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For those of you that follow my blog, you must have noticed that I’m a Mandriva user. Recently though, I took an interest in Ubuntu: I installed version 7.04 on a laptop, and it did look interesting, enough to make me doubt my commitment to Mandriva’s products. Thus, when 7.10 came out with a bang in the media, and I got another laptop to de-borgify, I downloaded the Ubuntu 7.10 ISO along with the install CD for Mandriva 2008.0 Free. So, I did a test drive, trying to level the field as much as possible. Here are the results.

So, you just delivered that new PC to your customer and gave them a quick tour of what's new and then watched their eyes glaze over with confusion. After a few seconds, the questions start. Questions that should be easy to answer, but turn out not to be! Where is my start button? Where are my programs? What happened to the Menu in Internet Explorer? Why is the system constantly asking for my permission to do simple things? Why does my system take so long to boot? Now your eyes glaze over, not with confusion, but with frustration and you have to ask yourself: What did I do to deserve this? It's simple; you sold your customer a computer with Windows Vista installed, when that customer was somewhat satisfied with Windows XP. The answer lies with the open-source community and more specifically, Linux.

Some years ago the idea came up to fork KWord and refurbish it to be more stripped down, and have simpler and bigger buttons. The effort was applauded by many but in the end didn’t really work out. It was a great heads up and I took it with me for the next generation of the applications. As I’ve been working on KOffice2 high-level design I had 2 user groups in mind, the lawyers office and the Kids “office”. The two extremes that I wanted to be able to both have a real use for KOffice. In the last days I finalized a plugin for KOffice that is targetted directly to the “kids office”. I reused the artwork that was created for the kids-office by Dannya well over 2 years ago and ended up with a simple replacement for the more complex standard interface. I hope that kids, and many parents, will appreciate this new user interface.

It's one thing to make a computer easy to use, but if you're going to do so, you must also make it secure. If you're not going to develop a secure OS, then at least give more thought to your emphasis on "Ease of Use".

Red Hat is partnering with Amazon to offer Linux-based computing power as an on-call computer resource, letting companies scale up applications without building a bigger data center. That Linux-on-demand idea has sizzle, but there are other interesting pieces in Red Hat's latest batch of products, including more virtualization support and one audacious goal. The Amazon partnership is part of Red Hat's Linux Automation initiative to make it easier for companies to deploy Linux applications. With it, Red Hat will have its version of Linux powering over half of the world's new servers by 2015 while doubling its current market share, says Scott Crenshaw, Red Hat's VP of enterprise Linux business.

Gimmix, however, is not an ordinary audio player. It requires a lot more than running it and pressing the play button to listen to music. Gimmix is just a front-end to MPD (music player daemon), which will require to be installed, configured and started in order for Gimmix to run properly. MPD is basically a server which allows remote access for playing audio files, streams and managing playlists. What's really impressive about this design is that the client used for controlling the server doesn't need to run on the same machine MPD runs on. This enables you to play the music files on your home server from work, a friend's house or wherever, as long as you have Gimmix with you.

Now it’s finally official: the Asus EeePC (for Easy to Learn, Work, and Play) will be available from December in Germany and Austria for a recommended end user price of €299,- including tax. The good news? Debian developer Ben Armstrong has realized that this is the perfect text editing device for himself and his wife, bought two of them, and is currently porting Debian to it!

Renewed proceedings have been brought against the SCO Group GmbH [Ltd.] and its apparent managing director Mike Olson by the Bonn-based Tarent GmbH as well as the Bremen-based Univention after derogatory remarks about Linux had re-appeared at the URL http://www.sco.de/scosource/letter_to_partners.html. The German Linux companies had already successfully protested against statements made at the same URL in 2003. In case of recurrence, SCO's lawyers had already undertaken to refrain from repeating statements in the course of business that Linux would be an unauthorised derivative of Unix. The incriminating pages at SCO, which has become particularly known for its legal proceedings over alleged copyright infringements in Linux and the copyrights to Unix in the past, cannot be accessed any more since yesterday.

Linux, the free operating system that's a perpetual underdog in the desktop market, will get another chance this holiday season at Wal-Mart Stores Inc. The chain was taking orders online Wednesday for a computer called the "Green gPC" that is made by Everex of Taiwan, costs $199 and runs Linux. A comparable Everex PC that comes with Windows Vista Home Basic and more memory costs $99 more, or $298, partly because the manufacturer has to pay Microsoft Corp. for a software license. Both computers come with keyboard, mouse and speakers, but no monitor. It will be available in about 600 stores, as well as online, Wal-Mart said.

