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Sometimes all it takes to foment innovation may be an idea that sounds cool. When Romanian developer Bogdan Radulescu first ran into what would eventually be known as NimbleX, a mini-live CD project designed to be fast, light, and functional for everyday use. Radulescu recieved his first computer from his parents in the fifth grade. Little did he realize that computers would consume most of his time in the future. "I think my first contact with open source was actually with Linux in the late '99. I had only a [Red Hat 6] CD that I managed to install on my computer. I didn't actually know how to do anything because it was only the CD.

After being assured that my test on the Dell Optiplex GX520 didn't work because 512 MB of RAM is usually enough but not always, I tried to boot OpenSolaris 2008.05 on my Gateway Solo 1450 -- featuring a 1.3 GHz Celeron M processor and a whopping 1 GB of RAM. I got to the console, but no GUI, no matter how hard I tried.

It’s a big question: how trustworthy is the software I use on my computer? When it comes to open source, can you trust the quality of programmers who work for free? You can, according to a new report out this week – which also proves major open source offerings to be especially well written. It equally shows up the projects which are slow to respond to vulnerabilities.

Following on from my recommendation for [apt-buglist][]—where you can see the reported bugs on a package before installing it—I thought it might be useful to look at the other side of the coin, reporting bugs in Debian. The best way to do this is with the dedicated tool: reportbug. http://www.freesoftwaremagazine.com/columns/reporting_bugs_d...">Full story

Google Notebook is a free service that allows users to save and share notes and Web clippings in an online journal. A REST-based API allows developers to build PHP applications around this service using SimpleXML. In this article, you will learn how to use the API, with examples of reading notebooks and notebook contents using PHP.

The Debian GNU/Linux project has just endured what is probably its worst week on the security front in the 15 years of its existence following the disclosure on May 13 of a serious vulnerability in the distribution's OpenSSL package.

It was just over a year ago that Microsoft Corp. dropped a bombshell of a claim: users of Linux and open-source software were unwittingly violating as many as 235 Microsoft software patents. "This is not a case of some accidental, unknowing infringement," Horacio Gutierrez, Microsoft's vice president of intellectual property and licensing, told Fortune magazine at the time. "There is an overwhelming number of patents being infringed."

[Maybe someone needs to look at our list of Patents that Microsoft might be infringing upon. - Scott]

in 2007 we set-up a computer, running Ubuntu, for guests to use to access the Internet at our bed and breakfast. We also switched the office computer to Ubuntu as we had had many problems with viruses/spyware/malware using Windows. Since switching we have had no problems with viruses etc, and have had lots of positive comments from guests about the Ubuntu machine in the breakfast room.

Mitch Meyran is your guide over at Freesoftware Magazine helping you to navigate the moral maze to decide if Microsoft's "adoption" of ODF is a Pauline conversion or just another example of "embrace and extinguish". Read the full story and decide.

Open-source software helped London's Oyster card system move past a proprietary roadblock, an open-source conference in London was told last week. The Oyster contactless card system, which handles payments for travel on London's buses and Tube system, suffered from lock-in to proprietary systems, which hindered developments to the online payment systems, said Michael Robinson, a senior consultant with Deloitte, at the Open Source Forum event in London. "The hosting was on a proprietary system, centred on one application," he said. "It demanded certain hardware, and was locked into one design of infrastructure."

The Equinox Desktop Environment is a small memory footprint desktop environment built on top of the extended FLTK toolkit ('Fast Light Tool Kit'). EDE features a desktop, a Windows-like panel with 'start' menu, taskbar, and system tray, support for theming, and graphical front-ends for software installation, xscreensaver configuration, and much more. Linux.com took a look at EDE version 1.2.

I just committed a change to the default desktop containment that removes desktop icon support. Yes, it has finally happened ... no more splattering icons from the "desktop" folder across the screen. Buh-bye. Let me pause while some of you get all worked up and ready to punch the "Add comment" link to flame me to kingdom come.

Last month, Daryl Lee gave us a taste of the language Scheme in the article It's time to learn Scheme with a C++ code generator. This time we will be looking at some practical examples written with Scheme Shell (SCSH): finding and replacing text in a bunch of files, sorting files in two different ways, and converting data from a CSV file to an HTML file. SCSH is a scripting language based on the programming language Scheme. It was created by Olin Shivers to replace long sh or bash scripts and extends the Scheme language to make it far more suited for shell scripting.

Linux-based sub-notebook for $219 (£111/€139), anyone? That's what Hong Kong-based Bestlink is currently offering - if you're prepared to buy in bulk. Dubbed the Alpha 400, the Eee PC-like machine sports a 7in, 800 x 480 display but is based not on an x86 processor but a 400MHz, 32-bit XBurst chip. It's got 128MB of memory and 1GB of Flash storage.

Two weeks ago, the third edition of theLibre Graphics Meeting was held in at the Wroclaw University of Technology, Wroclaw, Poland. Sponsored by KDE e.V., Boudewijn Rempt, Cyrille Berger and Emanuele Tamponi from the Krita project and Gilles Caullier from the Digikam project attended this yearly conference on free graphics software.

MAC OS has been traditionally known for their impressive graphical interface and stability. Now even though i have been an avid Linux follower over the past 9 years I have been using Linux still i find my self attracted to MAC OS. Now even though these days it's possible to run Hackintosh on normal Intel hardware but it's not stable and well there are hardware compatibility issues . So well other alternative to using MAC OS is either to purchase MAC hardware(which would be naturally expensive) and run full fledged MAC OS or you could tweak and customize your Ubuntu desktop to look more like MAC OS X .

Desktop environments like KDE and GNOME offer a popular interface to computing. Unfortunately they are also often heavy on resource usage. By contrast, the Equinox Desktop Environment (EDE) is the fastest desktop environment I know of -- but its lack of standards support and a few missing features may be troubling to some users. The boundaries between desktop environments and window managers are often blurred. No window manager by itself offers the things included in a run-of-the-mill point-and-click environment: a desktop with icons, a task bar that shows the running programs and a system tray. Of course, you can always piece together a solution featuring your favorite WM along with Idesk and the right now unmaintained PerlPanel. But such a solution will never look coherent and appealing.

This document describes how to make your laptop's hotkeys usable on Fedora. I've tested this with Fedora 8 but it should also work with other Fedora versions - and maybe, with a little modification, also with other distributions.

Learn how the Romanian Microsoft branch is using bully tactics to convince Romanian universities not to indulge in open-source promotion. This is happening NOW. It is shameless, it is irritating, it is illegal.

South Africa has filed a formal appeal with both ISO and IEC, challenging the Fast Track adoption of OOXML. I have received a signed copy of the letter sent to each of ISO and IEC, signed by Mr. M Kuscus, Chief Executive Officer of SABS.