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I've complained numerous times in the past about the Ted word processor being broken in Debian. On my many Debian installs, I could neither create a new file in Ted nor open an old one. But on my Gateway Solo 1450 (the $0 Laptop), after doing my big Debian Lenny update yesterday -- which fixed an annoying Nautilus bug by updating to Nautilus 2.20 -- I decided to give Ted another try. It works.

While perusing some Linux stories today, I came across a reference to using SBM, Smart Boot Manager. SBM runs from a floppy disk and allows systems to boot from a selection of disks, effectively allowing one to bypass an old BIOS and have more advanced boot options. From the SBM site: "Smart BootManager is an os independent BootManager which has easy to use interface and many other features. The main goals of SBM are to be absolutely OS independent, flexible and full-featured. It has all of the features needed to boot a variety of OS."

Think you're smarter than the meatheads on your local city council? Now you can prove it -- without running for office -- courtesy of the original city simulation game. Electronic Arts (EA) has released the source code to SimCity under the GPLv3. The newly freed game is dubbed Micropolis, and it is playable in most major Linux distributions. The original SimCity was published in 1989, and spawned 18 spinoffs (and counting), plus dozens of expansions and sequels. For years it was the bestselling PC-based video game, until it was eventually unseated by its own spinoff The Sims. Given its nonviolent, educational nature, SimCity was a natural fit when the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project solicited games for inclusion on the XO laptop.

How do you produce a major update of a popular desktop for GNU/Linux? Following the January 11 release of KDE 4.0, Bruce Byfield sat down with KDE and discussed the new and improved elements of KDE, and what it took to get them there.

Christopher Negus is responsible for some of the most widely-read and well-respected mass-market books on Fedora and Red Hat Enterprise Linux. You may already know of, or own, Linux Toys, its sequel Linux Toys II, or one of his miraculously up-to-the-minute Fedora and Red Hat Enterprise Linux Bible books. Negus has an uncanny ability to [...]

The infrastructure and tools required to make Linux a green operating system are now in place, according to Linux leader Linus Torvalds, who was in Melbourne this week attending Australia's largest Linux conference.

A great wiki engine used on Wikidot.com is now free software are Wikidot Inc owners: Pieter Hintjens and Piotr Frąckowiak, release the code on AGPLv3 licence just today. This is great news for the Internet as Wikidot is one of the most advanced wiki engines out there, leaving MediaWiki and TWiki far behind.

By combining VMware Server with some free software, you can run Windows XP along with Linux, not inside a console window, but completely integrated into the Linux environment. You need three tools installed on your system: VMware Server, rdesktop and Cendio's SeamlessRDP, which is a GPL-licensed utility that lets you integrate rdesktop with Windows XP.

So I kept hearing and reading about the Asus, and I finally just ordered one myself—at $399 it wasn't going to break the bank.

Vlogger is a little tool with which you can write lighttpd logs broken down by virtual hosts and days. With vlogger, we need to put just one accesslog.filename directive into our global lighttpd configuration, and it will write access logs for each virtual host and day. Therefore, you do not have to split lighttpd's overall access log into access logs for each virtual host each day, and you do not have to configure lighttpd to write one access log per virtual host (which could make you run out of file descriptors very fast). At the end of this tutorial I will show you how to use webalizer to create statistics from the lighttpd access logs.

While the name "Netscape" is now mostly dead, its progeny continue to survive and develop. Many are familiar with Mozilla's efforts on the browser side, but Netscape also had another business -- a directory server business now run and expanded upon by Linux vendor Red Hat. Red Hat has been busily building out a major new evolution of Netscape Directory Server that will officially be called Red Hat Enterprise IPA (Identity, Policy and Audit).

Linux is appearing everywhere these days: your PCs, laptops, mobile phones, GPS systems, e-book readers, gaming consoles, and now your Television set. Learn about how Asus, maker of the popular Linux laptop the Eee, has announced the upcoming Linux TV.

There's no doubt that 2008 will go down in history as the end of the first Microsoft era. This year, Bill Gates will finally hang up his Microsoft mouse and leave the company he cofounded over 30 years ago. Most people know that he's going off to spend the very large sums of money he has acquired from those Microsoft years, most of which has been used to set up the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation with $37.6 billion in assets. But what will that really mean for free software?

[This story is not about open source software, but about Bill Gates 'charitable' intentions to prevent the uptake of open source software in developing countries and make them dependent on Microsoft - hkwint]

Related story: Bill & M. Gates foundation for-profit investments harm the health & environment of the poor

[ My personal opinions are between () parentheses. If you like to read a rather unbiased article, skip the bits between brackets and you should be fine - hkwint ]

(Dutch source here)
Yesterday Webwereld.nl (a Dutch IT-site called "Webworld") revealed it laid its hands on a 'non-public' document which describes a non-public tender for new software for 3k to 21k desktops for the financial department of the Dutch government. It seems the tender favours Microsoft and other closed software over other solutions leaving little chance for open source software. That's because the tender asks for support for several closed / proprietary platforms like Active Directory to manage logins and firewalls, and (the patent encumbered) .NET. After protest from society and politicians, the Dutch Minister of Finance / Vice Prime Minister, Mr. W. Bos answered the Dutch government will switch to open standards and open source software in 2012, but at the moment this is not a viable option (not viable since they are locked in rather badly it seems).

Those of us living in South Africa are now facing the reality of rolling electricity blackouts for, at the very least, the rest of this year and possibly even longer than that. If you have a laptop and 3G connection then two or three hours a day without electricity is not unmanageable. Add the Flexopower SolarPouch to your backpack and your cellphone, iPod, PSP, GPS and music player are also covered for unexpected downtime.

The majority of the users Just Don't Know. But I have been enlightened: Microsoft is like the Matrix. The only difference is that Microsoft does not desire electricity, but the money. All it can get. Now read, think and have fun.

In the first installment in this series, your editor took on the task of getting video data onto his system in digital form. Part 3 talked about authoring DVDs with the nicely edited versions of those video clips. Now it's time to fill in the missing second part, wherein your editor turns raw captured video into something suitable for DVD creation.

If you need to share files or printers with Windows machines, you're likely using Samba and know how to administer and configure it by editing configuration files and starting and stopping the daemon. However, there's an easier, graphical way to configure your box: the Samba Web Administration Tool. SWAT allows you to set up all aspects of your Samba server through an intuitive Web interface in a style similar to Webmin. (In fact, if you use Webmin, you can access SWAT by going to Servers -> Samba Windows File Sharing and then clicking on the hammer icon for SWAT.)

VirtualBox is a great application for hosting guest operating systems on your Linux platform. It can be used to host other Linux operating systems and Windows.

Let's be honest, the rise of the Eclipse development platform is the best thing to ever happen to Sun Microsystems' NetBeans integrated development environment (IDE). Eclipse rolled out a solid platform, with good performance, high levels of extensibility and a rapidly expanding ecosystem of commercial and open source plug ins. NetBeans, by contrast, has been the poor relation with low levels of industry take up, fewer users and not much in the way of momentum.