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A little while ago, Gregory Brown announced hisRuby Mendicant Project. He’s trying to raise enough money to work for the Ruby community full time for 6 months (or on a time-share basis if he doesn’t raise the full amount, see the web site for the full details). With just 7 days left, he’s about 40% of the way there.

We often hear from readers who want to track the development process of their favorite Linux distribution but don't know where to start. Budding Linux enthusiasts frequently ask how the release cycles work, what the version numbers mean, and what options are available for end-user testing prior to official releases. The answers to those questions differ depending on the distribution, but we are going to attempt to address those questions for Ubuntu, Fedora, and openSUSE—three of the most prominent desktop Linux distributions.

Last year AMD introduced the flagship 790 Chipset series as part of their Spider Platform for use with the Phenom processors and Radeon HD 3800 graphics. Until earlier this month when AMD introduced the 780 Series, missing was any chipset with integrated graphics capabilities supporting these first AMD quad-core processors. Now we have AMD's 780G and 780V Chipsets, which are designed to be the mainstream solutions to the 790FX, but they pack the best integrated graphics processor (IGP) ever created by the combined ATI/AMD engineering talent. Since its launch at the CeBIT trade show, the AMD 780G has received rave reviews for its vehement performance due to its graphics core that's derived from the AMD RV610. The benchmarks available on launch day were only for Microsoft Windows operating systems, but this morning we have the Radeon HD 3200 Linux results from the AMD 780G. Is this IGP a crown jewel on Linux?

The VAR Guy is in the market for a small office printer that supports Ubuntu Linux, Mac OS X and Windows XP. Alas, most PC companies do a lousy job describing which of their printers work with Ubuntu. Which means they’re leaving easy money on the table. Here’s our resident blogger’s sad story so far.

As I look at the new PC-BSD 1.5 (Edison), I cannot help but flashing back to the days when Linux desktop was not that mature as it is today. The PC-BSD project commenced 3 years ago with user-friendliness in mind. Since then, efforts have been put into making PC-BSD desktop operating system as usable as possible for the casual desktop PC users. The challenge was pioneered by Kris Moore, the lead developer, and a few volunteers in bringing the open-sourced and BSD-licensed Unix-like FreeBSD (famed for being a very secure and stable server operating system) to the desktop of normal or casual PC users. Interestingly, this project was acquired by iXsystem, a leading provider of high-end hardware solution in October 2006.

"Free" has been a founding concept in the Linux world since before there was Linux — or GNU/Linux, if you prefer. In his history of the GNU project, Richard M. Stallman begins, "When I started working at the MIT Artificial Intelligence Lab in 1971, I became part of a software-sharing community that had existed for many years. Sharing of software was not limited to our particular community; it is as old as computers, just as sharing of recipes is as old as cooking."

Let us quickly accumulate pointers to posts which summarise the problem and use this page as somewhat an index that makes it easy to understand for those unfamiliar with it.

Two things annoy me a lot when I'm browsing the Internet. First, I hate unclickable links, where I have to select the text link, open a new tab, paste the link, then press enter. I'd much rather deal with links that I can just click to open. The other issue is being forced to manually edit a URL in the address bar if I want to browse up one level on a site. Linkification and Uppity are two Firefox extensions that make my annoyances go away.

Welcome to this year's 12th issue of DistroWatch Weekly! Debian-related happenings form the dominant topic of this issue. The feature story is an interview with Chris Hildebrandt, one of the main developers of the increasingly popular sidux distribution. How do the developers of this project test and stabilise Debian's unstable branch? And who is behind the seductive artwork and theme that graces its fast and cutting-edge desktop? Read below for answers. In the meantime, the Debian Installer team releases the first beta for Lenny, while Ubuntu unveils its own beta of the upcoming "Hardy Heron" Long-Term Support (LTS) release. But it isn't all about Debian. In the news section, Novell hints at an upcoming release of SUSE Linux Enterprise 11, the Fedora board votes to remove pointers to the Fluendo codecs, the PCLinuxOS community releases a GNOME edition, and NetBSD celebrates its 15th birthday. Finally, don't miss the new distribution section where you'll find SliTaz GNU/Linux - at just 25 MB, it has to be the smallest desktop live CD ever created! All this and more in this week's DistroWatch Weekly. Happy reading!

