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A little later than planned sidux announced the immediate availability of sidux 2008-02 "Erebos" for amd64 and i686. Enhancing the sidux family, a roughly 420 MB large XFCE variant has been added for both architectures for the first time.

June is Bandwidth Conservation Month (well, not officially, but let's say that it is), so if you have multiple machines running an APT-powered Linux distribution such as Debian or Ubuntu, you should take a look at apt-proxy, a utility that caches package downloads in a shared pool for all interested parties on your LAN. This saves you both the time and the bandwidth it costs to download the same updates for more than one computer.

In this article, I ask some very difficult questions concerning the promotion of Free and Open Source Software.

This tutorial shows how you can set up a Linux Mint 5 Elyssa R1 desktop that is a full-fledged replacement for a Windows desktop, i.e. that has all the software that people need to do the things they do on their Windows desktops. The advantages are clear: you get a secure system without DRM restrictions that works even on old hardware, and the best thing is: all software comes free of charge. Linux Mint 5 is a Linux distribution based on Ubuntu 8.04 that has lots of packages in its repositories (like multimedia codecs, Adobe Flash, Adobe Reader, Skype, Google Earth, etc.) that are relatively hard to install on other distributions; it therefore provides a user-friendly desktop experience even for Linux newbies.

After steadily losing membership this year, one of the earliest mobile Linux groups will close and join another faster growing initiative. On Thursday, the Linux Phone Standards (LiPS) Forum plans to announce that its activities will be folded into the LiMo Foundation starting in July. The groups had slightly different activities although for a time many companies were members in both. The loss of one such group is likely good for the overall mobile Linux market, which has been criticized for being fragmented.

Red Hat Inc (RHT.N: Quote, Profile, Research), the world's largest publicly traded provider of Linux software, reported on Wednesday a quarterly profit that met Wall Street expectations as its revenue grew 32 percent. Net income rose 7 percent to $17.3 million, or 8 cents per share, in its fiscal first quarter, from $16.2 million, or 8 cents per share, in the same period a year ago.

Please help the GNU/Linux Matters non-profit spread the word about GNU/Linux and Freedomware in all possible languages. German translators are urgently needed!

We have released SOHO-5.9-DELUXE! It has been a year since our last SOHO release and from all reports this is our best yet. Starting from the ground up with our 5.9 standard release we have taken VectorLinux to a new high. This is absolutely the fastest KDE 3.5.9 desktop you will find anywhere with a optional fluxbox desktop for power users. The eye candy is amazing with four special themes to select from at installation time to a launch bar you have to try to believe.

Using the Trantham/Howard Method to setup your boot disks using Veritas Volume Manager on Solaris without encapsulation.

While thinking about some of the recent stories on the over-hyped Windows XP on the XO I realized how ridiculous it seems for anyone to get excited about an operating system released in 2001. An operating system that is the successor of Windows ME! So instead of going down memory lane and mocking Microsoft I decided to compile a little overview of a cutting edge Sugar demo that I was shown when I was at OLPC HQ in Cambridge, MA some weekends ago. The demo setup was prepared by Alex, an intern at OLPC, and its goal is to show off some of the cool features that you can get to use on your XO when you spend some time tweaking the thing.

First thing out of the gate on Monday's news cycle was the announcement from HP that it is committing its Tru64 Unix Advanced File System (AdvFS) code to an open source license. Not just any open source license, either; AdvFS is now under the GNU General Public License (v2), which officially makes AdvFS free software.

Linux is coming to an ultraportable near you! Sure, the oft-touted “year of the Linux desktop” is seen in the same light as such notable phrases like “the cheque’s in the mail”, “I’ll respect you in the morning” and “Duke Nukem Forever is being released” but there’s no denying the smash-hit success Linux is enjoying in the budget price ultraportable market. These are the Linux desktops that will catch on and here’s why.

You gotta love it. Microsoft has decided that it will ho ahead and kill off easy access to XP on June 30th. On behalf of desktop Linux users everywhere, and our first cousins, the Mac fans, thanks. You've given us the best shot we'll ever have of taking the desktop. But it gets even better! Microsoft has also announced that it will be releasing Windows 7 on January 2010. They'll blow that ship date. Microsoft has never set a shipping date it could meet. But, who in their right mind would now buy Vista?

In a recent interview with the British Sunday Observer, Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia, claimed that “it’s the next billion [internet users] who will change the way we think”. Such a big claim deserves some critical house room. Will the internet really change the way we think? Or are we just getting carried away? Gary Richmond explores the implications of the Wikipedia open source/free software knowledge paradigm and what it might mean for the way we think. You can read the full story at Freesoftware Magazine

Linux Certified sells Linux laptops and offers IT training to individuals and organizations. Its product line ranges from small, affordable units to performance laptops that cost well over $2,000. The company's customer list boasts the likes of Boeing, NASA, the US Army and MIT. But if recent trends are any indication, Linux Certified and similar companies that specialize in selling computers that run Linux are about to see some of the world's largest computer companies warm up to the open source operating system. Major manufacturers have begun to take notice of Linux's potential on the laptop.

The Eclipse Foundation wants to know who is using Eclipse and how they are using it ahead of next year's planned mega release. One of the main innovations in the Eclipse Foundation's Ganymede synchronized release of 24 projects this year, out today, is a feature called Usage Data Collector (UDC).

CentOS 5.2 — the free version of the recently released Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.2 — is here. I saw it on the mirrors last night, but as with most things Linux, a Distrowatch item means that it's really ready.

Finally, in Ubuntu 8.04, it looks like all the major news video players work under Ubuntu Linux.

Openmoko will distribute a mass-market version of its open Linux phone through five distributors in Germany, France, and India, it announced. The Neo Freerunner features an open hardware design, and a Linux-based operating system that users are free to modify. Previously, OpenMoko phones have been available only in limited quantities, mostly to open source mobile phone software developers. Today's announcement appears to signal the forthcoming release of OpenMoko's first product aimed at the mass market.

Last fall when the two mega-distros openSUSE and Mandriva both hit the mirrors, it was difficult to decide which I liked better. In an attempt to narrow it down, I ran some light-hearted tests and found Mandriva won out in a side-by-side comparison. But things change rapidly in the Linux world and I wondered how a competition of the newest releases would come out. Mandriva 2008.1 was released this past April and openSUSE 11.0 was released just last week.