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Lately there have been a fair amount of "Linux is not ready for the desktop" articles around the web. There are complaints about the trouble of installing and configuring systems. One recurring comment is that there are a lack of pre-loaded systems available. LinuxCertified is one company that offers Linux pre-loaded on laptops, which have a reputation of being somewhat of a bear to install on. Linuxlookup.com was eager to see if LinuxCertified's offering was "ready for the desktop (or laptop)". Read the full review.

A U.K. advertising standards body has warned Microsoft that its 'Get the Facts' ad campaign claiming Linux isn't cheaper than Windows could be misleading.

The new XOrg X11 server is due out on August 25th and with it comes some new, exciting features and improvements to old ones. I will describe some of these features, changes and more in this article.

Life without Microsoft's Windows: Michael Pollitt tests the open-source option

Gentoo based Vidalinux Desktop OS Beta2 will please both Linux and Mac users alike.

RSS/XML feedreading extention to Moz. Thunderbird, Forumzilla, has released new version 0.5.2 which fixes a critical usage bug. OSDir is featuring some screenshots of the application in use. As the forumzilla development team says, "no need for a separate News & Blogs account."

The second day of aKademy, KDE's World Summit 2004, opened the two-day developers' conference, involving a series of presentations and discussions both on ground-breaking topics like KJSEmbed and other subjects important to KDE. When not attending the two parallel tracks of presentations, KDE developers took the opportunity to socialise and hack in the comfortable surroundings of Ludwidgsburg's Filmakademie.

For your next DIY project, pick up an old Pentium computer and a CompactFlash card and build a custom router/firewall.

Welcome to this year's 33rd issue of DWN, the weekly newsletter for the Debian community. A lot of work has been done to help release sarge soon. Several recommendations and removals were requested on the debian-release list. Claus Fischer even requested to document important issues in the release notes. Jeroen van Wolffelaar asked maintainers to answer some questions if they maintain one or more packages with different versions in sarge and sid in order to help the release management.

Day three of aKademy opened with presentations in two tracks, covering the themes of multimedia on the desktop and integration. A cruel starting time of 8.45 meant that the first talks suffered from a rather low attendance, perhaps due to the exploits of certain KDE hackers. But those who managed to crawl out of bed so early were not disappointed.

A U.N.-funded organization has produced a Linux desktop manual for novice PC users as part of an effort to encourage developing countries to use open-source software.

Microsoft on Monday withdrew from a United Nations software standards group for commerce, citing "business reasons."

Enlightenment version DR16.7.1 has been released. In this new package, the theme has been replaced, dependencies have changed, and it has been split into three parts, "programs", "docs", and "themes". We've taken over thirty screenshots for those who like to look prior to downloading.

The Conference of KDE Developers and Contributors finished a few days ago, and we are now happy to announce a collection of reports, videos, slides and notes from presentations, as well as plenty of photo galleries from those attending the KDE World Summit - aKademy. There are full reports on day one (Saturday) and day two (Sunday) on Newsforge. You can also find transcripts and slides from many of the talks on the schedule (thanks go to Jonathan Riddell for the transcripts). The video stream archives can be found here, courtesy of Fluendo. Attendees have also started to add their photo albums to this wiki page. Those attending aKademy are invited to add notes to this wiki page, their photos to the other wiki page, and speakers are asked to send their slides to the press team.

- Novell Business Continuity Clustering 1.0 automates configuration and management of geographically dispersed server clusters, protecting businesses against site downtime and disasters

As the open source industry grows and becomes more widely accepted, the use of Linux as a secure operating system is becoming a prominent choice among corporations, educational institutions and government sectors. With national security concerns at an all time high, the question remains: Is Linux secure enough to successfully operate the government and military's most critical IT applications?

Melbourne Bennett has written an editorial on his opinions regarding user-friendly web sites and computer interfaces. This subject, and the resulting text, grew out of this thread on Lycoris’ community web site. Feel free to come by to see what others had to say on this subject, pro (yes, there are others who have issues with some of the things as they now are) and cons.