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Designing good looking websites is often a little bit hit and miss. Even with the best web development tools, getting things to line up or matching colours is hard to achieve. Forunately, Firefox has a couple of great extensions that make laying out a web page just a little bit easier.

KDE Community Ships Second Translation and Service Release of the 4.0 Free Desktop, Containing New Features in the Plasma Desktop And Numerous Bugfixes, Performance Improvements and Translation Updates

OpenMoko, developer of open source Linux mobile phones, has open sourced the casing of its handset, releasing the CAD files so anyone with a computer-aided manufacturing technology can create their own versions to fit the OpenMoko electronics.

Shuttle today announced that the newly launched $199 KPC will feature the Foresight Linux operating system. With an intuitive interface and user focused design, Foresight does away with the need for users to be familiar with Linux.

First, let me clear up a mistake I made in my previous article about sidux. I used a “S” instead of a “s”. sidux is spelled with a small s. I am still trying to get around Mrs. Gibson’s High School English class. Okay, now that we have gotten the English lesson out of the way, you may be wondering, what in the world is sidux. Well, to start off, they say a picture is worth a thousand words, so here are a couple of screenshots of my desktop. Keep in mind that I like to keep my desktop simple and uncluttered. I have my icons all hidden, but as are most things in sidux, that is easily changed.

Landscape -- a new Canonical tool for remotely managing Ubuntu desktops and servers -- debuts March 5. It holds great potential for enterprise administrators. But could Landscape also become a tool for managed service providers to remotely manage small business networks running Ubuntu? Here's some perspective from MSPmentor.

I did a Debian Etch install on one of my test machine drives recently, and today I added the openssh-server package so I could play around with PuTTY and Xming. Once I installed openssh-server (I used Synaptic, in case you were wondering), using PuTTY to start the connection, I was asked whether or not I expected the encryption key to change (I was, since this is the Debian install, not OpenBSD, which I've been using until now).

Microsoft is encouraging its business partners to promote its Office Open XML specification (OOXML) to the Indian Bureau of Standards (BIS) and Ministry of IT. This move has incensed supporters of the rival OpenDocument Format (ODF) who fear that the "soft" Indian state may not be able to stand up to Microsoft pressure tactics. Open Source Initiative (OSI) board member Raj Mathur claims to have a copy of the Microsoft letter to NGOs. "Microsoft has 'persuaded' several non-profit organizations," Mathur writes, "to bombard the Indian IT Secretary and the Additional Director General of the Bureau of Indian Standards with letters supporting its OOXML proposal."

Late last year, Everex, a mid-tier PC vendor, made a big splash with its inexpensive gOS Linux-powered Green gPC TC2502. Now, Everex is following that popular mini-tower PC with a Mac-mini format computer: the gPC mini. Like Everex's gPC TC2502, the gPC mini uses the Ubuntu 7.10-based gOS operating system. The gPC mini uses the newest version of gOS: Rocket gOS 2.0.

Although the Asus Eee PC has everything you need to be productive right from the start, a few simple software tweaks can help you to get more out of your tiny companion.

Flash support on Linux is already terrible. The Adobe Flash Player on Linux doesn't even display Adobe's own website correctly. There's been a lot of talk about adding DRM support to Flash. What does this mean for Linux and Flash? Will Linux users no longer have access to Flash at all?

Cha-ching. That’s the noise open source companies hope to hear as they launch new point-of-sale solutions for VARs and retail customers. But can open source POS systems compete with traditional, popular options from Microsoft and others? Here are some thoughts from The VAR Guy.

I had really thought that Vista SP1 would be an improvement. I didn't think it would be a big improvement, but still that it would be more competitive with Windows XP and the modern Linux desktop. I was wrong. I've now been working with Vista SP1, the so-called RTM (release to manufacturing) version, for about two weeks. I am amazed at how little improvement I see in this so-called major update.

One of the main things that gets annoying with FUSE, or Filesystem in Userspace, is that it won't automatically mount a filesystem when you first attempt to access the filesystem. This means you must manually track mountpoints and specify what program to run in order to mount each FUSE filesystem. Placing the exact commands to mount each FUSE filesystem into shell scripts can make things a little easier, but with afuse, you can mount FUSE filesystems on demand without the need for any explicit mounting.

Delays in awarding WiMAX licences and a lack of competition in the sector had undermined the rollout of high-speed broadband wireless services. This was the conclusion of a new study by World Wide Worx, released today. The report, WiMAX in SA 2008: Year Zero shows that only those companies that have already deployed WiMAX have appreciated its impact.

I remember when I was a Jr. Geek and could focus on one programming task at a time. Today, besides having all too many Linux-related tasks, I have an assortment of other things to deal with. This last week, one of my distractions turned into a new programming project. Those of you who have been following my posts know my current goal is to create the Geek Ranch. What I have been writing about has been how Linux fits into that project. Well, a peripheral need of the project created a new Linux project for me last week.

The patent in the dispute, number 6,108,703, deals with a global hosting system that "allows a content provider to replicate and serve its most popular content at an unlimited number of points throughout the world" and was originally awarded to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2000.

This tutorial shows how to set up a CentOS 5.x server to offer all services needed by virtual web hosters. These include web hosting, smtp server with (SMTP-AUTH and TLS, SPF, DKIM, Domainkeys), DNS, FTP, MySQL, POP3/IMAP, Firewall, Webalizer for stats.

IBM has teamed up with partners in Austria and Poland to offer Microsoft-free personal computers for the eastern European market, IBM said in a statement on Tuesday. International Business Machines Corp said it was offering the PCs based on the open-source Linux operating system together with Red Hat software distributor VDEL of Austria and Polish distributor and services firm LX Polska in response to demand from Russian IT chiefs.

Tired of spotty network performance interrupting your web service's performance and of navigating the maze that is mobile application development? Google can help - just don't rely on the giant's Android mobile Software Development Kit (SDK) when it comes to building in security.

[A version of Gears that only works with I.E. and Windows Mobile? All that would do is tempt MS developers to use Google tools instead of Microsoft's own development tools. Interesting.. - Scott]