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A new breed of extremely small and light (2 pounds or so) laptop has emerged just in time for summer travel. Called mobile Internet devices (MIDs), and also known as mini-laptops, mini-notebooks, or mini-notes, these lightweight laptops are practically naked, stripped of all extraneous features. And starting at around US$400, they're far cheaper than other mobile PCs.

LXer Feature: 15-Jun-2008

First off, It is Father's Day in the U.S. and I want to wish a Happy Fathers Day to my beloved Father and to all the Dads across the world. In this week's Roundup we have stories from the big OOXML vote fiasco that has been brewing. We have an LXer Feature written by Thomas King entitled "The future is bright for Linux filesystems", How to buy the wrong color laser printer, a review of Slackware 12.1, IBM rolls out Symphony support, The inevitability of open source Windows, Richard Stallman attacks Oyster's 'unethical' use of Linux, Are there any evil distros? and last but not least I end things with a couple of very funny articles that should bring a smile to your face. Enjoy!

Sometime last night I started a "21 bug salute": pick 21 bugs and fix them one after the other. Closing bugs that are already fixed, are upstream bugs or are WONTFIXes don't count. Only bugs closed with patches do. Currently the count is 11 down, 10 to go. The goal is to be done before the weekend is through. I keep getting interrupted, however, by the continuing fallout from what has become one of the biggest faith-in-the-community destroying events I've experience. Having read a couple more angry FUD filled blog postings on this matter, proving squarely just how confused people are at the moment, I figured a picture might help.

Here's the full text of a very angry letter, sent today to the educational advisory body Becta by Mark Taylor, president of the Open Source Consortium and chief executive of the enterprise support firm Sirius. I'm currently writing up a story on this, so keep an eye out for that, but the letter is far too long to include in that story in its totality.

This tutorial shows how to set up an Ubuntu Hardy Heron (Ubuntu 8.04 LTS) based server that offers DNS services using BIND. This article is written for the 32-bit version of Ubuntu 8.04 LTS, but should apply to the 64-bit version as well.

A look at prime, composite and relative prime number generation and machine/OS limitations common to deriving them.

Don’t misunderstand me, as I’m not preaching the value of proprietary codecs. Despite Theora's shortcomings with rendering speed and overall playback quality in comparison to proprietary alternatives, this does not mean that all open source codecs are loosing ground in the fight for your video viewing freedom.

As I sit here looking at my Zonbu(s) (a mini and the notebook), I cannot help but feel overwhelming dismay over all the progress made with "ready-to-go" Linux solutions like the Eee, Cloudbook and of course, the OLPC project. My concern is not in regard to the projects themselves, but it’s where Microsoft is trying to edge their way into something that Linux was working magic with first.

While Gates had a point about OLPC being able to come to full fruition, I think he is out to lunch on the idea that third-world countries are interested in Windows, paying for software and any potential malware headaches that will arise with running a stripped down version of XP on these systems.

A review of the new Opera 9.50. The big difference between Opera and the other Linux web browsers like Firefox or Konqueror is that Opera is closed-source. So, what benefits or advantages could bring a closed-source browser in the Linux world, you may ask. Well, they are definitely not advantages, but a thing is sure: Opera is a complete mature web browser which does its job very well.

For those new to Slackware, here are a few quick tips on adding groups to user accounts, using sudo, getting Slack to recognize your wheel mouse, and using slapt-get to make a new installation work a bit better.

A review of the 10 best KDE applications that are not included with KDE.

At this time of great change in the Zikula project, they announce the immediate availability of Zikula 1.0, codename adam_baum. This release is the culmination of years of hard work by everyone involved in the project, past and present, and brings Zikula to the forefront of the Web Application sector.

Are there many high quality commercial games available for Linux? That's one of the frequently asked questions we receive in our mailbox every week.

"Oh great, not yet-another-kernel-tree, just what the world needs..." began Greg KH, continuing, "yes, this is an announcement of a new kernel tree, linux-staging." He explained: "In a long and meandering thread with some of the other kernel developers a week or so ago, it came up that there is no single place for companies and developers to put their code for testing while it gets cleaned up for submission into the kernel tree. All of the different subsystems have trees, but they generally only want code that is about to go into this release, or the next one. For stuff that is farther off, there is no place to go. So, here's the tree for it."

Have you tried lately to figure out which Linux operating system you’d like to use? And, did you think about adding a VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) device to that Linux system? We can guess that you probably overwhelmed with the choices available to VoIP users today. In fact, to write a truly definitive guide to VoIP for Linux users, we would need to write a book. Instead, we combed the online Linux and VoIP Wikis to find the most-used combinations of Linux and VoIP according to the systems and devices that were most talked about on these support and documentation pages. Those choices, listed below along with their Wikis, will provide you with a definitive guide to choices available, and to the choices that provide the most documentation for ease of use.

This week HP announced the Envy 133 and details surfaced surrounding the Dell E and E Slim. These new notebooks from HP and Dell will each ship with an embedded Linux environment, which the manufacturers have dubbed Voodoo IOS and BlackTop, respectively. Both Linux environments appear to be quite similar in concept and similar to the instant-on SplashTop environment for notebooks, PCs, and motherboards, which DeviceVM Inc had pioneered and then ultimately introduced last year. In this article we have more information on HP's Voodoo IOS and Dell's BlackTop and whether they're actually using SplashTop for powering the system or have developed their own proprietary distributions.

Beta version of PDF import extension for OpenOffice.org is now available online. Fully functional version, special features like importing layout of LaTeX PDF or import of complex vector graphics, will appear later. The preliminary version of this extension allows to open and edit PDF documents up to version 1.4.

Opera Software released a security-conscious version of its freely-available web browser that adds protection against malware. Opera 9.5 also adds a faster browser engine, a clean-cut new interface, and synchronization features that keep the browser in line with the Opera Mini mobile browser, the vendor says.

A bash script to find all prime numbers up to a user-specified ceiling.