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A few years ago I stumbled upon the efforts of the Victoria Linux Users Group. They are an active, involved group, but not particularly unlike any other LUG. I was pointed in the direction of their Linux in Victoria brochure. Yes, its date of publication was 1997. What makes this brochure different is that it is open. Perhaps this is less impressive in light of the advent of wikis, but the purpose and intent of the brochure is still remarkable, and well worth expanding upon.

The Linux Foundation (LF) announced a "LinuxCon" conference that will be open to end-users. Set for September 2009 in Portland, Ore., LinuxCon will co-locate with the annual Linux Plumbers Conference (LPC), says the group. The LinuxCon announcement follows up on The LF's first end-user event, which is scheduled to take place on October 13-14 in New York City. This Linux Foundation End User Collaboration Summit offers an opportunity for "sophisticated" end users to "learn and interact with leaders from within the Linux community, including the highest level maintainers and developers," said the non-profit organization.

The Spread Linux platform is officially launched! The idea is to provide a platform for people who are interested in Linux marketing. Our target is to spread the word to increase the market share of Linux. We invite you to share your marketing ideas. With the newest Linux distributions it's very easy to install Linux even for people who have no deep computer knowledge. Linux is ready for the desktop!

The developers from Linux-gamers.net launched a new version of their Linux games-focused live distribution. New arrivals included action games Teeworlds 0.4.3, Openarena 0.8.0 and World of Padman 1.2. Also released was a rudimentary installation assistant that for the first time, will permanently anchor the contents of the DVD to the mother board.

In a recent independent test, Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 5 Advanced Platform trumped all other operating systems that process more than 1 million transactions per minute -- and at 22% lower cost than its next closest competitor. The San Francisco-based Transaction Processing Performance Council (TPC), which performs benchmark tests of database transactions, validated Red Hat's processing of 1.2 million transactions per minute on an IBM System x 3950M2 with the new Intel X7460 Xeon processor.

The tech sector is experiencing a crash -- not of stock prices, which rebounded somewhat on Wall Street on Tuesday -- but in its ability to take new companies public. So far this year, there have been just six venture-backed initial public offerings; last year, there were 86, according to the National Venture Capital Association (NVCA). The recent collapse of investment banks Lehman Brothers Holdings and Bear Stearns Cos. is exacerbating the problem.

In just over a week’s time, government officials and representative from around the globe will gather in South Africa for the second annual Open Document Format (ODF) workshop. The workshop, which will be held in Pretoria from 9-10 October, is aimed at governments that are in the process of migrating to ODF as a standard or have done so already.

Online office suites are attractive for organizations with modest document processing needs, especially due to their low cost (read: free). But if you don't like the idea of storing your documents outside your network, try OpenGoo. It's an online office suite that installs on your local network and allows users to collaborate with others both inside and outside the network. The open source software, still under active development, is an easy to install and use, and if it's not quite ready for real-world large-scale deployment, it's getting there fast.

ICANN, IANA, IETF, ISOC, IAB, IRTF, SRS, NSI, RIR, NSO-- who or what are these, and what do they have to with what you can do with the Internet? Charlie Schluting explains the roles of the many organizations and governing bodies that operate behind the scenes.

The Uncomplicated Firewall (UFW) is a new tool from Ubuntu whose goal is to make configuration of the built-in Linux packet filter less complicated and more secure for novice users. You must run UFW commands as root, so in Ubuntu, you must preface them with the sudo command. With UFW, enabling and disabling packet filtering is a simple matter of issuing the sudo ufw enable and sudo ufw disable commands. You set the default policy for filtering packets by running the sudo ufw default command and passing the allow or deny argument, depending on what you want to achieve. If you issue the sudo ufw default allow command, all incoming packets will be allowed by default, creating a very unsecure packet filter but giving you the broadest range of allowed services. The command sudo ufw default deny will block all incoming packets, requiring that you allow specific services to pass the packet filter.

Untangle, which develops open source security solutions, has a rather interesting pitch for VARs and small businesses. It involves a simple USB stick known as the Silver Bullet. Here’s the scoop.

You don't have to load a client on your PC to run GMail. You don't have to invest in expensive infrastructure to subscribe to Salesforce.com. It's not that complicated. I'm not sure what's so hard for Ellison to understand. Nor does it seem stupid. Maybe I'm missing something, but to me it seems to be an intelligent and reasonable approach to computing, especially in a fragile economy.

The 2008 Linux Kernel Summit was held September 15 and 16 in Portland, Oregon, immediately prior to the Linux Plumbers Conference. At this invitation-only meeting, some 80 developers discussed a number of issues relevant to the kernel and its future development. The following reports were written by Jonathan Corbet, who attended the event and was a member of its program committee.

Microsoft admits that TCO for education students in developing nations is about the same with their products and Free Software. They further admit that the initial TCO costs of hardware and software are lower with Linux, and that Linux technical people in developing nations command a higher salary than their Microsoft counterparts due to scarcity. I feel that this mandates greater use of Free Software in universities and high schools to help increase the number of locally employed, highly trained Free Software professionals to decrease that scarcity, and to lower the balance of trade problems that occur by sending software royalty money outside of the country.

In the proprietary production world, what matters about a copyright is who owns it. In the free production world, however, who owns a copyright is relatively unimportant. What matters is what license it is offered under. There is a very simple rule of thumb about the best license to use: use a “free, copyleft license”. As usual, Terry Hancock forensically analayses issues of copyleft, the GPL and licences generally and you can read the full article at Freesoftware Magazine.

Earlier this year Fedora 9 was the first distribution providing kernel-based mode-setting (or KMS for short). At the time there was only a kernel mode-setting driver for Intel hardware and it ended up being disabled by default. We had provided a preview of kernel-based mode-setting that showed how the system display looked when it came to the flicker-free boot experience, fast and clean VT switching, and the technical advantages this method provides over the graphics mode-setting within an X.Org DDX driver. With months having passed since our first article and Red Hat engineers working aggressively on KMS improvements for Fedora 10, we are providing another look at this technology and some of the recent advancements.

Google showed off its new brainchild last week:a smartphone design in collaboration with its Android partners, Taiwan's handset maker HTC, and the wireless carrier T-Mobile USA. The phone specs are all over the place on the Internet. It looks quite attractive, but perhaps because of the Apple iPhone's lasting impression, many tech pundits gave only a"pass" grade on its appearance.

The CC Network Filesystem (ccgfs) lets you mount filesystems over the network using either the push or pull model for connections. Most network filesystems use the pull model, where the client mounts a network share and all connections originate from the client. Using the push model for network shares means that all connections originate from the server. The push model has advantages when you want a machine on your network demilitarized zone (DMZ) to access a file server through a firewall.

So far, all of the browsers that I reviewed for this book have been Gnome-based browsers. Epiphany is a Gnome-sponsored project, and Firefox is rapidly moving towards Gnomeization (though at the time of this writing, a Qt port of Firefox is under heavy development). What’s a good KDE user to do? Simple: use the conqueror of the browser market, Konqueror. Andrew Min is your guide to the all singing, all dancing, resident KDE browser Konqueror. Read the full article at Freesoftware Magazine.

This tutorial will run you through the installation, configuration and preparation of media for Apple’s Darwin QuickTime Streaming Server on Centos/RHEL 5.2. Darwin QuickTime Streaming Server is capable of serving H.264 and mpeg4 file formats via the RTP/RTSP streaming protocols.