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Some technology analysts feel that Linux is still not ready for the desktop. Please don't tell that to any of the community members who last year logged in 40,000 times to the 28 Linux stations in our small town library and community center.

Ubuntu founder, Mark Shuttleworth, has commented on Microsofts renewed IP sabre rattling, saying that the company should "back off on its claims".

Transform any XML-based data to and from the OpenDocument format with XSLT-based filters.

In my first FOSS Project Marketing Howto article, I wrote about the importance of using your project's home page as an effective marketing tool. So let's examine a few press releases to learn how to write our own.

This is a detailed description about how to set up a Mandriva 2008 Free (Mandriva 2008.0) server that offers all services needed by ISPs and hosters: Apache web server (SSL-capable), Postfix mail server with SMTP-AUTH and TLS, BIND DNS server, Proftpd FTP server, MySQL server, Courier POP3/IMAP, Quota, Firewall, etc. This tutorial is written for the 32-bit version of Mandriva 2008, but should apply to the 64-bit version with very little modifications as well.

The power and flexibility of Ubuntu and Gnome. The magnificence and beauty of E17. Perfect and fast even for a Virtual Machine. Finally a fully functional Enlightenment Desktop. Geubuntu is a complete and fully functional operative system, available as a Live CD, based on the popular Linux Distribution Ubuntu. Geubuntu, a project started and designed by the Italian artist Luca D.M. (aka TheDarkMaster) is perfect for any Desktop, Laptop PC or even for a Virtual Machine. Geubuntu mixes the power and simplicity of Ubuntu and parts of the Gnome Desktop with the wonder and astonishing eye-candy of Enlightenment DR17

Mozilla is prepping a mobile version of Firefox, the world's most popular open-source web browser. "People ask us all the time about what Mozilla's going to do about the mobile web," reads a blog post from VP of engineering Mike Schroepfer, "and I'm very excited to announce that we plan to rock it."

By and large, most Red Hat Linux systems will have Bash as the default shell. Bash is a darn great shell, but this article is about another equally great shell, called Z-Shell, that has most of the attributes of Bash, but in some cases goes the extra mile to give you the flexibility to customize your shell more than Bash allows. This article is somewhat advanced, but if you’re very patient, with some effort, you will do just fine. Remember to make small changes, test them, and then make more small changes, test, and repeat.

Open source software has a lot to offer the business world. Aside from the fact that they’re generally free, many open source programs are more secure, reliable and customizable than their proprietary counterparts. In fact, many large companies, including big names like Amazon, Google, and Yahoo, run their servers with Linux rather than Windows. Open source software is often some of the best software for the job, even when cost is no consideration. So how can you make open source software work for your business? Here are 50 apps that can help your office get on track to join the growing numbers of businesses that have made the switch to open source.

In earlier articles, I compared OpenOffice.org 2.3's and MS Office 2007's word processors and slide show programs. It seems appropriate to round off the comparison with a look at spreadsheets, the third of the core programs in any office application. I spent a couple of days testing OOo Calc and Microsoft Excel features for formatting, list-making, formulas, and formula tools. Since the range of user expertise in spreadsheets tends to be much wider than in slide shows or even word processors, I considered the programs largely from the perspective of an average user who might require a spreadsheet for home or business use.

Has Red Hat finally grown up in terms of global sales potential?

Guess what, I can walk up to your Ubuntu, PCLinuxOS, Debian, etc desktop installation and take complete control over it without needing a single password. Thats right, root access simply by sitting down at your computer. Why is it nearly every single distro by default leaves this gaping security hole open?

We have k3b installed locally for users to burn CDs/DVDs/etc. This only gets used very infrequently, and it seems that something else has broken every time it does get used. This time it was a “Cannot find writer” error. I checked for the presence of cdrecord and dvd-rw-tools; all fine. Eventually it turned out to be a permissions error - that /dev/cdrom was set to be only user- and group-writable; and the user was not in the relevant group. Added them, log in & out, all well.

OpenSUSE 10.3 was released last week, and I quickly downloaded the new version to update my two openSUSE boxes. Here's a chronicle of the updates and some problems that surfaced during the process.

Over the past few releases, Fedora has gained a reputation amongst the various distributions for having some of the best artwork out there. This time around, responsibility has been handed over entirely to the community Art Team, and they've done themselves proud! Read on to find an interview with Mairin Duffy. Fedora Art team lead and previews of some of the key elements belonging to the infinity theme.

Last week we learned how to sanely organize our vast digital photo archives with Digikam. Today we'll look at Digikam's built-in editing tools. You'll be able to do a surprising amount of your editing work without ever leaving Digikam.

CPUs are today much more sophisticated than they were only 25 years ago. In those days, the frequency of the CPU core was at a level equivalent to that of the memory bus. Memory access was only a bit slower than register access. But this changed dramatically in the early 90s, when CPU designers increased the frequency of the CPU core but the frequency of the memory bus and the performance of RAM chips did not increase proportionally. This is not due to the fact that faster RAM could not be built, as explained in the previous section. It is possible but it is not economical. RAM as fast as current CPU cores is orders of magnitude more expensive than any dynamic RAM.

Douglas Gilbertannounced the 1.02 release of the sdparam utility. Originally written for Linux, it has also been ported to FreeBSD, Solaris, Tru64 and Windows. Douglas described the program:"sdparm is a command line utility designed to get and set SCSI device parameters (cf hdparm for ATA disks). The parameters are held in mode pages. Apart from SCSI devices (e.g. disks, tapes and enclosures) sdparm can be used on any device that uses a SCSI command set. Almost all CD/DVD drives use the SCSI MMC set irrespective of the transport. sdparm also can decode VPD pages including the device identification page. Commands to start and stop the media; load and unload removable media and some other housekeeping functions are supported.

Yes thats right you are in grave danger of having 25% of your wages garnished for life or even a prison sentence. People, churches, and businesses have been getting viruses that turn their computer (without their knowledge) into a file sharing server that shares illegal copies of music, movies, etc to people all over the world. One of these entities who were prosecuted against was a lady for having downloaded 14 songs. She explained she had no idea what was going on but that did not stop the court from deciding to sue her -$25,000.00 for the music and because all piracy cases also charge the guilty party for the prosecuting lawyer fees she also owed -$250,000.00. The court decided they would garnish 25% of her paychecks for life.

Now that I'm running a 1.2 GHz Celeron-equipped laptop with way better video support than my 1 GHz converted thin client -- both with 256 MB of RAM -- for my Linux and BSD tests, I'm finding that Windows XP isn't as fast as I once thought it was on my work-provided Dell 3 GHz Pentium 4 with 512 MB of RAM. Yep ... a fast Linux (Debian, Slackware, Puppy) on a slower system easily beats Windows XP on a faster box when it comes to many common tasks, from rebooting to shutdown, loading Firefox and OpenOffice, all the way down to switching between windows and having their graphics fully rendered.