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Looks like Europe is collectively ready to bring Microsoft's monopoly down so that other OS options will have a chance to flourish. Well, at least one group of like-minded people have managed to begin clearing the playing field some.

Myah OS creator Jeremiah Cheatham has issued the first preliminary release of Myah OS 3.0. The gaming- and multimedia-oriented live CD Linux offering is built with an "efficient" Xfce 4.4.1 desktop, and bundles Internet, office, graphics, development tools, and numerous other applications.

The Essential Blender from No Starch Press is both a reference and instructional guide to Blender, the open source 3-D modeling, rendering, and animation tool. It walks readers through Blender's capabilities by alternating hands-on tutorials with broader, topical chapters that discuss the key concepts and how Blender implements them. Despite a few flaws, it's a good resource for those struggling with the software.

After the descriptions in the previous sections it is clear that there are many, many opportunities for programmers to influence a program's performance, positively or negatively. And this is for memory-related operations only. We will proceed in covering the opportunities from the ground up, starting with the lowest levels of physical RAM access and L1 caches, up to and including OS functionality which influences memory handling.

There is security, and then there is Security. HP, with its new multi-level security services for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 is now offering Common Criteria certified level security for this Linux on its server and desktops. Common Criteria is an ISO security framework standard. It is frequently required in government computing contracts. It is also, historically, difficult for open-source software to obtain, as described briefly in "Free-Libre/Open Source Software (FLOSS) and Software Assurance" (PDF link) by David A. Wheeler, an author and software developer.

Recently I've been working with the transport synchronization capabilities of the JACK audio server. This article is a report on those capabilities as tested with a variety of Linux audio applications under the JAD and 64 Studio distributions.JACK: The 1-minute Profileread more

AMD announced today that it has released new Linux drivers for its line of video cards. The new Linux Catalyst 7.10 drivers release includes several updates and new features.

Making periodic backups is a common task. Synbak can help to simplify it. Synbak brings together several different backup methods and provides a powerful reports system that provides details about all the work it does. Synbak can use rsync over Secure Shell (SSH), Server Message Block (SMB), or Common Internet File System (CIFS) and either create tar archives or burn CDs and DVDs (quaintly called laserdiscs in a throwback to old times). It can also access and back up MySQL and Oracle databases and Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP) servers. Finally, it can send you an email message with the backup details and create an HTML plus RSS Web page with the same information.

Mandriva CEO François Bancilhon has asked Steve Ballmer what it feels like to look at himself in the mirror. In an open letter to the Microsoft head honcho, posted to the web late last night, Bancilhon claims that the Nigerian government has somehow decided to install Windows on 17,000 brand new PCs already equipped with Mandriva Linux. And he questions whether Ballmer and company used dirty tricks to make it happen.

This guide shows how to set up an Ubuntu Studio 7.10 desktop. The result is a fast, secure and extendable system with focus on multimedia creation - the real-time (RT) kernel is installed by default. It provides all you need for daily work and entertainment, incl. codecs, Flash, Adobe Reader, VMware, Skype, TrueType fonts, Cedega, and many more.

Guardian Digital reinforces their dedication to web security with completely redesigned and updated version of their popular Web and Content Filtering solution, SurfSecure.

Everyone knows they should make regular backups of their data. But hardly anyone is as diligent with backups as they should be. So in this two-part series we're going to learn some nice simple methods for making regular backups on single PCs or small networks. Part 1 covers external backup media, and bendingudev to your will so that your backup devices will have persistent names.

With much anticipation by the OpenSolaris community, last night Sun had released their first developer preview for the binary desktop distribution that we have known over the past couple of months as Project Indiana. Ian Murdock and company are optimistic for this project that will address some of the existing Solaris adoption barriers when it comes to the installation, package management, and familiarization along with revitalizing the user experience. How does this first milestone of Project Indiana, which in fact will be named OpenSolaris, rank when it comes to meeting their objectives? In this review, we have a lot of information and screenshots on this long-awaited OpenSolaris binary distribution.

As we all know, Linux distributions are freely available over the Internet. However, prohibitive bandwidth costs, thanks mainly to Telkom's stranglehold, mean that downloading distros of several hundred megabytes or even several gigabytes can be prohibitive. It is much easier and cheaper to just get a CD burned, either at cost or for a small premium.

This Beta aimed at further polishing of the KDE codebase and we would love to start receiving feedback from testers. Besides the stabilization of the codebase, some minor features have been added, including but not limited to much work on Plasma, the KDE 4 desktop shell.

If you are running a blog (or any Web publishing system, for that matter) that relies on a database back end, you will sooner or later face the problem of backing up the content stored in the database. One way to go about it is to build a backup tool using OpenOffice.org Base. Since Base can pull data from a MySQL or any ODBC-compliant data source, you can create a simple database that connects to the blog's back end and extracts content from it, which you can then export in different formats.

LinuxSecurity.com: Security is at the forefront of everyone's mind and a firewall can be an integral part of your Linux defense. But is Michael's Rush's "Linux Firewalls," the newest release from NoStarchPress, up for the challenge? Eckie S. here at Linuxsecurity.com gives you the low-down on this newest addition to the Linux security resource library and how it's one of the best ways to crack down on attacks to your Linux network.

The New Zealand State Services Commission's (SSC) championing of open-source software in government helped its ICT (Information and Communications Technology) branch pick up an award in the government category of the inaugural New Zealand Open Source Awards, held in Wellington this month. The SSC has developed and published guidelines to government agencies that are considering open source, says the deputy commissioner and head of the ICT branch, Laurence Millar. The guidelines were published on the e-government website in 2003 and then updated, he says.

I was truly disheartened after trying out Evolution on Windows: how in the heck is this even considered anything but an Alpha? As a full-time Evolution user in Ubuntu, I have always been very happy with its PIM (personal information manager) abilities, MS Exchange support and the fact that it's easy to create a simple backup script to keep things safe in case of data loss.

The situation and rules for the Ballot Resolution Meeting (BRM) are starting to become clearer. As you may know, this is a follow-up to the September 2 vote where the Microsoft/ECMA OOXML (”Open” “XML”) specification failed on both measures to become an ISO/IEC JTC1.Given the way the system works, this means that we get to go on and try something else to make it a standard. And if that doesn’t work, try something else. Repeat until either the opposition goes away, gets bored, or no one remembers what you were trying to do in the first place (grin).