[Not news anymore, but fun to see it's even made Fox News - Sander]

For any parent, myself included, setting your kids loose on the net is a daunting prospect. We have to do it because the net is a fact of life - it's in our schools, the workplace, public libraries and in many if not most homes of the developed world. Therefore, do we really have any option but to give them Linux?

Many companies could successfully partake in open source projects without adversely affecting their business, according to open source activist Bruce Perens. Perens told delegates at the Open Source Summit in London that companies need to hold on to their business differentiators in order to remain competitive. But he insisted that they can effectively share software development with the rest of the world without affecting their company in a negative way.

Manufactum, a German web retailer, has released a portable PC that is sure to delight Linux users. Weighing in at only 2 pounds, with dimensions of 7.1x4.4 x1.9 inches (180 x 112 x 48 mm), the "Manuscriptum" comes pre-loaded with Debian Linux with a KDE desktop environment, and other essential software like Firefox, Open Office and the Foxit PDF reader. Available for around $650.

Over the past two weeks there has been a number of new developments in regards to the open-source NVIDIA driver, Nouveau. In fact, the Nouveau team is preparing for the first stable release! This stable open-source NVIDIA driver will support 2D, X-Video, and EXA acceleration with all graphics cards from the NV05 to NV40 (GeForce 7) series. Read more in the 30th edition of the Nouveau Companion.

It's not surprising that Billy Marshall, former Red Hatter and current CEO of rPath, would be dismissive of Red Hat's new appliance operating system, given that he will be competing with it. But what I did find surprising is how dead-on his assessment is of enterprise software. We talk about certification a lot (i.e., "Yes, we are certified to run on SQL Server"). The customer takes this to mean, "It will work well with SQL Server." But this isn't always the case. In fact, as Billy points out, it is often not the case:

Once again, more than 2 weeks have passed and it is time for yet another issue of the TiNDC. So we are fighting to get a first "stable" release of nouveau out as soon as possible. This release will include 2D, Xv and EXA acceleration for all cards from NV05 to NV4x. Owners of NV04 won't get EXA due to hardware limitations, while NV5x cards (GeForce 8x00) won't get much more than working 2D and hopefully working mode setting for the common cases.

A decision to wipe 11,000 machines of their shipped Mandriva Linux operating system and replace it with Windows XP for Nigerian schools received a reversal that should please Mandriva's CEO. Someone break out the champagne for Francois Bancilhon, CEO of Mandriva. He had blogged his anger with Microsoft counterpart Steve Ballmer over what Bancilhon suggested were dirty tactics in gaining business with Nigeria.

The KDE project has released the fourth beta of KDE 4.0, and with it a call for end-user testing. The project faces a major challenge in getting this major release stable and functional enough to meet users' expectations in time for release. The reason for this lies not only in the extent of the changes made to the underlying platform libraries that we looked at last week, but also in the collision of ground-breaking new development and a mass user base.

primary desktop operating system since 1997. But for most people around the world, this is the year of the the Windows desktop, same as it was last year and the year before. But if we each spent one day telling others about GNU/Linux, could we make a difference in the lives of at least a few people? I think so. That's why I'm promising -- right here and right now -- to spend at least one day in the next three months handing out free GNU/Linux install CDs, and why I invite you to join me in this effort.

Some people say that there are too many GNU/Linux distributions, too many people just doing their own instead of joining an existing effort. In essence their criticism is towards the fact that so many people in the Free Software community actually take their freedom and pursue their dreams instead of finding their place in somebody else's vision. Sometimes the criticism is pointed towards those who duplicate a lot of the effort, just for a few small modifications. They are for consolidation. They want to build a cathedral out of the bazaar.

Mark McVey, the owner of McVey Creative Group, has a long history in the advertising and marketing business. He's used to helping people create product brands, and for the last seven years or so, creating a brand has automatically included creating a Web site. Because McVey is no stranger to working with Web developers, and because he knows what he likes, when he decided to launch Oohgaboohga.com, he called Bruce Kroeze, an active coder for the Django project and a fan of the Satchmo e-commerce framework for Django.