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My advice is to avoid dual-booting, and especially triple-booting (or even more than that). If you set up a box to dual-boot with two Linux distros, Linux and Windows, or even a BSD (OpenBSD, NetBSD, FreeBSD) and Linux, and you leave it alone, you'll probably be OK. But me, I'm testing things all the time, and lately I've been playing around with triple-booting on my Gateway Solo 1450 laptop. I've done this a lot, and I generally know how to do it so I don't hose one partition or another. But I slightly hosed something on the laptop last night.

Lenny (aka 'testing') appears poised to displace Etch as the popular Linux distribution's "stable" branch next month. To see how Lenny was coming along, I loaded the latest preview (beta 2) of its KDE system image onto an available Thinkpad, and took it for a spin.

Despite all its advances, GNU/Linux remains weak in its support for proprietary audio and video codecs. Because these codecs are often encumbered by patents, distributions must choose either to include support of questionable legality or else exclude it altogether. In the middle of this controversy sits Fluendo, a Catalan company of about 50 employees that is a main contributor to projects like GStreamer, and supports open formats, but also offers licensed, proprietary codecs such as Windows Media Video and MPEG4. While many would argue that this dual position is necessary, it's one that sometimes creates an unasy balance for the company, says Muriel Moscardini, Fluendo's sale director.

A federal appeals court has struck down a lower court ruling that found that open source copyrights may not be legally enforceable if they're licensed under terms that are "intentionally broad." Ruling on an appeal brought by software developer Robert Jacobsen, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit said Wednesday that open source users that do not comply with the software's strict licensing terms can, in fact, be sued for copyright infringement -- even if the software is free.

Open source developers now have newly clarified protection, thanks to an appeals court ruling over the validity of their licenses. A judge with U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit ruled Wednesday that programmers who"engage in open source licensing" and copyright their work do"have the right to control the modification and distribution" of their products.

Almost three years ago, developerWorks published "Using the Ruby Development Tools plug-in for Eclipse," which introduced some of the features found in the Ruby Development Tools (RDT) plug-in for Eclipse. Current at the time was V0.5. We revisit that tool in this article. Today, RDT is called Aptana RadRails and is available as a plug-in for Aptana Studio or Eclipse. This article introduces some of the plug-in's new features.

[Screenshots are from the Windows version, but it works the same on Linux of course — Sander]

Have you ever wanted to create an installer program on a Linux system, but didn’t want all the hassle of an actual install builder? I have. So I’m going to show you how you can create such an installer with very little hassle. I can’t actually claim credit for this method though; I actually got the idea from Sun’s JDK installer for the Linux platform. You download a “.bin” file, change the file mode so that it is executable and then run it. It displays the end user license agreement, gets some feedback and then goes about installing Java for you. Well, if you open that .bin file up in a text editor (say vi) you’ll see that it’s nothing more than a shell script with a binary chunked onto the end. Thus my plans for world domination were born…

Previously, we've interviewed the lead-developers of Arch and Gobo Linux. Two distributions for the more advanced users out there. This time, we're going in the complete opposite direction to understand more about a user friendly Linux-distribution: Ubuntu.

Quantum GIS 0.11.0, released last month, is a free geographic information system (GIS) application released under the GPL that runs on multiple platforms, including Linux. QGIS can read, edit, and export common GIS file formats. After installing it and using it to work with existing data layers available from official data repositories, performing common spatial analysis tasks, and sharing files and data with the commercial GIS products, I found QGIS has the potential to be a viable alternative to proprietary commercial GIS programs from the likes of ESRI and Intergraph/Geomedia.

Sun Microsystems has taken another step in its long journey towards greater support of open source by delivering the first beta of its next crop of NetBeans. The NetBeans 6.5 beta builds on the open source integrated development environment's earlier support for dynamic languages with support for PHP.

Students and linguists from Makerere University have translated the open source web browser, Mozilla Firefox, into Luganda at a Translate@thon held on the campus in Kampala, Uganda last week. The two-day gathering brought together almost 200 students and allowed them to make a practical contribution to their language’s presence in the digital age.

The key to IT security is secure software - software that is written with not only features, but also security, in mind, says David Jacobson, technical director at Linux services company Synaq. However, says Jacobson, software is seldom developed with an eye on back-end security requirements. Developers are usually under pressure to deliver on required features within tight deadlines which leave little time to check for vulnerabilities each step of the way. The result is that most software is inherently vulnerable.

Firewall Builder (fwbuilder) is a graphical application that can help you to configure IP traffic filtering. It can compile the filtering policy you define into many specifications, including iptables and various languages used by Cisco and Linksys routers. Separating the actual policy you define and the implementation in this way should let you change what hardware is running your firewall without having to redefine your policy for that platform.

OpenID sounds like a great idea - essentially single-sign on for multiple web sites or web applications, without participating sites having to see your credentials. But is it trustworthy and safe in the light of recent revelations concerning a flaw on the DNS system on which it relies?

In the past, data was structured, secure and tightly controlled. The bad news is that the data was limited by the firewall of personnel, technologies, and process rigidity. Today, however, the demand is for just-in-time and inclusive data, moving away from a monolithic data system mentality to multiple sources of data that provide real-time inferences on consumers, activities, events and transactions.

Community journalism encourages members of the community to participate in the news process, not just as passive readers, but as active producers of the news itself. This direct connection to the product is similar in many ways to the kind of community building that goes on in open source development.

Yes, Nortel Networks acquired Pingtel -- an open source VoIP firm. But the bigger story: Nortel may finally realize it needs to leverage open source communities to combat Cisco Systems. At least that's the spin from The VAR Guy.

We all know the term “FUD“, don’t we? If you haven’t heard of it, it means “Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt”, and it was created a big software monopoly, often headlined “Get the facts”. Some years ago, I got the real facts. And the real FUD.

Wired: Are you going to develop a version of Firefox for the iPhone? Lilly: No. Apple makes it too hard. They say it’s because of technical issues — they don’t want outsiders to disrupt the user experience. That’s a business argument masquerading as a technological argument. We’re focusing on more important stuff. The iPhone has been influential, but there’s not that many of them. We’re part of the LiMo Foundation — Linux on Mobile. The Razr V2 is a LiMo phone, and you’ll see more in the next year or so.

Hiring a well-known free software advocate to oversee efforts to work with the community is a good plan for any company, but for a company that has had rocky community relations, it may be essential. VIA Technologies has done just that, by contracting with Harald Welte to help guide its strategy to work more closely—and less contentiously—with the community. VIA announced a new effort aimed at cooperation with the free software world last April, but got off to a slow start that had people wondering about its commitment to fulfilling that promise. Welte will be well placed to ensure that community concerns are heard within VIA.