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Goldfarb represented that anyone can use Moonlight: "Moonlight is usable for anyone on any distribution of Linux (redhat, ubuntu, etc.) -- it is not limited just to Novell as Mono is." And he linked to the covenant, saying it "applies to all downstream recepients of the software." Is that true?

[This relates to the discussion here. Inflammatory headline by me! -TC]

Earlier this month Novell quietly released Moonlight -- a Linux client for Microsoft's Silverlight technology. Silverlight is a .Net-based cross-browser, cross-platform plugin for delivering rich media to the Internet. In a nutshell, it is Microsoft's version of Adobe Flash. To use Moonlight you need to make sure you have all of the current Mono packages installed. Ubuntu and Fedora come ready out of the box. On other distributions, check the package manager. You can also compile Mono from source.

Developers in the Debian project had a busy week cleaning up after the openssl vulnerability was disclosed. Once that was taken care of, they moved on to process-related issues. Clearly, some shortcomings in how Debian handles patches to the programs it ships have been revealed; now the project would like to face those problems and make things work better in the future. The resulting discussion shows Debian at its introspective best, and may well have results that other distributors will want to pay attention to. As a Fedora developer noted: "This bug could easily have been us on the receiving end." All distributors make changes to their packages, so all of them are potentially exposed to this kind of failure.

Last month Mandriva announced its latest Spring edition. Despite a few minor glitches, after several weeks of testing the two Mandriva flavors, I have finally come across a distro that gives you the best of the GNU/Linux and proprietary worlds in terms of ease of use, range of software, and stability on hardware that ranges from old Celerons to newer multi-core machines.

Mozilla's Screaming Monkey offers hope to developers who are frustrated by Internet Explorer's slow speed and skeptical of Microsoft's commitment to internet standards. So say representatives from Google and the Ajaxian community, in a joint presentation at Google's I/O conference in San Francisco on Wednesday. According to the pitch, Mozilla's yet-to-finish Screaming Monkey will juice AJAX applications and guarantee that developers can use web standards for rich internet applications with Microsoft's browser. The Screaming Monkey project began almost a year ago to have the ECMAScript-4-compliant Tamarin virtual machine plug-in to IE.

Unfortunately because of space constraints in a liveCD, you can’t squeeze all those ‘nice to have’ packages into one spot, so you have to download and setup xVM manually. A few things are broken, too so some minor tweaking is required. Here’s a list of steps required to get xVM setup as a Dom0 in OpenSolaris

Hello to all, my name is jeinner campos, i am from Managua, Nicaragua, i am new at the linux world but i use Mandriva, why? JUST BECAUSE IS THE BEST DISTRO I HAVE TRIED!!! Now, in my country, there are linux groups, SUSE, UBUNTU, FEDORA, DEBIAN and when i went to an install fest, i didnt see any MANDRIVA TEAM... so i say... I GOTTA DO SOMETHING. I got in contact with the linux comunity in my country and i started a project, of a mandriva group. now we have the Mandriva Nicaragua website.

Palm CEO Ed Colligan said the company's long-awaited operating system of the future will center around the Internet, and be distinct from the familiar Palm OS that's currently available. Palm has been somewhat tight-lipped about the future of its operating system development, but Colligan gave an interview to APC in which he described the "Nova" OS as a "next-generation operating system with much more capabilities, driven around the Internet and Web-based applications." Nova will be based on a Linux core and is scheduled to arrive next year.

Fotox comes with a small but useful feature set, including red-eye repair, sharpen, bend, stretch, noise reduction, cropping, and resize. It only supports the JPEG format. It fills a neglected niche in Linux photo editing, and that is an easy-to-use photo editor that includes the most commonly-used functions. It also comes with two useful features that a lot of bigger image editors don't have: panorama and HDR.

Joel Cohen is an Emmy award-winning writer and associate producer of The Simpsons. He’s also a keynote speaker at the Red Hat Summit this June. Enjoy this sneak preview of Joel, and then join us in Boston to hear more from him about The Simpsons and keeping innovation alive for 420 episodes over two decades.

Unbound is a validating, recursive, and caching DNS resolver, released under a BSD license. Version 1.0.0 was released on May 20, 2008. This tutorial explains how to install and use it on Debian Etch, including the creation of zones for your own domains.

GNU autoconf and automake are possibly two of the most cryptic and complex beasts around. They have a very steep learning curve, but due to their widespread use, it's almost essential to be familiar with them if you want to code on much of the free software available today. This tutorial provides a gentle introduction to these tools, by example.

A Microsoft job ad for Senior Marketing Manager – Open Source Community, spells out the company's plans: a concerted attack on GNU/Linux. Once use of the leading open source program has been reduced, Microsoft can then easily dispose of the now-dependent open source app vendors, assuming they are foolish enough to fall for this trick.

CrossFire isn't yet supported in Linux, but will a pair of CrossFire-certified DDR2 RAM benefit a Linux system in gaming or multimedia use? BIOSLEVEL.com benchmarks the RAM and delivers their opinion.

Microsoft is clearly worried about Google as a competitive threat. But the bigger worry continues to be open source, according to Chief Software Architect Ray Ozzie. Ozzie, speaking at Sanford C. Bernstein Strategic Decisions Conference in New York on Wednesday, said that while Google is a "tremendously strong competitor... open source was much more potentially disruptive" to Microsoft's business model.

Gavin Baker at Freesoftware Magazine examines the implications for free software and the GPL in the face of the social, web 2.0 world sites like Facebook, Google Apps and Flickr. In particular, the reciprocity clause in the GPL can become an unintended loophole as web-based services can incorporate free software code which is not shared or redistributed. You can read the whole article at the FSM website

How to inventory your filesystem using a simple shell one-liner in Linux and Unix, for all shells from ash to zsh.

I wasn't able to boot Damn Small Linux 4.4 RC1 on the machine I really need it to run on — the $15 Laptop (aka Compaq Armada 7770dmt) — so I booted it on my VIA C3 Samuel test box, the machine that ran my two Puppy Linux torture tests. I've already written about how the inclusion of Firefox 2 (renamed Bon Echo) in DSL 4.3 has breathed new life into the live-CD distribution as far as I'm concerned.

From my conversations and my own personal perspective I include a list of the top five ways not to evangelize Linux, or perhaps restated, how not to screw up a good thing:

Some search engine optimization (SEO) experts say sitemaps are important tools for promoting your site, because when a search engine picks up your sitemap, it automatically picks up a link to every page in your site. Not only does the spider crawl those pages, but the sitemap page shows up in search results for keywords on your blog. Sitemaps also make it easier for visitors to your blog to find what they're looking for, faster. Here's a look at three sitemap generators for WordPress and my experience with them.