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At first, ranking GNU/Linux distributions seems alien to the spirit of free software. After all, free software is all about choice. What should matter is that your distro suits you, not how others judge it. Yet, in practice, community members judge distributions all the time. They don't use a single metric, and at times a distro's appeal is as simple as the fact that it is new or has released a new version. Yet, whenever community members choose a distribution to download or to build their own distribution upon, or to borrow a tool from, they are making a verdict on it.

Embrace the standards, nicely, or get out of browsers. If there was a functioning market for web browsers and operating systems, the past few weeks would have seen two announcements from Microsoft. After a firestorm of criticism from the web design community about Internet Explorer 8's misguided mode switching proposal, Redmond would have publicly backed down. Second, Microsoft would have bowed to 90,000 users demanding that Windows XP continue to be sold.

You're probably familiar with the live CD concept -- a fully functional operating system on a CD that can be run on any computer that boots from its optical drive, without affecting the one(s) already installed. In a similar vein, you can set up Linux to run from a USB hard drive drive on any computer that can boot from USB. The live system offers automatic detection and configuration of the display adapter and screen, storage devices, and other peripherals. A bootable USB drive can run a mainstream Linux distribution such as Debian GNU/Linux, and can be secured, personalised, upgraded, and otherwise modified to suit your needs.

"To quote you a number of years ago: 'Linux is evolution, not intelligent design'," noted Greg KH, quoting Linux creator Linus Torvalds. Linus expanded on the statement, "evolution often does odd (and 'suboptimal') things exactly because it does incremental changes that DO NOT BREAK at any point." He continued, "in other words, exactly *because* evolution requires 'bisectability' (any non-viable point in between is a dead end by definition) and does things incrementally, it doesn't do big flips." When alternative examples in evolution were pointed out, Linus suggested that the kernel was much simpler than a mammal and more similar to bacteria:..

The debate over the OOXML (Office Open XML) format and the competing ODF (open document format) is still alive and kicking, but Microsoft just wants everyone to get along. The software giant had been lobbying for its OOXML format's ratification as an ISO standard at a ballot resolution meeting in Geneva later this month, after a failed attempt in September last year.

Yesterday, Microsoft announced DreamSpark – an ironic name, since it actually lays bare Microsoft's worst nightmare: that more and more of tomorrow's programmers are growing up using free software for their studies, which means that as they move out into the world, there will be less and less demand for Microsoft's tools, and even fewer programs written for its platforms. Its answer? This:..

Many companies offer LAMP hosting, but some of the cheaper LAMP providers do not allow SSH access, reserving that feature for higher-paying customers. Without SSH you may think you'll have trouble executing commands on the hosted server. Not so -- PHP Shell allows execution of some commands without having SSH access to the LAMP server.

This document describes how to set up master-master replication with MySQL 5 on Fedora 8. Since version 5, MySQL comes with built-in support for master-master replication, solving the problem that can happen with self-generated keys. In former MySQL versions, the problem with master-master replication was that conflicts arose immediately if node A and node B both inserted an auto-incrementing key on the same table. The advantages of master-master replication over the traditional master-slave replication are that you do not have to modify your applications to make write accesses only to the master, and that it is easier to provide high-availability because if the master fails, you still have the other master.

Microsoft Corp. is giving students free access to its most sophisticated tools for writing software and making media-rich Web sites, a move that intensifies its competition with Adobe Systems Inc. and could challenge open source software's popularity.

Ever wanted to review stuff online without being censored for telling the truth about a product or service? Behold the GNU Consumer Reports. We are open to doing reports on anything or anyone. Our system is simple. We rate the company based on a few different fair business practices, policies, quality, Linux Compatibility, and price. You can even comment on our reviews and tell us where we went wrong.

To Southern Californians February means several things. Winter storms bring snow to the San Gabriel Mountains. Most college students will have returned to school for another semester. Early flowering plants have started to bud and bloom, attracting bees. Most important of all however, is the coming of SCALE, the annual Southern California Linux Expo.

Let's be absolutely clear about this: it's difficult to recall a Microsoft product that has been so universally disliked - but MS is determined that you - yes, you - will use it whether you like it or not. But - perversely - we opine that Vista is the best thing to happen to the PC industry. Even Microsoft's usually powerful PR machine - which answers criticisms in the media and on blogs with answers on its own pages or in articles - has not been able to overcome the wave of distaste for its Vista operating system. If you doubt this, just look at blogs relating to laptops - they are over-run with users asking how to uninstall Vista and go back to XP. And corporate users are also simply reformatting the disks in new machines and putting XP on before deploying the machines.

Role-based access control (RBAC) is a general security model that simplifies administration by assigning roles to users and then assigning permissions to those roles. Learn how RBAC in SELinux acts as a layer of abstraction between the user and the underlying TE model, and how the three pieces of an SELinux context (policy, kernel, and userspace) work together to enforce the RBAC and tie Linux users into the TE policy.

Google "linux vs. bsd," and this comes up. Written by BSD user Matthew D. Fuller, there's a lot of information to absorb. Here he is on "Chaos vs. Order": One common generality is that the Linux methodology is the living incarnation of chaos, whereas the BSD methodology is far more about control. To a large extent, it's true. Linux grew out of a spare-time hacking background, while BSD grew out of a controlled engineering background. Of course, there's plenty of weekend tinkers writing BSD code, and plenty of full-time professional programmers sloughing away at various parts of Linux.

The British manufacturer will unveil the "One" laptop at The Education Show, which is to be held in Birmingham from February 28 to March 1. According to Elonex, the Linux-based laptop will boast a 3-hour battery life, Wi-Fi, a flash-based hard drive, a "hard-wearing case" and a "wireless music server", and will weigh less than 1 kilogram (2.2 pounds). However, the company has refused to release any hard specifications for the device ahead of the show.

Hundreds of ebay sellers who are angry about changes the San Jose company is making to its online auctions have vowed to go on strike today. Upset that the online auction site is hiking fees, some computer users have sworn off buying or selling on the site for one week. Another change that has ruffled feathers, ebay sellers will not be able to give negative feedback to bad buyers.

Last December we had published benchmarks of seven versions of WINE, which covered up through the WINE 0.9.50 release. We had used two versions of Futuremark's 3DMark suite for testing, and with that we had found the performance to be stable in some cases while in later WINE releases we had found some performance losses. With the WINE project on a consistent two-week release cycle, we are looking at the WINE 3D performance and this time going back with the past eleven releases.

KDE 4 is seen by many to be the next big step on the free software desktop, while others think releasing 4.0 in its current condition was misleading and a mistake. Either way, it’s an innovative release and in line with Fedora’s goal of providing the latest and greatest free software. It is set to be the default KDE environment in the next major release of Fedora. Fedora Interviews caught up with Rex Dieter, Sebastien Vahl, and Kevin Kofler of the KDE SIG to talk about the work they’re doing to get it ready for release, their own opinions on the software and what they think about the progress made by Fedora in getting over its GNOME-centric reputation.

Schemes are being hatched to make it harder and harder to download copyrighted material across the internet. Seems they will be just as successful as the method to stop people recording CDs to tape in the “old days.” And just as ludicrous.

[Not FOSS related but I thought it would be of interest to our readers. - Scott]

France is not a country many would associate with free software startups, but that's changing. One of the leading companies of this new Nouvelle Vague is Nuxeo, which was set up by Stefane Fermigier, now its CEO. He talks about the the origins of his company, and its place in the world of French free software.