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Linux users have always vocally encouraged major hardware vendors to unbundle the Windows operating system or offer Linux pre-installation. Although several prominent vendors are beginning to embrace this concept, they only support it on a limited subset of their hardware offerings. This means that Linux users often pay for a Windows license that they never use, and it also means that Linux users are forever attempting to recoup the "Windows tax."

The world of Linux distribution has traditionally associated the arrival of September with the start of a grand testing period as all major projects are about to finalise their feature lists, freeze their development trees and begin fixing any remaining bugs. So what can we expect when the final products eventually hit the download mirrors? We'll take a look at the feature lists of all major distributions to see what's coming up in the next few months. In the news section, Debian announces the code name of its post-Lenny release, Novell launches SUSE Studio - a web-based tool for building custom distributions, and Linpus Technologies releases an installable Linpus Lite live CD for netbooks. Also among the interesting web links, a user reports how Xubuntu has managed to turn an OLPC into a perfect travelling companion, while the developers of FreeNAS tell us why their FreeBSD-based distribution is an excellent way of storing important files on a remote machine. All this and more in this week's issue of DistroWatch Weekly. Happy reading!

In this article I will show how to install and configure fail2ban on a Mandriva 2008.1 system. Fail2ban is a tool that observes login attempts to various services, e.g. SSH, FTP, SMTP, Apache, etc., and if it finds failed login attempts again and again from the same IP address or host, fail2ban stops further login attempts from that IP address/host by blocking it with an iptables firewall rule.

Korean company MIZI Research, a developer of mobile application platforms based on embedded Linux, has been bought by US based Wind River, a developer of tools claimed to "reduce effort, cost and risk and optimise quality and reliability at all phases of the device software development process, from concept to deployed product." MIZI has 65 employees and, according to Wind River, is one of the earliest Linux pioneers in the mobile market.

Almost one-third of the 25 top-selling laptops at Amazon.com are sold with Linux. (Shown is their top-selling Linux laptop, an Asus EEEpc 900 unit.) When I last reported on my search for such a laptop, we learned that this is not something you just go into a store and ask for, unless you like blank stares from clerks. But a correspondent linked me to an Amazon page showing a number of Linux-based laptop configurations, mostly from MSI and Asus. So I asked their nice PR lady about it.

Another year has come and gone and, once again, the most counter-intuitive holiday rears its head ;) Today's a day when we celebrate labor by not doing any at all. Probably most comedians have already covered this material extensively, so I'll not tread on sacred ground.

The Daily News is leaving the windowless box it has called home since some time in the '80s to move down the street to a newer, window-rich building. The current spot has lots of space — and that means lots of space filled with old hardware. The paper's design desk used to subsist on Power Macintosh G4 computers hooked up to 22-inch LaCie monitors. Resident Mac guru and digital photography expert Roger Vargo announced that anybody who wanted a G4 could get one ... until they were all gone. So how does Debian perform on a Mac PowerPC with 450 MHz of CPU and 128 MB of RAM? Surprisingly well. And there were absolutely zero configuration issues. Everything came out perfectly.

LXer Feature: 31-Aug-2008

Happy Labor Day, hopefully you have an extra day off this weekend to relax and catch up on things, thus I present this week's LXer Roundup for your reading pleasure. This week we have 5 unpopular desktop environments, 25 killer Linux applications, 10 must have cheat sheets for those of you who are low on mental "RAM" (I know, its a groaner, but its all mine), in a new twist to the Apple-Psystar saga, Psystar claims they are going to counter sue Apple claiming anticompetitive business practices. A computer on the International Space Station gets infected with a 'worm' (guess what OS it was running?), Carla Schroder asks the question "Does attracting hordes of Windows users to your FOSS project benefit your project, or help the advancement of FOSS?" and to wrap things up I have a couple pieces of FUD I came across.

