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Four years since its inception and hundreds of thousands of visitors later, Tectonic.co.za is readying to launch the continent's first-ever Linux and open source magazine.

Securing the transfer of information while traversing the Internet requires an X.509 security certificate to guarantee its integrity. Usually, acquiring such certificates from commercial vendors costs a lot of money. Now, however, a new organization called CAcert aims to provide a community-driven free certificate authority alternative.

I have decided what I want to be when I grow up. I want to be a tech analyst. No, don't bother to try to talk me out of it. My mind is made up. It's the only job I have ever heard of where you can have huge gaps in your knowledge, get random but truly vital facts utterly wrong, say the opposite of what is observably true, and nobody sues you. They don't even fire you. They don't even notice. No one says a word. In fact, they actually pay you good money, and the next time they want to know something, they forget you got it all wrong the last time and ask you for your opinion all over again.

The International Open Source Network, an initiative of the United Nations Development Programme, has produced a 48-page primer on "Free/Open Source Software and Education," which is now available for free public download. The primer is intended to help policy-makers and decision-makers understand the potential use of free and open source software ("FOSS") in education.

ESP Print Pro, by Easy Software Products, is the commercial edition of CUPS, the Common Unix Printing System. CUPS is the standard printing system on virtually all modern Linux distributions and MacOS X. It runs on all Unixes, and provides print services to Windows and *nix systems. CUPS + Linux make a good printer server for Linux/Unix LANs. CUPS + Linux + Samba make a great printer server for Windows and mixed LANs.

Open source software isn't just for people with beards and long hair, according to a speaker at a conference in London, where it was noted that Britain is lagging behind other European countries in terms of open source take-up.

It seems EU politicians want to push the directive through the Agriculture Council again. Let's hope the "Thank You Poland" campaign wasn't an early bird.

Many people remain blissfully unaware that you can run a growing list of Windows applications on Linux. This development may disturb a certain tidy model of reality but it represents the overthrow of a major obstacle to the widespread adoption of Linux, that of "Application Availability."

Sun's chief operating officer Jonathan Schwartz said that he expects the Solaris source code to be released "hopefully by the end of this month".

As previously reported, the Santa Clara, Calif.-based systems vendor is expected to submit the Solaris code base this month under its Common Development and Distribution License (CDDL) -- a modified Mozilla open source license recently approved by the Open Source Initiative (OSI).

Improvements to Linux have led Intel to permit Linux laptops to sport the Centrino brand for the first time.

A judge overseeing the legal fight between the SCO Group and IBM over Linux and Unix on Tuesday ordered Big Blue to show all versions of its two Unix products, AIX and Dynix.

You can find ample and able Linux and open source software support from a range of places, but if my recent check on Linux support by Best Buy, Circuit City, CompUSA, and even Dell is any indication, don't expect to find any support from mainstream retailers.

Accounting and payroll application developer Softline Pastel has joined the increasing number of software development houses that have started hedging their bets by developing for Linux as well as Microsoft Windows.

An unpatched Linux server was able to sit on the Internet for months before being successfully compromised while one running Windows was turned over in a few hours, according to a security report.

It turns out that Open Source Development Labs isn't sitting on big news after all about patents and Linux. But it could make some news by supporting the opening up of patents for open source.

Simple Standards-based Slide Show System (S5) is a slide show program for browsers. It creates presentations that do not require any specific software on any specific operating system, and whose size is significantly smaller than conventional presentation formats. And S5 is available under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 license.

O'Reilly is the biggest name in the business of books on today's technology. When you want to use Linux to handle your wireless needs, they don't let you down. Whether it's setting up a WAP, wardriving, syncing your phone via Bluetooth or syncing your PDA via IR, Linux Unwired has it. The LinuxForumsDOTorg Content Development team has written an excellent review of the book. Be sure to read it before you buy!

Last week I walked you through customizing Ubuntu after a brand new stock installation. Now that your system is upgraded and tweaked to your liking, it is time to make sure that you have all the most important applications installed. In part 2 of my Ubuntu article series I discuss some of the more common and very useful (to me at least) apps and how to install them. Read on here.

Interesting interview with Michael Stutz, author of The Linux Cookbook, 2nd Edition.