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This document describes step by step how to set up a Ubuntu 8.04 LTS (Hardy Heron) desktop. The result is a fast, secure and extendable system that provides all you need for daily work and entertainment.

reStructuredText is a lightweight markup language intended to be highly readable in the source format. With it, you can produce beautiful HTML, PDF, XML, and even S5 documents from plain text files. reStucturedText is a part of Docutils, an open source text processing system for processing plain text documentation into more useful formats. Docutils is written in Python, and you will find a package for it in most Linux distributions, though you can install it from source under Linux and Microsoft Windows.

When I received my super-cool Android PC from Eric Burke he thoughtfully installed a copy of Ubuntu 7.10 for me, so naturally when the new Ubuntu 8.04 (”Hardy Heron”) was released I wanted to upgrade it to the latest and greatest version. “Installation is a snap,” writes Adrian Kingsley-Hughes. Ubuntu is user-friendly and ready for the mass market, so this should be easy, right?

That's the question raised by Britt Blaser in “Oh, if only government went in for an open source make-over…”. It's also one suggested indirectly by Phil Hughes in Our Internet. Democracy is by nature "our government". The open source twist on that we put it together and can hack improvements to it. Think of elected officials as committers and maintainers and you start go get the idea. The analogy isn't perfect, because by nature open source code is purely practical: it has to work. While government often does not. All government is buggy. In the worst cases it crashes outright and is replaced or supplemented by corrupt alternatives.

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GNU Telephony intends to help both national governments and private corporations comply with their obligations to the general public by promoting widespread adoption of secure and intercept free voice and video communication services worldwide using free software.

Syncing the release of distributions has many advantages including unifying Linux and increasing publicity.

Microsoft turn to free software? That’ll be the day. Some have suggested that Microsoft might embrace free software and thus resolve the present conflict. That actually would be a terrific strategy for them, but I don’t think that Microsoft is smart enough to do it.

Following our interview covering KDE in Japan last week, we now turn to South Korea. Cho Sung Jae tell us about the Korean KDE Users Group, including some of the problems of using KDE with Korean and just how fast their broadband is.

Last time I wrote about the “Black Tower,” I had just installed Vista and Kubuntu 7.10 in a dual-boot setup. When version 8.04 of Kubuntu (”Hardy Heron”) hit the Web last week, I wasted no time upgrading to it.

Windows Vista's newly-implemented security limitations are artificial at best, easy to code around, and only there to give the impression of security.

Sportsvite.com, a kind of MySpace for ballers, exists because Steve Parker and a few friends wanted to find a better way to organize softball leagues and other casual sports teams in their New York neighborhoods. Parker, who lists badminton as a favorite sport on his Sportsvite.com profile, says he has always been an advocate of using open source, and thought it would be a great idea to build an Internet service that would make it easier for people to team up for amateur sports.

Jurors found Linux programmer Hans Reiser guilty of first degree murder on Monday, concluding he killed his estranged wife in 2006. The verdict followed a nearly six-month trial and nearly three days of deliberation.

Also, San Jose Mercury News has a writeup.
SFGate trial blog

In this post I will interview Paul Battley, the man who wrote the program that worked around the DRM loophole at the BBC. No GNU/Linux user needs to be told what DRM (aka Trusted Computing, aka Palladium) is and why it is a thoroughly pernicious and Hydra-headed monster that needs to be slain. I hope to make that the subject of a post in the very near future, but in the meantime here is a quick thumbnail sketch of what happened with the BBC’s iPlayer, to bring you up to speed. The interview with Paul Battley follows.

Without much fanfare, the open source security area is growing rapidly. Here are top contenders from anti-virus, firewalls, forensics, intrusion detection, and more.

While large cheap hard disks allow you to keep your audio collection in a lossless format such as FLAC on your home network, when you are on the move you probably want to squeeze the most out of every gigabyte by using a compressed format. This article takes a look at three tools aimed at making audio conversion for portable music players a painless task.

Recently Products Editor, James Gray, caught up with IBM's Inna Kuznetsova, Worldwide Director for IBM's Linux strategy. They discuss IBM's Big Green Linux intiative and IBM's own power-saving move to Linux on its own data center.

Skype has released, in beta, a Java version of its softphone that will run on a wide range of cellphones. But every time you make or receive any kind of call you will pay for a mobile voice call. The beta version of 'Skype for your mobile' works on about 50 of the most popular Java-enabled mobile phones from Motorola, Nokia, Samsung and Sony Ericsson and is available worldwide with a feature set that includes chat, group chat, presence (seeing when your contacts are online), and receiving calls from Skype users, and through SkypeIn.

The Debian GNU/Linux operating system continues to generate interest from developers around the world, keen to sign up and contribute code to the open-source project now in its 15th year. But this popularity has been a mixed blessing. The project came under fire recently when programmers who wanted to get on board were unable to sign up and become registered participants.

Black Duck Software, a company best known for its services and software for the procurement and re-use of open source software, has acquired Koders, and with it the popular Koders.com search engine for free and open source software code (FOSS). Black Duck plans to integrate Koders' search technology into its own product line, while promising to enhance the Koders search engine while leaving its basic nature unchanged.