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With the release of Microsoft's new Windows operating system (Vista), more and more people are looking for alternatives to Windows for various reasons. In this tutorial I will show people who are willing to switch to Linux how they can set up a Linux desktop (Debian Etch in this article) that fully replaces their Windows desktop, i.e. that has all 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 runs also on older hardware, and the best thing is: all software comes free of charge.

Well, that's easy to answer but, more important what is he doing? And why? Well, here is a not so quick update.

[Geek Ranch?, sounds cool to me. -Scott]

What do you do if you forget the password to your OpenOffice.org files? The simplest solution is to download OOo Password Cracker, a macro for opening protected documents in any OpenOffice.org application. Using a brute force dictionary attack, OOo Password Cracker provides a slow but reliable method of document recovery. However, the macro requires some preparation if you want to use it effectively.

PCLinuxOS Magazine, a community-driven Linux publication, has just hit the virtual news stand with issue number 9 now available for download.

Following the release of the 2.6.21 kernel [story] Andrew Morton [interview] posted a list of patches in his -mm kernel, summarizing for each his plans as to whether or not they wil be pushed upstream for inclusion in the upcoming 2.6.22 kernel. He noted,"the overall stability in recent -mm's was not sufficiently high and we ran out of time to find all the bugs. I shouldn't have merged all those patches last week - they contained an exceptional amount of garbage. This all means that more bugs than usual will probably leak into mainline, and we'll have to fix them there." He went on to add,"I've been ducking most non-bugfix patches recently. I have ~200 feature and cleanup patches queued for later consideration, so people who sent those will be hearing from me eventually."read more

After being released onSourceForge.net,Ultimate EMR received504 downloads in its first month. Beating all other EMR's onSourceForge.net. With currently just over 600 downloads,Ultimate EMR is very happy with the continued interest. We invite you todownload or test ourdemo and give us feedback so that we can continue to improve. Let us know what you think by joining ourmailing List and ourforum.

In 2004, the Boston Red Sox won the World Series. In 2007, Dell, a top computer manufacturer, is introducing pre-installed Ubuntu Linux on its main PC lines. The worlds of baseball and the desktop will never be the same. In both cases, people worked long and hard to reach the top. In Linux's case, the top is the recognition that it is not just a hobby operating system, and that it is not an operating system that's only for servers. With its arrival on Dell's desktops, Linux has proven that it can compete in the same league with Mac OS and Windows.

It's not official, but sources tell Desktoplinux.com that when Dell begins offering PCs pre-equipped with Linux, the distribution that will go on those boxes will be ... Ubuntu.

Functional Languages seem to be pushing for the title of the next cool thing. Talks and tutorials about them are starting to show up in conferences and conventions, books about them are hitting the shelves, people are even asking about talking about them in blogs and mailing lists devoted to some of the current hot languages.

Learn how to build a simple dynamic Java Web application without knowing the Java language using Rational Business Developer Extension and Enterprise Generation Language (EGL).

The director of software for the nonprofit One Laptop Per Child project believes there is a big market for the self-powered machines in the U.S., provided the user wants to perform basic computer functions. "The XO machine is quite sweet," the OLPC's Walter Bender wrote in an email to DesktopLinux.com today. "I guess the question boils down to what you want to do with the machine.

Theodore Ts'o posted an update on the ext4 filesystem [story], "I've respun the ext4 development patchset, with Amit's updated fallocate patches. I've added Dave's patch to add ia64 support to the fallocate system call, but *not* the XFS fallocate support patches. (Probably better for them to live in an xfs tree, where they can more easily tested and updated.) Yes, we haven't reached complete closure on the fallocate system call calling convention, but it's enough for us to get more testing in -mm." Jeff Garzik noted that none of this development was happening in the kernel as originally planned, "why isn't this stuff going upstream rapidly? AFAICT nothing much at all has happened upstream besides a mass renaming? The whole point of having ext4 in the kernel is to do development upstream, in the public view, getting new stuff in ASAP (even if that means changing or pulling some stuff later)."

The Recoll project team on April 26 announced the release of version 1.8.1 of its free, open-source, full text search tool for Linux desktops. Recoll is based on the "very strong" Xapian backend, which provides an easy-to-use, feature-rich, QT-based graphical interface, a team member said.

O'Brien Automotive Team is a large car dealership conglomerate based in Peoria, Ill. When the company built new headquarters recently, it needed a phone system flexible and cost-effective enough to satisfy the needs of 200 employees at the home office, and hundreds more staff at nine local dealerships in four states. After evaluating options and wrangling with incompetent vendors, O'Brien went with an open source Asterisk solution.

Trademarks have recently become something of an issue in open-source circles. Debian, for example, recently took exception to Mozilla's Firefox trademark rules and called its version of the popular browser, IceWeasel. So, Ubuntu has decided to address possible trademark issues by creating its own trademark policy.

Toshiba's Italian channel sales and marketing operation reportedly is considering offering pre-loaded Linux in its Tecra, Satellite, Portege, and Qosmio notebook lines, according to a story published online last week in the Il Sole newspaper.

It's a relaxed entry this time, an update on some recent happenings in the Linux audio world. Without further preamble, let's take a look at some of the good things going on there.

The Supreme Court sided with Microsoft Corp. on Monday in a case that restricts the reach of U.S. patents overseas. In a 7-1 decision, the court found that Microsoft is not liable in a patent dispute with AT&T. The decision could impact other lawsuits against Microsoft and save the company billions because of the global scope of its operations. (footnote: although perhaps not directly affecting Linux/FOSS now, subject could impact other pending FOSS-related issues in the future)

During FISL 8.0 I caught up with PostgreSQL contributor Josh Berkus who was there to present on PostgreSQL and meet up with the local PostgreSQL community. Josh is a member of the PostgreSQL core team and works at Sun Microsystems as part of their open source database team. Over lunch, Josh shared how KDE plays an important role in the release coordination process which Josh oversees.

State-by-state skirmishes over open-source document formats represent the latest showdown in a long-running, and so far unsuccessful, campaign to topple Microsoft's sheer dominance of the desktop software application market. Outside of Florida, four other states since January have seen language similar to Homan's included in proposed bills.