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The final day of the Ottawa Linux symposium was highlighted by this year's keynote address, delivered by Red Hat's lead Linux kernel developer, Dave Jones.

Welcome to this year's 30th issue of DistroWatch Weekly. It is "shoulder season" in the distribution land. Apart from several minor distribution releases, it was a slow week, with only the launch of the Utnubu initiative and a new beta release from Mandriva providing some excitement. Prompted by a satisfied user, we have taken a closer look at StartCom MultiMedia Edition, an interesting distribution based on Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Apart from these topics, we have all the usual columns, complemented by a quick tip for using digital cameras, mobile phones and music players under Linux. Happy reading!

There are lots of ways the command line can help you. Often, you don't need to do something so much as you need to know something. Let's take a quick look at several commands -- whereis, whatis, df, kernelversion, ifconfig, route, and last -- that can quickly answer questions about your system or configuration.

It's been another Ottawa Linux Symposium, and before it fades into a daze, let's see whether I can extract some themes and threads.

LiveLAMP is a bootable Linux CD that allows you to set up a LAMP install quickly and easily. It is intended to provide a platform for primary and secondary IT teachers to get students using a LAMP server to learn about web development.

Enabling remote logging is very simple. The most difficult part is keeping all the doggone names straight — syslog, syslogd, sysklogd — I tell ya, it's a deliberate form of geek torture. Then you need a dedicated logging server somewheres. Then you need to start the syslog daemon with the -r switch; this tells it to accept messages from remote processes. Then the various hosts need to be configured to send their log messages to your logging server.

There may be one single penguin as the mascot for Linux, but there are countless Linuxes - different versions that aim to fulfil different niches. Some function as printer servers, while others as digital video recorders. And then there are also the large versions, complete with easy-to-use installation routines and large software packages. There are so many choices, in fact, that those interested in making the switch to Linux for the first time will likely be overwhelmed with the choices.

The FreeBSD operating system is the unknown giant among free operating systems. Starting out from the 386BSD project, it is an extremely fast UNIX-like operating system mostly for the Intel chip and its clones. In many ways, FreeBSD has always been the operating system that GNU/Linux-based operating systems should have been. It runs on out-of-date Intel machines and 64-bit AMD chips, and it serves terabytes of files a day on some of the largest file servers on earth.

Here’s the down and dirty. Finding that their computers are so filled with spyware, trojans and viruses that they no longer function, more and more people are THROWING AWAY entire computers and buying new ones with Windows pre-installed so they don’t...

Two software releases of note: Mozilla released an upgrade of Firefox, which includes several security fixes. They advise all users to download and install the upgrade. And the Open CD Project popped up on the radar with the release of a CD compilation of open-source programs that run on Windows.

There have been many recent pieces written about how a resurgent Mac is a threat to Linux. This particularly hit fever pitch when Apple decided to jump ship to Intel CPUs.

Occasionally I skim a whitepaper. I feel a little bit guilty saying that; I'm not a CIO or CTO -- I think of myself as a developer and author. Still, there are sometimes a few really good pieces of data to extract from even press releases masquerading as tech marketing whitepapers.

This series of articles provide an introduction to Eclipse, the Eclipse SWT, and the JFace GUI tool kits to construct Eclipse and stand-alone rich GUIs.

The Mozilla Foundation will hold off releasing the next revision of its popular open-source browser Firefox until late September. The announcement, made by developer Ben Goodger on the Mozilla Web site, is likely a stalling tactic to shore up recent security difficulties in the browser. Firefox 1.1 had been scheduled for release this month.

A biometrics company has launched a consumer products division that is shipping its first product -- a 256MB USB Flash drive loaded with Debian Linux. Bionopoly's FingerGear division will follow up next month with a Computer-on-a-Stick (COS) model incorporating a fingerprint scanner and LCD display.

Venture capital (VC) has returned to open source software, writes Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols in an eWEEK editorial published today. However, VCs today are more discriminating than in the go-go 90s, limiting investments to companies with solid fundamentals, especially those in markets such as development and deployment tools, telecom, and embedded.

The next version of the Firefox Web browser, which will be called Firefox 1.5, is slated for release later this summer, and development work continues on new features that include an automatic update service.

Last month, Sun Microsystems released the source code of its Solaris operating system to the general public in an attempt to increase community interest. Now they are at it again, with a far more ambitious plan. Sun COO Jonathan Schwartz has announced that the company plans to offer all of it's software for free.

A San Diego lawyer says California's state government should be forced to dump Microsoft in favor of open-source alternatives. But can free software get into politics without getting dirty?

Data is at the heart of any business, and access to it should be available with minimum downtime. In this article, take a look at the setup and implementation of a Linux High Availability solution for IBM DB2 Universal Database -- the database management system that delivers a flexible and cost-effective database platform for building robust, on demand business applications. Using this step-by-step guide, you can set up and run a highly available DB2 UDB database.