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Canonical this month released Ubuntu 7.10, codenamed Gutsy Gibbon. Like the Feisty Fawn release before it, Gutsy is a bleeding-edge distribution with a focus on new features and the newest free software applications. It's a speedy operating system with great new features and only a few minor issues. Ubuntu comes in three main flavors. Ubuntu features GNOME as its desktop, Kubuntu uses KDE, and Xubuntu ships with Xfce. Other derivatives of Ubuntu include Gobuntu, which contains only free software and no closed source elements, and Edubuntu, which was designed for use in classrooms.

Wikipedia founder, Jimmy Wales, will be in South Africa next month to promote the growth of the online encyclopedia in the country's various local languages through the launch of two Wikipedia Academies.

This article explains how you can install all the multimedia codecs to play any music or video file in Ubuntu 7.10 Gutsy Gibbon.

Conclusion: At the end of the day Linux is all about choice. For developers and power users this is a good thing, as it lets them set up things exactly as they want to have them. Unfortunately average users have to take a back seat because the practicality of the interface doesn’t take a high enough priority. In this way the lowest common denominator isn’t appealed to, users either have to learn to use or completely avoid Linux. This is in contrast to Windows, where things are designed with the average user very much in mind. OS X attempts to make the best of both worlds, making accessing programs easy but providing a bit more under the hood, without the flexibility of choice. By virtue of choice alone Linux may be the best option if neither Windows nor OS X sit right, and as it gets easier and easier to install it should become a more and more viable option.

Alan Cox emailed me this morning to note a presentation he gave way back in 2000 called "Dear Mr Brooks, or: Software engineering in the free software world." It's no surprise to me that my recent blog post (on the topic of optimally sized development teams) was better articulated by Alan many years ago. What was surprising is just how prescient Alan's talk was. And how informative. For anyone who has ever wondered how open-source software development works compared to proprietary-software development, this is an absolute must read.

Yesterday, Buffalo Technology and the German-based New Media Net published a press release claiming that from now on, you can buy Buffalo’s WHR-HP-G54 Router with the open source DD-WRT firmware. You’ll get the usual 2-year guarantee here in Germany, which you would lose with installing free software on most vendors’ products yourself.

The SCO Group is seeking U.S. Bankruptcy Court approval to sell its Unix business to a New York investment management firm for $36 million, according to documents filed today with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. The Lindon company said it sought court approval on Tuesday for an agreement it entered into with JGD Management Corp. doing business as New York-based investment firm York Capital Management LLC, to sell "substantially all assets used by (SCO) in connection with its Unix business and certain related claims in litigation." The offer also includes up to $10 million in funding for SCO's litigation expenses.

While Red Hat welcomed Microsoft's recent decision to comply with the European Court of First Instance's antitrust ruling, Michael Cunningham, general counsel for Red Hat, stated that the company was still concerned about Microsoft's patent model. "We are reviewing the European Commission's announcement in the Microsoft abuse case and congratulate the Commission on the improvements announced [on Monday]," Cunningham said in a statement. "Our enthusiasm is somewhat tempered, however, by concerns that the patent arrangements may have not been made compatible with open-source licensing".

Trolltech is extending its Qtopia embedded Linux development platform with iPhone-like motion control. Thanks to a partnership with motion-control software firm F-Origin, Qtopia developers will soon be able to trick out their mobile devices with interfaces that respond to landscape/portrait rotation, gestures, and gravity.

So you just upgraded to Ubuntu Gutsy and you cannot get the Internet to work? You appear to have a LAN connection or Network-Manager is allowing you to connect to your access point, yet when you type in http://www.google.com, the domain will not resolve - it just keeps reading ‘connecting’. Why? Use of Gutsy’s own implementation of ipv6 - 99% of the time.

Prepare for the Linux certification exam or simply build fundamental skills on Linux systems administration in this six-part tutorial series on exam 301 topics. In this tutorial Sean Walberg introduces you to Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP) concepts, architecture, directory design, and schemas.

A Silicon Valley start-up backed by an early Google employee is taking a novel approach to building a business for domestic robots and driverless vehicles: it will take it's sweet time.

The senior director of entertainment products at Motorola questions whether Apple will truly "open up" the iPhone. "We've yet to see Apple's SDK [software developers' kit], and I'm sure there will be some level of [Apple] control that goes along with it. I guarantee you that you will not see a Napster music service on the iPhone," said David Ulmer, as he and three other wireless industry big-wigs pondered the impact of Apple's latest status symbol at this week's CTIA Wireless I.T. and Entertainment trade show in San Francisco.

Desktop Linux needs drivers. Right? Of course. So why is Novell's Greg Kroah-Hartman, a Linux kernel developer and head of the Linux Driver Project, having to ask people to tell him about devices that need drivers? It's a good question, and Kroah-Hartman doesn't have the complete answer. What he does know, as he explained in his blog, is that while the Linux Driver Project now has "over 300 different developers signed up to help create and maintain Linux drivers," at the same time he doesn't have "enough work to keep them busy."

How many times have you been stuck at work when the latest episode of a podcast such as LugRadio has become available for download, or the latest version of your favourite Linux distribution has been released? Wouldn’t it be really useful if you could access a server at home through your web browser and order it to download that file, so that it’s waiting for you when you get there? Or, if you like to sleep in peace with your desktop off, wouldn’t it be great if you could remotely access a BitTorrent client on the home server in your attic and tell it to run the downloads while you sleep? -- Here's how.

In Section 2 we saw that, on some machines, the cost of access to specific regions of physical memory differs depending on where the access originated. This type of hardware requires special care from the OS and the applications. We will start with a few details of NUMA hardware, then we will cover some of the support the Linux kernel provides for NUMA.

Ballmer's statement that Linux "uses our intellectual property." -- along with follow-up claims by Microsoft executives that they had found violations of 235 patents in Linux and other open-source software -- caused a sudden refrosting of what had been a slowly thawing relationship between the company and the open-source community. By dangling the threat of patent-infringement lawsuits over the heads of users and vendors alike, "Microsoft opened up a can of worms with the open-source community that they have been attempting to close since then," said Charles King, an analyst at Pund-IT Inc. in Hayward, Calif. So the two sides remain wary "frenemies." And their friend-or-foe relationship has continued to evolve in both directions this month.

Pepper Computer, manufacturer of the original Pepper Pads and developer of the Pepper Linux OS, has admittedly seen better days. After months of silence from the firm's executives led forum members to write the company off as dead, CEO Len Kawell has finally responded to users' pleas and posted a summary of Pepper's current state of affairs -- but not before we left a message at headquarters stating our intentions to write up a deathwatch piece this week.

Rupert's just said again what I've been hearing in various places: Vista's awkwardness is going to drive people to Linux. That's something I heard when Specavers moved to Linux. They'd been thinking about moving before, but there was always a barrier - the cost of retraining. That's the theory at least - but let's not forget that home users now effectively cannot get Windows XP. They're pushed towards Vista Home Premium, and that means here's a generation who will go through the Vistification process at home on their own time, at their own expense.

From Tectonic, the South African government accepts ODF as the document standard. The adoption of ODF (Open Document Format) in our government is indeed great news, and hopefully it will have an effect on other developing countries when decisions like these are made. What disturbs me though, is the criteria for what qualifies as an open standard, according to the MIOS document.