The world has been turned upside down for Linux developers, thanks to Microsoft's approach to its mobile platform--today it's the most open functioning platform on the market, says new Linux Australia president Stewart Smith. The star of application-rich mobile phones, Apple's iPhone, has been met with criticism from the open source community and even confusion by major software developers like Adobe.

One of the most noticeable differences between Linux and Windows is the directory structure. Not only is the format different, but the logic of where to find things is different.

Linux has always been the operating system of the geeks and nerds. For some reason Linux has never been able to capture the market like Windows and OS X have managed to do. The main reason for this has been the so called unfriendliness of the Linux OS. But things are changing now with distros like Ubuntu etc..

Although I regularly use KDE, Xfce, and other desktops for GNU/Linux, I keep returning to GNOME. Sometimes I use the default Metacity window manager, and other times the quicker Sawfish, but, with either choice, GNOME has an uncluttered look that allows me to focus on my work rather than my software. It also contains enough customization that I can easily set my increasingly long list of preferences with a minimum of effort.

Microsoft's Office suite could have plausible challenger on the desktop for the first time since Lotus gave up trying to take on Redmond a decade ago. With developers struggling to get OpenOffice 2.4 out the door, details are emerging of the features users have to look forward to in the upcoming bullet point release, version 3.0.

When Windows 7 launches sometime after the start of 2010, the desktop OS will be Microsoft's most "modular" yet. Having never really been comfortable with the idea of a single, monolithic desktop OS offering, Microsoft has offered multiple desktop OSes in the marketplace ever since the days of Windows NT 3.1, with completely different code bases until they were unified in Windows 2000. Unification isn't necessarily a good thing, however; Windows Vista is a sprawling, complex OS.

[I thought this might be of interest to our readers even though it is not FOSS related. - Scott]

On the 12th and 13th of March the 4th OpenExpo took place in Bern. /ch/open oranises the fair every 6 months alternating in Bern and Zurich. A wide variety of talks grouped into three different tracks accompanied the fair. This year more than 30 OpenSource Projects took the opportunity to present themselves and their work to a wide audience. KDE and the Amarok team was among them.

According to the Book Description blurb: "Stop wasting time doing Internet searches only to find inaccurate, out-of-date, or incomplete information. CSS: The Ultimate Reference includes all the ins-and-outs you need to know including compatibility information for all major browsers, lists of useful hacks, known bugs in CSS, and much more - all presented in a beautiful, full color layout that will have you coming back over and over again". Ok. I know plenty of folks who want to learn more about CSS and are indeed frustrated by online resources. The Olsson and O'Brien book promises what a many CSS books promise...to the the "end-all-and-be-all" of CSS resources. Let's have a look and see if it can live up to this claim.

If you have ever tried to implement one of the hotspot HowTos on this and other sites, it might have dawned on you that this is not an easy feat to accomplish. Amazingly most solutions also leave out the most important part – how to get paid by the punters using the hotspot. Some will offer prepaid solution or access tickets that need to be printed, but this will require staff being involved on the premises. And in particular, once you want to offer a professional service and not just a toy concept it gets tricky – and expensive. Just imagine all the servers you need to provide redundant and load balanced freeradius, mysql and web servers. It is generally not worth the effort and expense for just one hotspot – unless of course you are willing to accept outages, unhappy customers etc.

LXer Feature: 23-Mar-2008

In this week's roundup we have an early look at KDE 4.1, the Supreme Court rejects Microsoft's Novell appeal - 12 years later! 25 Simple Games for Linux, CodeWeavers to release CrossOver Games, A Wine 1.0 release in our lifetime and reviews of Spicebird and Clonezilla. To wrap things up we have two FUD articles, an old argument about Linux viruses and Apple fixes some Open Source Vulnerabilities.

A guide with screenshots and code samples to show you how to install and run most of the DirectX 9.0c March 2008 redistributable on Linux using Wine.