This article will tell you how to install and use Webmin, a web user interface mainly used for administering servers. If you are not a sysadmin, don’t run away: Webmin can also be used on a single desktop too. You may struggle to remember all the command line operations to manage, say, run levels or various daemons and prefer to do it the GUI way. One of the best reasons for using Webmin is to circumvent the sheer number of command line variations from distro to distro and the different locations for configuration files that you would otherwise require to memorize (manpages notwithstanding). Please keep in mind that it is still essential to know how to use basic Unix commands. Using Webmin without some system literacy is just asking for trouble. It should be used as an additional tool, not a replacement—because a little knowledge is a dangerous thing. On that basis, let’s look at what Webmin modules can do for the desktop user.

The time is right for Linux and Open Source company absorption into large corporations. Which companies will be left standing in 2010? Don't get too attached to your favorites.

A while ago, Apple sold heavily discounted Macs to schools, hoping to get students to choose the Mac. Obviously, the same technique will not work for Linux, but it is important to get students interested in Linux.

The new distribution gOS 3 Gadgets BETA is based on Ubuntu 8.04.1 and is able to interact with Google Documents, Calendar and Mail. The newest release of WINE 1.0 is included to now support thousands of Windows software. The new operation system will also be loaded with Lightweight X Desktop Environment (LXDE) and other Google software for Linux to improve the user experience. This workshop describes how to install and run the new software from an USB stick.

By rights, copyright really shouldn’t apply to binary executables, because they are purely “functional” (not “expressive”) works. The decision to extend copyright to binaries was an economically-motivated anomaly, and that choice has some counter-intuitive and detrimental side-effects. What would things in the free software world look like if the courts had decided otherwise? For one thing, the implementation of copyleft would have to be completely different. Hypothetical? Academic? Not if you’re a hardware developer! Because this is exactly what the law does look like for designs for physical hardware (where the product is not protected by copyright).

Tomboy is a desktop note-taking application for Linux and Unix. Simple and easy to use, but with potential to help you organize the ideas and information you deal with every day. Tomboy is written in C# and utilizes the Mono runtime and Gtk#. Automatic spell-checking is provided by GtkSpell.

Japanese manufacturer Shimafuji is readying a two-inch cubed computer that runs Red Hat Linux on 1GB of flash. The Space Cube is equipped with a MIPS-based NEC VR5701 processor, 64MB RAM, and numerous I/O connections, including a Firewire-like "SpaceWire" port designed for spaceflight.

Fayandria Foley helped reel in big bucks in July with one of the year's most curious fundraisers. She helped pull together an American Cancer Society Relay for Life, which is typically a walkathon locally. More than 2,000 showed up -- or didn't, actually. Everyone at Foley's relay stayed home to participate.

Microsoft are poised to launch a new $USD 300 million advertising campaign this week, starring comedian Jerry Seinfeld among others. The marketing types responsible are intending to counter Apple’s successful "I’m a Mac" line, but the slogan picked out is simply on the wrong foot from the start and is thwarted by Linux immediately.

It's hardly news these days when RHEL or Suse Linux boots Windows or Unix off a server. And we know that commercial software vendors are paying plenty of attention to commercial open source. But have you ever heard of a community version of the open source operating system displacing one of the popular commercial distributions? That's exactly what happened in Germany's third-largest public TV and radio station, according to a new report on community Linux by analyst Jay Lyman of the 451 Group.

On a superficial level, Novell’s third quarter, which ended July 31, 2008, didn’t look that good. A closer look reveals though that Novell did quite well in general and extremely well with its Linux business. According to the company press release, “For the quarter, Novell reported net revenue of $245 million.” This was up from Novell’s net revenue of $237 million for the third fiscal quarter 2007. “Income from operations for the third fiscal quarter 2008 was $1 million, compared to a loss from operations of $10 million for the third fiscal quarter 2007. Loss from continuing operations in the third fiscal quarter 2008 was $15 million, or $0.04 loss per share, due to a $15 million impairment charge related to our auction-rate securities.”

I received an email recently from a young man in Brazil who wanted me to come to his university and talk to the students and faculty about using Free Software. I am normally happy to advise universities to use Free Software, but usually this is done in conjunction with some large conference held at the university or some other venue. I just do not have the time to visit each and every school. But I did investigate the university of the student and found that Microsoft was indeed a sponsor of the University. In fact, the university had a large banner on the front page of their web site talking about Microsoft as a partner. It was the first time I saw a university advertising a commercial firm on their home page.