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The latest and as they say one of the most ground-breaking versions of Mandriva Linux has been released as scheduled. Mandriva Linux 2009 is jam-packed with exciting new features and innovations that will try to cater everyone’s desktop needs. I had fun with Mandriva 2008, so I was really looking forward to this latest release.

LXer Feature: 12-Oct-2008

In this week's Roundup Linux turns 17, Google releases their Linux repositories, a new Linux Broadcom driver arrives and Sean Michael Kerner asks if .NET on Linux is finally ready or not. Also, an introduction to free music production software, Debian leader Steve McIntyre says Lenny might be late and in what I would consider to be an extremely bad idea, the ISO offers to take over maintenance of the ODF standard from Oasis, stating that they are not dealing with defect reports fast enough.

Warrington School, in Otago, will not get paid funds allocated for Microsoft licences after moving to open source software, simply because the school was never billed, says the Ministry of Education. The school is deploying the GNU/Linux operating system, aiming to have free software across the board by 2010, and the complete switch to Linux has been approved by the MoE, says the school’s principal, Nathan Parker.

Do you remember using old-school IRC chat rooms? Well Michail Blestas does, and he tells us how that has become Chat on the XO in this second OLPC interview by Robert Scoble. He also gives us a good idea of how many XO laptops are connected to the Internet - about half.

The extremely simple guide to installing Ubuntu using Wubi. Many people are put off using Ubuntu because of installation issues. Not that installation is difficult, of course, but for the true non-technical user, it’s equivalent to scaling Mount Everest. This guide is for them. It’s a step-by-step guide to installing Ubuntu for complete and utter beginners. If you have a relative, or friend, who would like to try Ubuntu, but who is frankly scared of the prospect, then send them a link to this posting! It assumes zero prior knowledge.

The KDE Community today launches the new KDE Forum. The new forum uses the bulletin board software MyBB offering users, developers and people interested in KDE a place to help each other, discuss KDE-related topics and exchange ideas. The KDE Forum complements KDE's UserBase, the home for KDE users as a valuable support resource.

Xubuntu 8.04 (Hardy Heron) Screenshots Tour. Xubuntu is a complete GNU/Linux based operating system with an Ubuntu base. It is lighter on system requirements and tends to be more efficient than Ubuntu with GNOME or KDE, since it uses the Xfce Desktop environment, which makes it ideal for old or low-end machines, thin-client networks, or for those who would like to get more performance out of their hardware.

The self-signed certificate is a certificate that you can create yourself that will provide SSL encryption but without the verification of your website from an outside source. The outside verification does cost money. In other words, you can get the protection you need, encryption by doing it yourself. One thing to note, if you are taking people's credit card information then you will need to get a signed certificate as a warning appears when you are using self-signed certificates.

Reader Christian Nielsen wrote from Sweden to tell us he and his girlfriend have named their baby Linux, after the operating system, and attached this darling photo. Nielsen says he and his girlfriend Veronica considered a few names during the pregnancy, "but when he finally arrived none of them seemed right. We both thought that he looked like a little Linux as soon as we saw him and decided to go for that name." You might wonder what the grandparents think of their choice, but Nielsen says it hasn't been a problem. "The reaction from family and friends has been positive -- they all like it.

Rishi Patel had an epiphany when he saw"Toy Story" more than a decade ago. The Smyrna, Ga., resident has long been interested in merging science and art -- he graduated with a physics degree from the University of Georgia and enjoyed making clay models as a child -- and the Pixar movie drove the point home.

In this howto we will build a load-balanced and high-availability web cluster on 2 real servers with Xen, hearbeat and ldirectord. The cluster will do http, mail, DNS, MySQL database and will be completely monitored. This is currently used on a production server with a couple of websites. The goal of this tutorial is to achieve load balancing & high availability with as few real servers as possible and of course, with open-source software. More servers means more hardware & hosting cost.

A few annoyances, and I really hope this will be fun. I wrote it last night. Some things which don't work as they are supposed to, or some things which may be annoying - Linux forever, I love it, but sometimes it's not so funny fun as it should be.

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.