges that other distributions found unsolvable, ranging from reasonable prices and features sets through to getting into distribution channels and finding the right marketing approach -- all for an effort that may be only moderately profitable at best, and perhaps best undertaken for non-financial reasons.

Welcome! This is Regular Expressions, or, more precisely, its early-September 2008 installment. Regular Expressions is a column we've written around a hundred times already, stretching back to the late '90s. We're excited to bring it now to Linux Developer Network (LDN), which will publish two installments each month. LDN focuses in September 2008 on different aspects of kernel development and management. We'll be back mid-month with our own slant on kernel work; first, though, we return from the US Labor Day holiday this week wondering why everyone doesn't use Erlang? Regular Expressions' usual domain is high-productivity languages like Perl, Tcl, and Python, and specific news or ideas that help make the most of them.

My favorite quote of the day so far comes from a comment that was filed on Bob Sutor's post about how the International Organization of Standardization is risking irrelevancy based on the way it ignored objections to the rushing of the Office Open XML (OOXML) specification through the ISO's ratification process. OOXML is primarily a Microsoft-authored competitor to the already ISO-ratified OpenDocument Format (ODF). Bob Sutor is the grand pooh-bah of open standards at IBM (a major proponent of ODF).

It was in line with the likelihood of summer following spring that somebody would declare an application optimized for Google's Chrome, the new web browser that has dominated the geekier end of technology news this week. And it turns out that that somebody is the rising star of the software-as-a-service movement, NetSuite.

I've wanted to write this article for quite a while. Over the years I've noted that Java-based music and sound applications have increased in number and quality, yet no comprehensive list or summaries have covered these advances. And so at long last I present this survey of music and sound applications that require Java. The presentation follows no particular order, but in this first part I'll begin by questioning the use of Java in sound and music applications development, followed by a brief look at Java's internal audio and MIDI capabilities.

In the open source community, there are several efforts to develop robots that look and/or act like humans, performing interesting and useful tasks. They're not C3PO at this stage of their development, but they show tremendous promise, especially if more open source contributions are made to the projects.

The One Laptop per Child program is a nonprofit, philanthropic organization, so how can Intel, a 500-pound gorilla, compete against a philanthropic project like OLPC? This competition would barely be newsworthy if OLPC was a for-profit company… competition is just a standard part of doing business in the corporate world. As I said in Part 1 of my series exploring the ongoing “battle” between Nicholas Negroponte’s OLPC laptop project and Intel’s Classmate PC, my philosophy (shared with many Intel execs) was to embrace OLPC and win them over, and to not trash them in the press, especially given OLPC’s philanthropic mission.

Hey there and happy Saturday! One more work week down and an indeterminable amount left until you either shuffle off this mortal coil or figure out some other way to beat the game ;)

Google's Chrome browser is the most revolutionary, transformative technology to ever hit the planet. It will end hunger, tame avarice and greed, and beat swords into plowshares. But plows are destructive, so they will be strictly ornamental and have pretty flowers growing over them.

I always seem to have trouble with Ubuntu. On the $0 Laptop — the Gateway Solo 1450 — there comes a time in every Ubuntu install when the thing either won't boot or runs so slowly that I have to wipe the thing off the drive and start over. It could be something particular to this laptop, the hard drive in it, or my constant dual- and triple-booting of Linux and BSD operating systems in a constantly shifting array.

Google's Chrome browser has as Spartan a user interface as possible, but the browser's Omnibox also turns out to be a window into a much more elaborate view of the browser. That's because Chrome users can type several commands into the browser's address box to uncovers a wealth of nitty-gritty detail and an amusing Easter egg.

There is an international move aimed at providing one laptop per child has already been implemented in such countries as Uruguay which has just celebrated their having reached 100,000 laptops for their children. Other countries in the programme are Thailand and Pakistan, according to Ian Thomson from SPC (Secretariat Pacific Community) of the Forum Secretariat.

In response to the growing blogging ecosystem and Web phenomena like the Slashdot effect, the developers of the Habari blogging platform have built features into their core software to tackle the increased attention blogs receive, both from innocent viewers and exploitative attackers, while making it easier for users to manage and administer their blogs. Most blogging software start out with a simple WYSIWYG interface and store data in back end databases. Some applications evolve into more complex blogging engines with bolt-on accessories. Habari, by contrast, was written from the ground up to handle things like comment spam and traffic overloads.

What does it mean to be open. My copy of Oxford defines open as: "unconcealed circumstances or condition". Way back in the day when the GNU operating system was getting going, they coined the mantra: "Free software is a matter of liberty, not price. To understand the concept, you should think of free as in free speech, not as in free beer." Last month, I talked about transparency and how important it was in software and systems. Just as important are standards, and, more important following those standards. Today, in Computerworld, a different issue has been raised. The value of standards.