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How are GNU/Linux users preparing for Linus Torvalds' plan of world domination? By playing free software computer games based on the classic world conquest board game Risk. You can perfect your strategy by playing the games XFrisk, TEG, or Ksirk.

Released this week for free download, Radria is a set of open source software (OSS) tools that can be used to develop database driven websites online through a graphic user interface.

An article for new computer users receiving a computer gift for the holidays. Tips on what to do with Windows, Linux and where to find a bit of help with Macs.

Red Hat's Messaging Real-time Grid (MRG) was launched as a beta yesterday, adding to its Enterprise Linux platform and promising speed increases of up to 100 times for certain transactions carried out by larger businesses.

While all of the rage recently has been around Intel's X38 Express Chipset, there is still plenty of life left in Intel's P35 "Bearlake" Chipset. The Intel P35 is only a few months older, but it contains most of the same features as the flagship X38 aside from the PCI Express 2.0 support and a Hardware Memory Prefetcher. We have previously reviewed Intel P35 motherboards such as the ASUS Blitz Extreme and Gigabyte P35-DS3P, but in this review, we are going back and looking at two more of these Intel Bearlake motherboards. At hand today we have the ASUS P5K-E WiFi and Gigabyte P35-DS4 motherboards, both of which are similar in many respects and use the P35 + ICH9R combination with DDR2 memory.

Computer users are up for a debate when it comes to choosing the best operating system that they have ever used. Like Microsoft Windows that held monopoly when it came to operating systems, more and more computer users, especially the youth, are opting for Linux operating systems these days. A sea of difference between Linux and Windows operating systems has got computer users hooked onto Linux. Users feel that it is a package that comes with everything needed for a computer.

The GNU/Linux desktop lacks a font manager for design work. Ideally, such a font manager should support currently used font formats, including TrueType, Type1, and OpenType, and allow sets of fonts to be activated on the fly, so that system memory is not choked with rarely used fonts. Until now, the closest to this ideal has been Fonty Python, but, when last seen, it fell short because of it supported only TrueType fonts and had a needlessly complicated interface. Now, however, newcomer Fontmatrix has proved itself a contender for the role. In fact, despite some weaknesses in its features, its basic functionality is already dependable.

Two fabless networking chip vendors will collaborate on Linux-based reference designs for managed enterprise switches and SOHO/SMB routers. The designs will combine Cavium's multi-core MIP64-based Octeon processors with Broadcom's StrataXGS and RoboSwitch Gigabit Ethernet switches, and run Linux along with LVL7's Fastpath TCP/IP stack.

Standing next to your laptop to control the slides during a presentation is not cool. Nowadays everyone uses a presentation device or their laptop's remote controller, but a presentation device can be expensive, few laptops come with a remote controller, and for those that do, Linux compatibility may be an issue. The Amora project turns your Symbian mobile phone into a Linux presentation device using Bluetooth.

It's no secret that Asus has some big expectations for its low-cost Eee PC, but it looks like the company is now getting a bit more specific on the matter, with it saying it expects to ship some 3.8 million of the laptops in the next fiscal year. What's more, as Daily Tech reports, at least some of those 3.8 million laptops will be shipping with Windows -- specifically, a stripped-down version of XP that's been designed for "emerging markets."

[Would that be the nutered XP version that can only run three applications at the same time? Like, AV software, a firewall and Windows Explorer? - Sander]

Like Dracula, the old myth that free software can't innovate keeps returning. Its latest incarnation is in the form of a column by Jaron Lanier in the December issue of Discover Magazine. But this accusation is one that's overdue for a stake through the heart. Those who have experienced free software projects firsthand know that they depend on innovation and generally foster it. In fact, the very idea of free software is one of the most innovative ideas in the history of computing.

As an electrical engineer with an automotive background, when I think of Linux, I think of servers, PCs, supercomputers, and so forth. Embedded applications don't really come to mind when I consider Linux. However, Linux is used as an operating system for many phones, games, and other devices with embedded software. Even though Linux is open source (free), certain companies could have patents that could be infringed by people using Linux in embedded applications.

Sun Microsystems on Wednesday will release details of a new award program meant to spur growth and activity within the company's open-source efforts, according to a post by Sun's open-source officer, Simon Phipps, on his corporate blog. The award program will involve the OpenSolaris, GlassFish, OpenJDK, OpenSPARC, NetBeans and OpenOffice.org communities.

If you create a piece of open source software and discover that it has been put to use in a way you find personally distasteful or immoral, what would you do about it? That's a question that was raised, albeit in a somewhat oddball form, just recently. Not long ago the Motion Picture Association of America released what it calls the "University Toolkit", a custom edition of Xubuntu that comes with a number of network analysis tools, allegedly for detecting copyright-infringing network activity.

India may have been a late starter in adopting the powerful computer-based education program One Laptop Per Child (popularly known as OLPC), a brainchild of MIT professor Nicholas Negroponte to bridge the technology divide between rich and the poor children in the developing world. But with the formation of an Indian edition -- called OLPC India -- the program, which aims to equip millions of world's school children with cheap laptops, is not only set to make an entry into India but also promises to do it with a bang.

Back in May I spent some time with Linutop’s fanless, Xubuntu-based micro-PC, framing my review from the perspective of a Linux-naive home user, to see if the compact device would make a decent alternative to a low-end Windows PC. At the time I criticised how tricky, for a fledgling user, it was to add functionality beyond what was preinstalled; since then, Linutop have released v1.2 of their software package, and asked if we’d like to check out the changes.

The brouhaha surrounding Sun Microsystems and ex-employee Neil Wilson over governance of the OpenDS project - first reported in The Register - continued to bubble this week, not least among Reg Dev's readers. Many of you took the harsh, but arguably fair, point of view that Sun was in the right as work done during the employer's time belongs to, guess who, the employer. Others adopted the slightly provocative stance that open source developers are "chumps" because what they are really doing is unpaid open source development for companies like Sun that have the money to pay.

Red Hat has launched a"real-time" addition to its Linux operating system, which it claims will make some features run 100 times faster than rival technologies. Red Hat's Messaging Real-time Grid (MRG) was launched as a beta on Tuesday with a full release in the first half of 2008. MRG is an addition to the open-source specialist's Red Hat Enterprise Linux platform, and is designed for businesses such as banks that need to carry out transactions on their IT systems as instantaneously as possible, or "real-time".

CentOS (Community Enterprise Operating System), the free Linux distribution based on the commercial Red Hat Enterprise distribution, has been released in version 5.1 for i386 and x86_64 architectures.

Welcome to the sixth issue of OpenLDAP Weekly News (OWN), the unofficial weekly newsletter for the OpenLDAP community.