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After almost a year since Microsoft released Vista to manufacturing, it's time to re-evaluate it and decide if it's finally the equal of the best of the desktop Linuxes. That's not a facetious question. Yes, in terms of market share, desktop Linux hovers just over 1 percent of all users, while Microsoft claims that Vista by this summer had already sold more than 60 million copies. I'm not impressed, and you shouldn't be either.

This guide describes how to configure Fedora 8. Learn how to set up extra repositories, add video/dvd and audio codecs, install useful applications, configure Firefox's plugins, install compiz-fusion and much more!

Can SCO escape Novell's wrath? Will SCO CEO Darl McBride emerge rejuvenated and ready to continue the Linux legal wars by selling SCO's Unix business? These and many more questions will be answered in the next episode of "As SCO Turns." In our last chapter, SCO appeared in front of a bankruptcy court on Nov. 6, 2007, in Delaware. When the news that SCO was applying for Chapter 11 bankruptcy first appeared, most assumed that was the end of SCO and its seemingly endless lawsuits against IBM, Novell and other Linux-related companies.

Since slide shows are graphical themselves, most people associate them with GUI programs. Yet you can build slide shows just as effectively with some of the simplest and oldest of GNU/Linux tools. A case in point is LaTeX Beamer, which adds extensions to the classic LaTeX typesetting program to produce PDF presentations. Although LaTeX Beamer is capable of considerable complexity, you need to know surprisingly little in order to produce a slide show.

Red Hat has delivered an early Christmas present to ISVs. At a press conference Nov. 7, the leading Linux company announced that in 2008 it will release a new appliance version of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.1: Red Hat Appliance Operating System.

In order to navigate and jump between dozens of websites with sanity intact, James Archibald tries out another Firefox add-on, Tab Mix Plus, and finds himself very, very impressed.

Now the bad news. Even though HyperSpace is Linux-based, it doesn't look like you'll be able to freely install your own open-source applications of choice in the environment, which I suspect that's mostly to prevent tampering. It's also not clear if the HyperSpace code will be made public, but I'm fairly confident if they don't do it someone else will be more than happy to devise something similar that is open.

This tutorial shows how you can set up a gOS 1.0.1 desktop that is a full-fledged replacement for a Windows desktop, i.e. that has all the software that people need to do the things they do on their Windows desktops. The advantages are clear: you get a secure system without DRM restrictions that works even on old hardware, and the best thing is: all software comes free of charge. gOS is a lightweight Linux distribution, based on Ubuntu 7.10, that comes with Google Apps and some other Web 2.0 applications; it uses the Enlightenment 17 window manager instead of GNOME or KDE.

As of 2.6.23, virtualization is quite well supported on Linux, at least for the x86 architecture. Containers lag a little behind, instead. It turns out that, in many ways, containers are harder to implement than virtualization is. Full container support will get quite a bit closer once the 2.6.24 kernel is released. The merger of a number of important patches in this development cycle fills in some important pieces, though a certain amount of work remains to be done.

Our conference in Spain, Akademy-es, will be held in Zaragoza this year on the 17th and 18th November. We have a very interesting schedule with talks about CMake, KOffice, KDE programming, KDE 4 among other interesting topics. Of course, entry to the talks is free, only limited by physical space.

On Nov. 7, Red Hat joined the cloud and software as a service market by announcing the beta availability of RHEL 5.1 (Red Hat Enterprise Linux) on Amazon EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud). EC2 is a Web service that provides resizable server capacity in the cloud. This collaboration makes all the capabilities of RHEL 5.1, including the Red Hat Network management service, technical support and over 3,400 certified applications, available to customers on Amazon's network infrastructure and data centers.

This month Open Tuesday will take a look at how a government tax incentive scheme can be used to the benefit of open source developers and companies. Representatives from the department of science and technology, will present on the research and development (R&D) tax incentive programme at November's Open Tuesday, with a particular reference to how this can be used to assist in funding research and development in information technology.

If you've got a bit of Linux experience under your belt, it's pretty simple to add some programs, enable an advanced desktop, and tweak the Eee PC to your heart's content. But it turns out that even if you're a Linux noob, the learning curve isn't that steep. Here are some of the most useful Eee hacks/tweaks we've discovered in our first half week of playing with it. Thanks to the Eee User community for helping inspire our hacking.

In your Linux® education, you may have learned about concurrency, critical sections, and locking, but how do you use these concepts within the kernel? This article reviews the locking mechanisms available within the 2.6 kernel, including atomic operators, spinlocks, reader/writer locks, and kernel semaphores. It also explores where each mechanism is most applicable for building safe and efficient kernel code.

Document design is all about space -- the space allotted to an element, and the space between and around elements. This concern is especially obvious when you are setting up paragraphs and page spacing.read more

The slow, toe-in-the-water approach by PC makers to the Linux desktop continued on Wednesday, with Dell (NSDQ:Dell) and Novell (NSDQ:NOVL) formalizing a deal to ship Dell OptiPlex 330 and 755 desktops preloaded with Novell's SLED 10, to commercial accounts in China. The move in the Chinese market also expands Novell's footprint for SLED 10 among Tier 1 vendors; earlier this year Lenovo said it would pre-load some models of ThinkPads with SLED 10.

The first international workshop of Open Document Format (ODF) public sector users took place in Berlin on 29-30 October 2007, hosted by the Foreign Office of the Federal Republic of Germany. The position of the German Foreign Office, as host of the event, was made very clear. The Federal Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier, in his opening word, called ODF "a completely open and ISO-standardized format", considering it an "excellent basis" for "a free exchange of knowledge and information in a time of globalization". The Foreign Office has already linked its foreign missions in a network using open-source programs and shifted to OpenOffice and Linux operation systems on their laptops and has in view to extend this program to all diplomatic workstations by the middle of 2008.

It's close to midnight and something cool is coming through the "tubes"
It's looking real tight, a distro for the experts and the n00bs
With Live CDs so you can try it out before installing
Or DVDs so you can have the packages you choose
No way to lose

Sixth Floor Labs LLC, a Linux game development company, has launched their business today. Founded by Ethan Glasser-Camp and Carl Li, the company aims to improve Linux's desktop feasibility through the creation of high-quality games. Games are "sold" to the Internet community through the "ransom model" -- for one large payment, the product is released under the GPL and freed forever.

If you are new to the GNU/Linux world, and need to know where to begin, you might find the LINFO project very useful.