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KDE 4 is barely eight months old, and already it has three options for a main menu. Until now, users have either used the default Kickoff, which makes for awkward navigation of the menu tree, or reverted to the familiar but unwieldy classic menu. Now, with the first full release of Lancelot, users have another option that overcomes the shortcomings of both other alternatives and gives KDE 4 a thoroughly modern menu. According to comments on the project Web page by main developer Ivan ?uki?, Lancelot started life as a SuperKaramba applet for organizing desktop icons. Its name is a homage to Monty Python and the Holy Grail -- as evidenced by the default grail icon -- as well as a pun on "launch-a-lot."

I haven't been a big fan of the moves that Yahoo has made recently, but I like the sound of their latest move--opening up their online services and pages to third-party developers, as reported today by the Wall Street Journal. Reporting from a briefing held at the company's Silicon Valley headquarters, the Journal says that everything from Yahoo's home page to Yahoo Mail would become fair game for outside developers--a more open Yahoo. Here's how this may make a lot of sense.

Welcome back! Charlie Schluting, in this edition of Networking 101, will give you the IP knowledge required to understand routing issues. Most everything on the Internet uses IP, and unlike Ethernet, knowing this protocol is pivotal to understanding how networking works with regards to the big picture. In upcoming articles, Networking 101 will explore TCP and UDP, routing theories, and then delve into the specific routing protocols. It's going to be a wild ride.

Boxee is a new entrant into the increasingly crowded open source media center space. The company's eponymous application is billed as a "social media center" -- melding a smorgasbord of social networking services into an XBMC-based media center designed for the couch-centric user. Boxee has bigger goals in mind, but you can take an early look at it now by applying for the invitation-only testing program.

Windows may be king of data centers, but Linux has a foothold in nearly every courtyard and is sure to make further inroads in the year ahead. According to the Data Center Decisions 2008 Purchasing Intentions Survey, 91% of data centers run Microsoft Windows, but a large percentage also use Red Hat Enterprise Linux (48%) or Novell SUSE (21%, multiple versions) in their data centers. Nonetheless, Linux use remains limited in scope, with two-thirds of respondents running Linux on 25% or less of their servers, with application servers the most common pairing. Tech Target

One of the greatest and most destructive beliefs in the open source community is that "Because I'm not a programmer, I can't participate in an open source project." Let me be the first to tell you that if you believe that, you're wrong. Dead wrong. Why? Well let me explain.

The ecosystem that Microsoft (MSFT) has built up around its Windows operating system is showing signs of strain. In one of several recent moves by partners that sell or support the company's software, Hewlett-Packard (HPQ), the world's No. 1 PC maker, has quietly assembled a group of engineers to develop software that will let customers bypass certain features of Vista, the latest version of Windows. Employees on a separate skunk works team are even angling to replace Windows with an HP-assembled operating system, say three sources close to the company. HP acknowledges the first effort. The company formed the "customer experience" group nine months ago and put at its helm Susie Wee, a former director in the company's research labs. Her team is developing touchscreen technology and other software that allows users to circumvent Microsoft's operating system to watch movies or view photos more easily than they can with Vista.

What's happening at the biggest virtualization event in North America this year? Will there be some earth-shattering announcements?

Using the MPlayer engine, SMPlayer is a powerful video player built in Qt4, with support for playing DVDs, DVD ISO images, a configurable interface, icon themes, the very useful feature of remembering settings and time left from a video after closing it (so when you restart SMPlayer the movie will be loaded from where you left it), support for subtitles and much more. SMPlayer lately gained a lot of popularity and I'm sure it will become one of the most used video players on Linux, if it's not already.

The Open Source Geospatial Foundation (OSGeo) and the Geographic Information Society of South Africa (GISSA) will host the 2008 Free and Open Source Software for Geospatial (FOSS4G) conference at the Cape Town International Convention Centre from September 29 to October 3. The annual conference is expected to attract more than 500 software programmers, government officials, business people and technology experts.

This posting follows up the recent one Vncserver on SNV97 DomU at Xen 3.3 CentOS 5.2 Dom0 (64-bit) and is targeting enabling Sun's Java Web Start in FireFox 3.0.1 Web Browser with 32-bit JRE 6.0 plugin installed on 64-bit Linux. First of all install 32-bit Sun JRE 6.0 for Linux by running ./jre-6u-linux-i586-rpm.bin.Then install FireFox 3.0.1 into folder /usr/tmp/firefox for instance Create following symlink to make firefox aware of JRE.

Asia is in the middle of a mass adoption wave of open source technology, and the floodgates of innovation will open following this wave in two to three years, according to open source vendors. Following recent remarks made by MySQL co-founder, David Axmark, on Asia's lack of contribution back to the open source community, fellow industry spokespeople were decidedly more optimistic about the region's role to play in the open source ecosystem.

Xine is an engine which allows to play audio CDs, DVDs, VCDs, various audio and video formats like AVI, WMV, MOV to list a few. The last version of xine-lib is 1.1.15, released on August 14, 2008. To compile from source and install xine-lib 1.1.15 in Debian Lenny you'll have to follow the steps below.

Being connected to the Internet means exposure to what the outside world has to offer -- including the undesirable elements. Every time you connect to the Internet, you're exposed to threats that can compromise your network's security. Although network security solutions have evolved in recent years, so have network attack techniques. To prevent ever-evolving attacks from compromising your network, you must preemptively block malicious traffic before it enters your network. Free, open source programs, such as Snort, can do the job, but setting up a full intrusion detection system (IDS) sensor, especially in an enterprise network, takes time and isn't very user-friendly. StillSecure's Strata Guard Free can be your front line of defense to face outside threats without as much hard work.

Microsoft and Novell Thursday released a virtualization bundle that represents the pair’s first fully supported joint product since their historic interoperability partnership was forged in 2006. The two have configured and optimized Novell’s SUSE Linux Enterprise Server to run as a guest operating system on Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V. The product is the first to include technology developed by both vendors at the Microsoft and Novell Interoperability Lab they opened just over a year ago in Cambridge, Mass.

mod_spamhaus is an Apache module that uses DNSBL in order to block spam relay via web forms, preventing URL injection, block http DDoS attacks from bots and generally protecting your web service denying access to a known bad IP address.

The second episode of Microsoft's costly ad campaign is out, and it's becoming clearer what the overall purpose is: to make Bill Gates more cuddly - and de-fang Microsoft in the eyes of the public. That could mean trouble for open source, now that Google is turning into the digital bogeyman: regulatory authorities might see this kinder, gentler Microsoft as part of the anti-trust solution, not part of the problem.

In some respects, the market for Web-based applications resembles a crowded, noisy and confused bazaar. It's difficult to get a good wide-angle view of all available options. Those there to sell wares often have a hard time finding and securing the best place to set up shop.

IRC plays a major role in the Linux development and the community itself, and most distributions and software projects usually have one or more IRC channels (usually on Freenode or, in Debian's case, on OFTC) for discussing issues related to the project or just helping users.

“Our company has started offering systems with the new Asus mobo ’s with Express Gate. Asus has provided no way of installing it without Windows already installed. […] It’s on the Asus utilities disk. You can’t install it without Windows installed first because Asus only provides a Windows installer.”