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Love it, hate it, heard lots about it, but still don't have enough of a handle to form a firm opinion? Then we must be talking about Linux, the open-source operating system that's alluring because it's heavy duty and it's free. Simultaneously, it's intimidating to newbies because it's typically more difficult to install and configure than Windows.

[Just an overview for beginners; we're posting it here for those in our audience who are. - dcparris]

Welcome to this year's 23rd issue of DistroWatch Weekly! The long-awaited version 6.06 of the Ubuntu family of Linux distributions dominated the headlines of many open source news sites last week; we'll comment on the release and share our first impressions of the new product. In other news, the second Red Hat Summit, concluded last week, was characterised by the launch of several new initiatives, while the Debian release team has been busy finalising the feature set for the December release of Debian "etch". Also, don't miss our opinion piece about the changing landscape of Linux users prompted by the recent release of the binary-only Picasa photo management software for Linux. Finally, we are pleased to announce that the May 2006 DistroWatch donation has been awarded to LilyPond and Lua. Happy reading!

If there's anything harder than predicting the future, it's reaching a consensus about it. The trends affecting IT today are easy enough to spot - outsourcing, globalization, increased regulation, increased complexity and never-ending demands from the business for growth and revenue - but it's much more difficult to figure out how all these trends will converge to determine the size, composition and strategy of the IT department over the next few years.

Linux distro chief outlines new products and future directions

As the basis of learning in classrooms across the country, textbooks are coming under increasing scrutiny in a political climate dictated by initiatives such as the No Child Left Behind and the American Competitiveness acts, increasing the demand for a positive return on textbook investments.
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The mission of the Global Education Learning Community is to create an "open source" curriculum worldwide, providing free resources to students, teachers and administrators, according to the community's executive director Bobbi Kurshan.

I enjoy using many different desktop environments and operating systems. On a day-to-day basis, I use Finder, Explorer, GNOME, and KDE. They all have their good sides, but obviously, they have their fair share of bad sides as well. The next couple of columns will be about the latter. This week, I take a look at whatever bothers me about Ubuntu's GNOME/Linux combination (Dapper, obviously).

What started in the 1990s as a contractual protection for Java against forays from Microsoft turned out to retard JavaSE on GNU Linux. A team from Sun last month remedied the long-standing legal problem, forging new license terms for JavaSE on GNU Linux.

Tonight's People Behind KDE interviews the developer of KDE's premiere photo management application Digikam. Gilles Caulier started out as a French translator for KDE but is now busy programming for hours each day. Find out his development tools of choice and his most influential photographer in our interview.

The goal of OSS2006 is to provide an international forum where a diverse audience of OSS researchers and practitioners can come together to examine the culture, technology, and organization of OSS systems, work practices, development processes, community dynamics, tools and applications.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 will enter beta testing in late July and ship in December, executives said Wednesday.

Learn to configure DHCP, NIS, LDAP servers, and PAM to support authentication to prepare you for the LPIC-2. This tutorial series serves as a comprehensive study guide so you can take the exams with confidence. And even if you're not preparing for Linux certification at this time, this series helps you build fundamental skills on Linux systems administration.

Five years to Java on Linux, next is Java open source

The law, some say, is an ass and it is quite possible that mule-like legal stubbornness has lain at the heart of the time it has taken for Sun Microsystems to get Java on Linux.…

Dear Lord, you people are highly focused on mating issues. Just because I walk on two feet, don't confuse me with a mammal. However, I will do my best to answer your questions.

Oft times creating modules is not necessary (or perhaps wanted) at a particular site. Copying and pasting the same code over and over can also become cumbersome. A simple middle ground is to create Perl shared libaries that use the requires method. Simple shared libraries can be setup so a Perl site administrator and/or system administrator does not have to solely manage the code.

My friends and I in the Open Source community trade geek bunker photos. What I would like is fellow Open Source folks who have interesting setups to either email me a picture or link of your particular setup and I will link to and/or post it on systhread.net. Call it a fun geek time hole.

This is a detailed description about how to set up a Ubuntu 6.06 LTS server that offers all services needed by ISPs and hosters (Apache web server, Postfix mail server (with SMTP-AUTH and TLS!), DNS server, FTP server, MySQL server, POP3/IMAP, Quota, Firewall, etc.).

Recently, spokespersons for Microsoft's standards group have been promoting "design, collaboration and licensing" as alternatives, rather than supplements to, open standards. Maybe Adobe's been listening.

The Sakai Foundation has announced a link-up with Oracle as a commercial affiliate. The business technology giant says it will assist in the development of the community source Sakai collaboration and learning environment, which is supported by over 90 universities around the world.

Virtusa Corporation reinforced its commitment to Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) and open standards by launching the Keystone initiative globally. This is the largest implementation of FOSS within Virtusa with a global deployment of over 2500 users.

Eben Moglen, professor of law at Columbia Law School, says that open source is a fundamentally American concept, contrary to the view promoted by Microsoft and others