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Donations play a crucial role in supporting Free and Open Source Software projects. At times readers will write in to share their positive experience with a utility or program or a distribution that I have written about. Now don't confuse them with your average technical-bent-of-mind Linux user. These are accountants, home-office businessman, and even carpenters and plumbers, who've saved a lot of money thanks to open source software. And they have one question in mind -- how do I help the person behind the program?

I used to think of myself as something of a rare bird -- a philosopher and software developer with a keen interest in the Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) movements. But as I discovered at last month's North American Computers and Philosophy (NA-CAP) conference in Chicago, there are many with similar interests.

This guide describes how you can use the CD/DVD burning application K3b to convert songs from an audio CD into MP3 or Ogg files that you can use on your MP3 player, for example (if you choose the Ogg format, your MP3 player must support it).

Last month we looked at the ALiveNF7G-HDReady from ASRock, which was a great budget motherboard that had integrated NVIDIA GeForce 7050 graphics that made it suitable for an HTPC or multimedia setup and it came topped with Gigabit LAN support and IEEE-1394 Firewire. We are back with ASRock today as we look at their ConRoe1333-DVI/H motherboard. ASRock's ConRoe1333-DVI/H is based on Intel's 945G Chipset and is compatible with Intel 1333MHz Core 2 Duo processors, uses GMA 950 graphics, and is home to many more features.

FUD recipe, it’s delicious:

1) Create a completely misleading title. 2) Make a mountain out of a non-existent molehill. 3) Proclaim insider knowledge not possessed by more experienced individuals. 4) Carefully craft statements based on false premisses. 5) Spread the FUD around and bake @ 350.

And whatever you do, DO NOT ADD FACTS, Facts, facts!

[He makes a couple of points, but you still know which side of the fence he is on. - Scott]

Fedora and Debian make building a custom kernel and packaging it for rollout a simple process. Part 2 of the Linux kernel compilation series examines the unique steps in getting these popular distros' set up with a custom kernel.

The free electronic program guide (EPG) data that Zap2it Labs currently provides to many MythTV users is scheduled to shut down on September 1. Today MythTV users learned how much a replacement service offered by Schedules Direct (SD) will cost.

The second Free and Open Source Software Conference is being held this year on August 25th-26th, in St. Augustin, Germany. Some 66 speakers will address issues ranging from Drupal and other web technologies to KDE 4, Open Source and Marketing, as well as Women in IT.

Pure HTML enhancements grew hardly at all in the last eight years. It basicaly stopped in 1999 with HTML 4. Now the future looks bright. Recently, HTML has finaly came back to life.

Open Tuesday this month has Obsidian Systems founder, Anton de Wet, talking on how to build a business on open source software. The Joburg based networking event for OSS enthusiasts has also moved venues.

Some of the heaviest PR lead-up to this year's West Coast LinuxWorld Conference and Expo was about Linux on laptops, and specifically Novell's SUSE Linux on Lenovo laptops.

Windows Vista has probably created the single biggest opportunity for the Linux desktop to take market share, Cole Crawford, an IT strategist at Dell, said in an address titled, "The Linux Desktop—Fact, FUD or Fantasy?" at the annual LinuxWorld Conference & Expo here. For example, a number of companies have moved back to Windows XP after deploying Vista, Crawford said, before quoting Scott Granneman, an author, entrepreneur and adjunct professor at Washington University in St. Louis, as saying, "To mess up a Linux box, you need to work at it; to mess up your Windows box, you just have to work on it."

Make no mistake about it, if you are using a Linux distribution, you are not a friend to the software giant in Redmond. For years, they have spread rumors and half-truths in an effort to curb any further attraction to Linux development. Unfortunately for them, this has not only failed miserably, but their own Vista operating system has become the ultimate pro-Linux marketing campaign with its bugs, bloat and compatibility issues.

Learn how the new XML storage and query environment of DB2 9 for Linux, UNIX, and Windows plays into the XML data model described in Part 1of this series. Part 2 focuses on how to exploit the improved database support for XML in your application architecture.

Novell CEO Ron Hovsepian explained rather than defended his company's deal with Microsoft in his keynote address at the annual LinuxWorld Conference here Aug. 8. "I know our deal with Microsoft is controversial, but it is necessary for our customers who have to deal with both Linux and Windows in their data centers. Virtualization is also going to have to deal with both of those operating systems," he told attendees.

The Open Solutions Alliance (OSA) pushed out a prototype application at LinuxWorld yesterday to demonstrate interoperability between open source applications. The Common Customer View (CCV) prototype integrates data between open source products from JapserSoft, Centric CRM, Adaptive Planning, Talend, and other OSA members, and includes a new single sign-on (SSO) piece contributed by SpikeSource and released under the Open Source License (OSL).

MySQL quietly let slip that it would no longer be distributing the MySQL Enterprise Server source as a tarball, not quite a year after the company announced a split between its paid and free versions. While the Enterprise Server code is still under the GNU General Public License (GPL), MySQL is making it harder for non-customers to access the source code.

This tutorial, the fifth in a series, shows you how to manage and manipulate the shape your Emacs session—examine how to partition the Emacs screen, create multiple X client windows for a single Emacs session, and display multiple buffers in each window, dividing the screen with horizontal and vertical divisions.

For those who like living on the cutting edge, Mandriva Linux 2008 Beta 1 (code name Cassini) and Fedora 8 Test 1 ("for 'alpha' users") were both released this week.

Today at 11:04am (GMT, or Greenwich Time), Debian developer Erich Schubert reported about a bug in Serendipity. According to his blog, it took him 10 minutes to close it, and he reported it to the guys over at Serendipity.