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Law and order is one of the cornerstones of a civilized society. Establishing rules of conduct, spelling out acceptable and objectionable behavior, defining the consequences for anyone who violates those laws and deciding who will enforce them are all essential to maintaining peace and harmony.

Debian developer and former project leader Martin Michlmayr has got Lenny running on the HP mv2120 and other devices, better known as the "HP Media Vault". So if you're interested in a small but cool NAS device for at home or for your small business, this could be the one you're looking for.

It was announced at the Firefix Plus summit today that Firefox will include native Theora and Vorbis support for the HTML 5 media elements. So

Setting up a LAMP server is a common task for systems administrators, and FreeBSD is one of the most reliable and stable operating systems available. Why not combine both LAMP and FreeBSD to build a fast and reliable Web server? In this article I assume FreeBSD is already installed. If not, make sure you download the latest stable production version of FreeBSD and run the installer. I recommend choosing the MINIMUM option at the installer screen to quickly install only the most basic and necessary things.

The open source community has been awash with announcements recently, including a host of announcements at the O'Reilly Open Source Convention (OSCON). At OSCON, Sun Microsystems on July 23 announced the availability of the Sun Web Stack, an integrated enterprise-quality AMP (Apache/MySQL/Perl or PHP) stack for Solaris and Linux operating systems. Sun also announced that it is open sourcing the core components of the Sun Java System Web Server 7.0 and Sun Java System Web Proxy technologies. Meanwhile, Sun and Joyent Inc. announced a collaboration aimed at accelerating the development and deployment of social applications for Facebook and OpenSocial environments. On the open source desktop front, on July 29, the KDE Community released KDE 4.1, the second feature release of the KDE 4 series.

Red Hat's new chief executive, Jim Whitehurst, has his eyes on the sky. The former Delta Airlines chief operating officer, who took the reins of the most established open-source software company from Matthew Szulik in January, names cloud computing as a top priority. Loosely speaking, the term refers to computing services available to anyone online rather than custom data centers isolated within corporate confines, but it also dovetails with the general idea of computing services running at massive scale on a more flexible infrastructure. "The clouds will all run Linux," Whitehurst said in an interview.

I've been using OpenBSD 4.2 for a few months now on the $15 Laptop (Compaq Armada 7770dmt), and I'm leaving it on the hard drive for now. It does run better with 144 MB of RAM. I may even upgrade the OS to the current version 4.3. OpenBSD with X is nowhere near as fast as the fastest Linux systems, but the added security and overall quality keeps me using it. However, I'm considering swapping out the hard drive (to retain my OpenBSD installation) and trying Debian again.

Over the past few years, I have heard a lot of noise about how great it would be to see KDE coming to Windows world. Despite this happening on its own, it really means little with the exception of perhaps one application - amaroK.

Launched yesterday, and available now in Debian "experimental," KDE 4.1 is what 4.0 should have been, one reviewer finds. With some 70,000 software changes since 4.0 launched at Google HQ last Jan., is KDE 4.1 about to usher in the future of the Linux desktop? The first RC1 release of KDE 4.0 appeared nearly a year ago. The full major 4.0 version was then officially launched at Google headquarters on Jan. 18. Then, team KDE really got busy, implementing a roadmap that called for minor releases each month. Those releases, in turn, culminated with the release of KDE 4.1 yesterday.

Even the most casual observer of the linux-kernel mailing must have noticed that, in the shadow of the firmware flame war, there is also a heated discussion over the management of security issues. There have also been some attempts to turn this local battle into a multi-list, regional conflict. Finding the right way to deal with security problems is difficult for any project, and the kernel is no exception. Whether this discussion will lead to any changes remains to be seen, but it does at least provide a clear view of where the disagreements are.

How to lose friends and influence people ;)

In my previous article, I shared my opinions and overall vision of the state of Linux wireless today. In this latest installment, I will demonstrate exactly how one can have a simple way to implement Linux wireless connectivity without all of the headaches.

At the OSCON open source convention in Portland last week, Neuros CEO Joe Born explained how Linux-based embedded devices will bring open source to the set-top market and the consumer electronics space. He also demonstrated how to build applications for the Neuros OSD, his company's programmable DVR product.

What would your favorite small open source project do with a sudden influx of money? Imagine you donated $5000 to a project, where would the money go? Less scrupulous developers might spend the money on Mountain Dew and Twinkies, but more likely the money would just sit, doing nothing. Why? Because it takes time to spend money, and in the open source world time is in short supply.

Launchy and GNOME Do are both two launcher programs that are designed to let you quickly open applications and files and perform tasks you want done quickly, with just the tapping of a few keys. Previously, Launchy had been an open source solution, albeit for Windows only, and GNOME Do was the Linux solution. Launchy is now available for Linux too, so I thought I would do a brief side-by-side compare of the two programs.

Likewise Software has released a new, open-source version of its eponymous AD (Active Directory) program for integrating Linux, Unix and Mac systems into AD. Likewise Fall includes two main features. The most important, LWIS (Likewise Identity Services) enables you to use Active Directory Authentication for your Linux, Unix and Mac PCs. In addition, the program comes with the LAC Likewise Administrative Console. This enables administrators to manage AD users, computers and access rights from Linux.

Now that I've got your attention, don't worry too much: Blizzard Entertainment, the company behind the popular World of Warcraft online game, isn't trying to shut down open source software entirely. But in a recent legal filing (reported by the Virtually Blind weblog), they are asking a judge to take an unusual move: prohibiting a developer from releasing a particular bit of code as open source.

When you, Joe or Mary user, buy a computer at Best Buy or Computer Village or order a computer from Dell or Gateway, you get a computer with a system already installed. Do you think they had any trouble installing that system on that computer? Do you think that if Dell sells Mary a computer with Windows installed and they sell Joe a computer with Linux installed, that Dell had a differentially hard time installing one of those systems compared to the other? Think about it.

El Tunes is a GStreamer plugin that allows Linux users to play all music they have purchased from the iTunes Music Store. With El Tunes installed (Ubuntu .debs available), your GStreamer-based players (such as Rhythmbox, Totem the Movie Player, Banshee, etc.) can play DRM'ed music purchased from the Apple iTunes store. Apple is refusing to make an iTunes for Linux, and it seems they aren't content with their music being played on it, either.

"Why free software and Apple's iPhone don't mix" is the second article in our series describing the threats posed by Apple's iPhone to free software. Apple has imposed TiVo-like restrictions that prevent users from having freedom, and developers from writing free software. These restrictions argue for more developers to use the GPLv3 as their license of choice, in order to block the threat of Apple stripping freedoms away from free software. People aren't going to hear about these restrictions from the Apple marketing machine, and reviewers so far have bought into the hype and ignored their significance.