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Last weekend a friend was moaning about endless problems with Windows XP on his desktop PC. We installed Ubuntu 7.04 on it. The problems went away. That started me thinking about my own "daily driver" computer, a Dell Latitude that also runs Ubuntu 7.04, and it made me realize that I hadn't thought about my laptop or its operating system in many months. Linux -- especially Ubuntu -- has become so reliable and simple that for most end users it's simply not worth thinking about, any more than we think about tools like wrenches and screwdrivers. Does this mean desktop GNU/Linux has become so boring that it's not worth noticing?

The real enemy of open source remains what it has always been. Not Apple Inc. The copyright industries. Music companies. Movie companies. TV companies. Radio companies. Book companies. Magazine companies. Newspaper companies. (Often, now, the same company.) Media has feared the Web since the day it was spun. The DMCA and No Electronic Theft Act were aimed at the Internet.

Dell today flipped the switched and is now officially offering consumer desktop and notebook PCs with Ubuntu 8.04 pre-installed. Two notebooks and one desktop join two desktop systems in Dell’s open-source product portfolio.

When a genre of software is estimated to account for 15 percent of the total revenue generated by a given sector of the IT industry and that total is $A3.5 billion, then it is time to sit up and take notice. Which is what the government of the Australian state of Queensland has done. Queensland, which styles itself as the "smart state", has provided funding to research company Longhaus to "identify the current and growing capabilities within Queensland's ICT industry" of the open source sector.

I've come to the conclusion that GNOME is not quite ready in Debian Lenny. A lot of strange things have been happening on my screen. There's the ghosting in the upper menu bar, as well as various hard-to-describe funky things happening in other windows opened by various applications. I had used Xfce quite a bit in Debian Etch, and it also works great in Wolvix. So using it in Lenny is a bit of a no-brainer.

Yahoo Inc.'s board of directors landed its first endorsement from a major institutional shareholder Friday, giving it momentum in the fight with investor-agitator Carl Icahn over control of the Internet company. Bill Miller, who as Legg Mason Capital Management's chief investment officer controls 4.4% of the stock in Yahoo, said he would vote to keep the current board in place instead of backing a dissident slate nominated by Icahn.

Some more Unix and Linux related laughs for the weekend.

The reasons that these screeds of hate work so well is that the author really knows what they're talking about. He or she is extremely knowledgeable and able to go into the details of every problem, sometimes as far as analyzing the underlying code and pointing out the problems (thank goodness for Free Software). They're right of course. Some of their complaints are amazingly well written, detailed, and are undoubtedly correct in pointing out flaws in a Linux distribution.

Software installation, deployment, and configuration can be a headache and a time sink for systems administrators. To ease the process, JumpBox delivers preconfigured Web apps that run as virtual appliances on any machine, across platforms, irrespective of operating system. A JumpBox contains a streamlined Ubuntu 8.04 LTS distribution stripped down to running only a particular Web app and its dependencies, including a Web server (generally Apache), a database server (generally MySQL or PostgreSQL), a scripting language (such as PHP, Perl, Python, or Ruby), and other essential libraries. There are preconfigured JumpBoxes available for blogging software like WordPress, content management systems like Drupal and Movable Type, wikis like MediaWiki and TikiWiki, bug tracking apps like Mantis and Bugzilla, revision control software like Trac and Subversion, customer relationship management (CRM) applications like vTiger and SugarCRM, and more.

I was going to explore the new trend of green IT or perhaps talk about the morality of threatening or blackmailing (your choice) software companies into fixing security holes, but an article in Computerworld about a hospital selecting a Linux-based email system with compatible features to Microsoft’s Exchange brought back to my mind a discussion I have had with others about the real choices there are in today's software wilderness. What started the discussion was my thought that one does not have to look too hard to find a pundit saying you have options other than Vista. As a long-time Linux user and evangelist, I knew this to be truth, but with an asterisk.

Jim Zemlin of the Linux Foundation says Linux is the platform of choice for the mobile and embedded platforms. Zemlin to present “The State of Mobile Linux” at OSCON. Linux is here to stay in the mobile and embedded worlds,

Apple licenses tie you down and are written in a way that would have Einstein tearing his hair out. Open source licenses give you freedom and are written in a language called English unknown to most lawyers. But if a company can ignore an Apple EULA, another company can ignore the GPL. Isn’t that what folks like Harold Welte at GPL Violations are fighting so hard for, the recognition of software contracts as legitimate?

Linus Torvalds, an acknowledged godfather of the open-source movement, was just 21 when he changed the world by writing Linux Today, 17 years later, Linux powers everything from supercomputers to mobile phones. In fact ask yourself this: if Linux didn't exist, would Google, Facebook, PHP, Apache, or MySQL?

Over time, organizations replicate, migrate, or add complexity within database systems, often times losing control of the quality of their data. When applications begin to fail because of invalid, corrupted, or out-of-date data, the free, GPL-licensed Talend Open Profiler can give data analysts, database administrators (DBA), and business users the ability to research data structures and improve data quality. Through the use of Open Profiler, users can be alerted to hidden inconsistencies and incompatibilities between data sources and target applications. Through data analysis, business users and technical analysts can communicate both data structure and content needs.

Learn the tools and code needed to add encryption support for user data in one of the most popular online calendar applications. Building on the flexibility of Firefox extensions and the Gnu Privacy Guard, find out how to store encrypted event descriptions in Google's Calendar application, while displaying a text version to anyone with the decryption keys.

Dell's Ubuntu Linux PCs now come with the latest build of the operating system, version 8.04. That may not seem like news, but it's actually a significant move by Dell.

The KOffice team announces the availability of the ninth alpha release of KOffice 2.0. With KDE4 becoming more stable by the week, KOffice development is picking up at a fast pace and developers who previously had trouble keeping up are now getting active again, leading to a much increased rate of commits for KOffice. Both the NLnet sponsored Girish Ramakrisnan, who is working on OpenDocument support, and the KOffice Google Summer of Code students are delivering solid work.

Will Linux and open source destroy Microsoft's profits? Before you answer that question, take a look at this quick Microsoft vs. Red Hat financial analysis from The VAR Guy.

Hector Ruiz is out as chief executive at Advanced Micro Devices as the struggling chip maker on Thursday reported its seventh consecutive quarter in the red to the tune of a $1.19 billion loss in the second quarter of this year. Dirk Meyer, Sunnyvale, Calif.-based AMD's president and chief operating officer, has been elected by AMD's board to replace Ruiz as CEO, according to the company. Ruiz replaced Jerry Sanders as CEO in 2002 upon the AMD co-founder's retirement. Ruiz will stay on in a director's capacity at AMD, he said on Thursday's Q2 earnings call, where the news was announced at about 2 p.m., PT.

This tutorial describes how you can encrypt an Ubuntu 8.04 (Hardy Heron) system right during the initial installation.