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While I was browsing through the recently posted distributions on some website in search for the newest and greatest, I ran into Paldo. Curious as I am, I’ve downloaded the iso and fired-up a vmware session just to see what’s up with this distribution. And was I impressed? Well, not that much but this one has a lot of potential and it might someday impress all of us. But let’s start with the beginning.

Nigerian schoolchildren no doubt appreciate the innovative little machines that are trickling into Africa via Nicholas Negroponte's One Laptop Per Child program. But IBM thinks the developing world needs a little more processing power to cross the digital divide--about 14,000 times more, by the company's estimation. The computer giant announced Tuesday it will donate one of its BlueGene/P supercomputers to the Center for High Performance Computing in Cape Town, South Africa.

[Only vaguely related to Linux, but good news nonetheless - Sander]

One question that people who don't know how open-source businesses work is: "How do you make money from open-source software?" SourceForge.net has a new answer to that question: sell services and support to customers using an eBay-like market. SourceForge.net, with millions of monthly visitors, is already one of the world's largest Web sites for open-source development and distribution. What it didn't have, though, was any way for its uses to cash in on their open-source projects. On Dec. 6, that changed forever. Today, SourceForge launched an online marketplace for technology professionals to buy and sell service and support for open-source software.

A recent Forbes review gushed over Zonbu's Linux-based Zonbox network PC. Joining the chorus of other positive reviews, in "Hassle-Free PC" Daniel Lyons writes that he was "blown away" by the performance, stability and ease of use of the eco-friendly, power-thrifty mini-PC. "Zonbu is riding two of tech's hottest trends: open-source software and 'cloud computing,'" writes Lyons. Later, after coming up with only one criticism (his printer wasn't supported), the reviewer concludes, "Zonbu can't edit movies or manage a big photo library, but as a second PC for the kids, the kitchen, or the weekend house where you just need to browse the Web, it's a killer product."

As a standard practice since Zenwalk Linux 2.6 (with the exception of 4.0), a live CD for Zenwalk Linux will be released, usually 4 to 6 weeks after the release of the standard Zenwalk Linux edition (the installation CD). With a Zenwalk Linux live CD aka Zenwalk Live or just ZenLive, you can also enjoy the goodness of the standard Zenwalk Linux edition without installing it to your hard disk. Like its standard Zenwalk Linux edition, the live CD also comes with a broad spectrum of applications but without the bloat. It's one application for one task! Right now, I will review the latest offering from Zenwalk.org, the Zenwalk Live 4.8.

Securing Adolescents From Exploitation-Online Act passed the House by a vote of 409 to 2

Sydney-based open source research and consulting firm Waugh Partners has won this year's State Pearcey Award for Young Achievers for its work educating the ICT sector about free software.

There’s a Bullwinkle quality to predictions about desktop Linux. You know, the bit where the Moose claims he can do magic, and keeps pulling everything out of his hat but a bunny. Desktop Linux has been making the same promises for years, but like the moose said, “This time for sure.” Jim Zemlin, CEO of the Linux Foundation, admitted as much when we talked yesterday. “2008 will be the year of the Linux desktop. Don’t we say that every year?” he joked. Actually we do. This is the third December I’ve gotten to predict “this will be the year” for mobile Linux and desktop Linux. So why will this be the year?

One of the planned features for Ubuntu Hardy Heron, a fresh new theme, is a perfect opportunity for Ubuntu to become known for its incredible artwork and themes. With other distributions, and even Fedora, using very simple themes, now is the perfect time for Ubuntu to create a unique and attractive theme to draw even more users.

Discover how to scan your network for services and how to regularly monitor your services to keep uptimes to a maximum. A key way of ensuring the security of your network is to know what is on your network and what services individual machines are at risk of exposure. In this article, learn how to use these same techniques to ensure that genuine services.

Novell unexpectedly delays its fourth quarter and end of year financial earnings report. Novell stockholders were unpleasantly surprised on Dec. 5, when instead of hearing from Novell on how the Linux distributor had done over the last quarter and the full 2007 fiscal year, they were presented with an earnings announcement postponement instead.

Has the television writers' strike left you with hours of spare time and no way to fill it? Well, put down that book and put the running shoes back in the closet, because TED is here to help. TED is the torrent episode downloader, an open source, cross-platform tool that simplifies the tedious process of searching for torrent files. TED is not a BitTorrent client itself; rather it is a search tool for torrents that can pass along its results to your preferred BitTorrent downloader. TED is geared toward retrieving episodic television shows; it lets you search for specific episodes by season and episode number. The app ships with a database of predefined shows and a manually selected set of feeds from torrent sites that frequently carry such content.

Working with vast raster images: NIP2

It’s been almost seven years since I stopped buying desktops for personal computing, and since then, I am always under the impression that buying a new laptop to run Linux on is a bigger challenge that it needs to be. Over the years, I’ve spent countless hours on linux-laptop.net (and others) trying to get the most out of my hardware working under Linux. Things like proprietary drivers for video cards, network adapters and wireless, sound and modem support were virtually always making the life of the Linux geek a bit harder.

Howto Setup a Remote Calendar using WebDAV with Mozilla Sunbird

Firefox 3 should be welcome both for its many small usability improvements and for its under-the-covers Web rendering engine and security enhancements. When you first install and launch the beta of Firefox 3, the initial impression (especially for those who remember some of the earlier promises of a revamped user interface and increased Web 2.0 integration) can be a little disappointing, since it doesn't look much different from the current version of Firefox.

Despite technical difficulties with the phone lines, Linux.com's live podcast with Jeff Waugh of the GNOME Foundation and Roy Schestowitz, cofounder of the Boycott Novell site, attracted a large audience eager to discuss GNOME's involvement with the efforts to make the Microsoft Office Open XML (OOXML) document format an ECMA standard. Hosted by Rod Amis on his Lightning Strikes show at BlogTalkRadio, and with questions from Linux.com's Editor in Chief Robin Miller and me, the discussion revealed that the two sides of the issue are closer than they have appeared in the past.

Ottawa copyright circles are buzzing with hints that the government is preparing its new revised copyright bill, and will be tabling it soon, perhaps as early as next week. And the buzz is that the new law will basically be a copy of the controversial U.S. Digital Millennium Copyright Act. [Also see: Michael Geist's blog: http://www.michaelgeist.ca/content/view/2431/125/ - Barbara]

If you need to type a diacritical mark such as an acute "e" (é) -- let alone a character not found in a Western European language -- the standard English keyboard layouts for GNU/Linux users are barely ahead of those of typewriters. However, adding support for both extended characters and multiple keyboards has become much easier in the last few years. These days, you can quickly add extended character support from both GNOME and KDE, and, should either desktop fail you for any reason, you can fall back on other methods to improve your input.

It's early December 1995 and it has been a heady few days for Java. IBM and Adobe Systems have agreed to license this strange and embryonic new software that Sun Microsystems keeps telling us can be "written once and run anywhere". Two days before, Sun and Netscape had announced JavaScript that - according to the press release - was: "Analogous to Visual Basic in that it can be used by people with little or no programming experience to quickly construct complex applications."