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While I was cleaning up my office I ran into the March 1986 issue of UNIX/WORLD, a long-since deceased magazine. I had saved this particular magazine because I am the author of the article featured on the cover: The Unix System on the IBM PC. Much like your Linux system choices of today, there were choices back in 1986. In the article I looked at three versions of real UNIX (meaning software licensed from AT&T) and two clones. Also, much like today, I didn't come up with the one single best answer. Each had advantages and disadvantages.

Dell agreed to ship PCs and laptops with the Ubuntu operating system after more than 130,000 people promoted the notion on the company's IdeaStorm web site. It would seem, however, that only a fraction of these zealots were willing to back their votes with cash. Dell has shipped close to 40,000 systems pre-installed with the Ubuntu flavor of Linux, according to multiple sources. By most accounts, that's a heck of a total for what remains more or less a fringe operating system.

poMMo, the "post modern mass mailer" with the not-quite-right acronym, is a powerful Web server-based mass mailing program firmly rooted on a Linux+Apache+MySQL+PHP (LAMP) base. poMMo has been developed with the end user in mind, which shows in its quick Web-based installation, in its powerful yet simple way of creating and sending mailings, and in its intuitive usage.

The release of OpenOffice.org 2.3 brings several significant improvements to the open-source office productivity suite, including easier upgrade paths for existing Microsoft Office users, improved measures to prevent security breaches, and an array of snazzy new features introduced in the suite's word processing, spreadsheet, presentation and database applications.

gOS, the hot new Linux distribution, has been generating a lot of buzz because it comes with the Everex Green PC, sold at Wal-Mart for $200. Linux reviewers are totally in love with it, and are praising it to the skies. Naturally, Carla Schroder had to find out if it lives up to the hype.

As things start quietening down for the year, we may just get a chance to while away a few hours with games. Slipping into the holiday spirit, Tectonic has put together a list of some of the better free Linux games out there, but we want your input to decide which are the best.

Over the past few months, the concept of green computing has become all the rage. But the undeniable fact is that often times with this low impact approach to computing, we end up sacrificing actual computing power, which makes this a tough sell for many. Frankly, to me it just feels like a marketing ploy. Could this perception be felt by others as well?

The first alpha release of Ubuntu 8.04 was scheduled to be released today, but the official release has been pushed back until tomorrow. However, a preliminary CD image of this first alpha release for Ubuntu 8.04 LTS has surfaced today on the Internet. While there is still seven more Ubuntu 8.04 test releases planned before the final release of Hardy Heron in April, we have already started exploring this first Hardy Heron LiveCD.

EFF study shows that Comcast does indeed throttle P2P activity.

This week on Open News More BusyBox Lawsuits, Gnome Supports OOXML?, and Flyback.

This guide explains how to set up software RAID1 on an already running Debian Etch system. The GRUB bootloader will be configured in such a way that the system will still be able to boot if one of the hard drives fails (no matter which one).

I have heard a number of people tell me that as much as they love the speed of development and the community, sometimes Ubuntu just gets ahead of itself. And I suppose in a larger sense, this is what makes Linux such a fantastic platform in the first place. If you dislike GNOME, you can use KDE, or instead, pick a slimmer desktop manager like Fluxbox. Wireless woes?

Recent hardware trends are creating an opening for Linux to become a serious competitor to Microsoft Windows. Linux is better suited for cheap, highly portable machines than the bloated and expensive Windows Vista.

Last week Ryan "Icculus" Gordon had confirmed that the Linux client and server ports of Unreal Tournament 3 were caught up in a legal issue regarding some middleware used in this latest PC title from Epic Games. However, what is the middleware that Unreal Tournament 3 is caught up in? There is a strong possibility that it deals with the PhysX licensing from Ageia Technologies.

It’s enough to make you want to scream, having connectivity issues with your favorite Linux distro. And frankly why most people are best off with a Mac Mini, as it sometimes means getting your hands dirty.

Try to describe Hotwire, and you'll eventually wind up saying something that sounds like an oxymoron, like "command-line GUI," "graphical shell" or "GUI xterm." Well, that's pretty much what Hotwire is: something halfway between a text-based shell and a modern graphical user interface. In part, the confusion stems from the fuzzy definition the typical desktop user has of the Unix shell. For the most part, it is transparent to us. We probably know that some commands (like ls and chown) are separate binaries, while others (like cd and umask) are actually internal functions provided by the shell. But unless we do a lot of scripting, it can be hard to remember which is which; we type whichever we need at the prompt and get back to business.

Open source has at its heart a big idea, which some find uncomfortable and others find liberating: it's about collaboration. It's about getting involved. It's all about having lots of people working at making useful things: you pay with your time, and you get paid with the time of thousands of others. If you're happy just using open source, then no problem. But if you want to contribute, because you have a problem that nobody else is fixing — or simply because you want to do your bit in exchange — it can be difficult to know where to start. The following suggestions might just inspire you to join in.

The U.K.-based company Sharp and Tappin Technology (STTech) is readying two PCs based on Via's recently introduced pico-ITX motherboard. The picoPC1 and picoPC2 measure as little as 5 x 3.4 x 1.5 inches, and feature separately available cases fashioned from billet aluminum, according to the company. The systems will be available with STTech's own "customized, optimized version of Gentoo Linux," according to spokesman Ben Sharp. Sharp added, "We are considering/evaluating a few other distros as possibilities to ship with the PicoPC range, including gOS"

Novell is shipping the first real-time SUSE Linux enterprise data center operating system, SUSE Linux Enterprise Real Time 10. SLERT is the high-end—and significantly higher-priced—version of Novell's open-source real-time operating system for running high-performance, time-sensitive data center applications. A key difference between SLERT and the regular SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 10 is that SLERT allows pre-designated mission-critical business applications full I/O priority at all times, something regular SLES can't do.

Now I'm not quite sure what to make of this at the moment but a United States-based Nigerian-owned company has sued OLPC for an alleged patent infringement about multilingual keyboard technology. As MarketWire.com puts it: "The patent infringement lawsuit was filed on November 22nd, 2007 as a result of OLPC's willful infringement of LANCOR's Nigeria Registered Design Patent # RD8489 and illegal reverse engineering of its keyboard driver source codes for use in the XO Laptops."