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Free Geek is a not-for-profit community organization that recycles used technology to provide computers, education, Internet access and job skills training to those in need in exchange for community service. Linux Journal reader Kevin, from Portland, Oregon, tells us, "I've donated equipment and money to them (Free Geek). I love giving working computer gear to them knowing that someone will learn computer skills by refurbishing it, loading Linux on it, and passing it on to someone truly in need of a computer. After 24 hours of donated time the volunteer gets to take home a computer for their own."

In an iHealthBeat Special Report, experts on open-source software discussed the next steps for Open Health Tools, an initiative designed to encourage the use of the software and promote interoperability in health care.

Ubuntu, Linspire, and Freespire users can now install "Google Earth" with a single click, says Linspire. The desktop Linux distributor has added support for the free mapping application to its CNR ("click-n-run") installer, a user-friendly tool currently beta-testing for a wide variety of desktop Linux distributions. Linspire said the version of Google Earth that CNR supports will work with Ubuntu 7.04 and 7.10 (32-bit), Linspire 6.0, and Freespire 2.0. Presumably, it will also support Ubuntu's Hardy Heron release scheduled for tomorrow, as Linspire has promised CNR support for that release.

The ability to import and export data is crucial to any database management system, and OpenOffice.org Base is no exception. While you may be surprised to discover that OpenOffice.org lacks a dedicated import/export feature, it does allow you to get data into and out of a database in a variety of ways.

Andrew Min, the distro fashion correspondent for Freesoftware Magazine, gives us the lowdown on what's great and new in these major Linux distributions.

While all of the Solaris excitement at Phoronix as of late has been around Solaris Express Developer 1/08 and the forthcoming release of OpenSolaris 2008.05, today Sun Microsystems has announced the immediate release of Solaris 10 5/08. This update to their Solaris OS includes major enhancements for those running Intel hardware, a number of new features, updated applications, the introduction of Solaris OnDemand, and updated drivers.

A step-by-step tutorial on setting up Mandriva One 2008 Spring (Mandriva 2008.1) desktop (GNOME) has been published on HowtoForge.com. Written by Oliver Meyer, the six-page tutorial, called "The Perfect Desktop," covers basic configuration, and then steps through installations for over a dozen Linux applications. Mandriva has been around for awhile, but the distro was substantially updated for the 2.6.22.9 Linux kernel in a Mandriva 2008 release in October.

Stripped-down operating systems made specifically for virtual machine appliances have tickled the fancy of the Linux collective, and these types of systems are keeping commercial distributors busy pushing out their versions of the concept. Last September at VMworld, Canonical unveiled Ubuntu JeOS — pronounced juice and short for "just enough operating system." The idea was to rip out general purpose software from the OS, leaving only a lightweight container that ISVs can customize for their particular application. This in theory makes an appliance smaller and more efficient in a virtual environment.

Using toast takes the burden out of building, installing, and keeping track of software built from source. You can use toast to build and maintain software installed in your /home directory as a regular user, or to set up software for all users in /usr/local. toast can obtain packages over HTTP, HTTPS, FTP, and via SSH and CVS. It can handle most archive formats, as well as .rpm and .deb packages.

Who said Google doesn't contribute to Open Source? This summer they're pumping more money than ever, taking more students than ever and supporting more project then ever before.

Last week, I wrote about the `GLIBC_2.4′ not found errors your game might get when an application built on a new distribution is run on an older distribution, such as Debian Stable and Slackware 11. Judging from my search logs, this problem seems to be common enough to warrant a follow-up post. I have since solved the problem and have not added new dependencies, and it does not involve using strange, mysterious scripts or older compilers.

Thanks to a wonderful new open source tool called Wubi, downloading and installing the latest version of Ubuntu Linux is now a snap for Windows users. It’s a pity the Ubuntu development team still hasn’t taken the hint with its latest release, Hardy Heron.

All your phones, are belong to Google — a brief overview of Android, the new software stack created by Google for the Open Handset Alliance. The Open Handset Alliance (OHA) is an industry trade group comprising more than 30 technology and mobile companies. The focus of the OHA is to accelerate innovation in the mobile application and hardware space and to provide consumers with a more comprehensive and inexpensive mobile device experience. Android is a new, mobile application development framework developed by Google for the OHA that represents part of a greater promise from OHA members to make the open platform an industry success.

Ubuntu 8.04, dubbed Hardy Heron, is out this week and Linuxophiles worldwide are excited. It’s not hard to see why, but is this really the much-fabled year of the Linux desktop? Will the Heron match the unmet hype of predecessor Gutsy Gibbon? And let me tell you just how spectacular and cool Wubi is.

At Phoronix we have looked at a number of Gigabyte products from their motherboards to graphics cards and even wireless adapters. However, today is our first time looking at one of Gigabyte's barebone solutions. The Gigabyte STA Thin Client, specifically the GB-STA-C7V7, is a mini-ITX solution that ships with a VIA C7 1.0GHz processor, UniChrome PRO graphics, is completely fan-free, and it's all packed in a slim yet stylized chassis. However, does the Gigabyte STA Thin Client work with Linux? We'll let you know today.

You’ve always dreamt of making panoramas of your holidays pictures. You’ve never done it cause you’ve never found the good software into Ubuntu or it was too complicated to set up? Me too. Until recently and the discovery of Hugin. Let see how to achieve this.

Good systems administrators know that implementing a robust backup procedure is one of their most important duties. Unfortunately, it's also one of the most complex and least fun. When the phone rings and there's a panic-stricken user on the other end who has just lost a crucial document, you need to be confident that you can promptly recover his missing files. Failure to do so can bring about a speedy end to a promising career in systems administration. So what's a budding sysadmin to do? Download the latest release of Bacula and watch those backup woes disappear into the dark of night.

The best storage engine for MySQL is by far InnoDB (and yes some applications can live with MyISAM only, but that's not the point). InnoDB (now part of Oracle) is also dual-licensed and has had an agreement with MySQL for several years now. On the surface everything is looking smooth. n practice it doesn't work quite that way: First because InnoDB hot-backup feature for instance has never been open source released. So contrary to the recent brouhaha, MySQL has fostered proprietary components for a long time. Second because even so SUN at large has a good relationship with Oracle when it comes to selling Oracle DB on SUN servers, it is unlikely that SUN will let its pricey acquisition be driven (through InnoDB/Oracle) by an outsider. Conversely, the day Oracle perceives MySQL+InnoDB as a threat, the existing agreement won't be renewed.

Linux is expanding its influence outside of the world of smartphones, and is poised to take a significant share of the mid-range mobile phone market as well, according to a new study from ABI Research. The study, released this week, found that efforts to promote and standardize Linux on mobile phones are paying off, while problems relating to Linux's processor requirements are being alleviated.

GNOME 2.22.0 was only released last month, but being released tomorrow is the first development release in the path towards GNOME 2.24.0. This first development release will be dubbed GNOME 2.23.1, with GNOME 2.23 being the unstable branch. The tarballs for this first release were due last night, with new versions of gnome-applets, mousetweaks, gnome-control-center, cheese, and other packages already being checked-in. All of the checked-in packages can be found on the gnome-announce-list.