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The Linux Mint Debian Edition — built from Debian Testing, unlike "regular" Mint editions that start with an Ubuntu base — just released a new image that pushes the project forward much more quickly that I expected.

The second release candidate of the Document Foundation's fork of OpenOffice, LibreOffice, has been made available and announced in the Document Foundation's blog. In the announcement, the developers say the release is "beta quality software", ask for users to play with it so they can test and give feedback, and list over 80 individuals who have contributed to development between the third beta and current release candidate.

Using free software in education is not just about saving money. It's also about preserving choice, not locking a student's experience into a certain way of doing something. With Linux, there's no vendor lock-in. Free software is more likely to be open-standards compliant, and it's going to be more open to different languages, localities and curricula.

I've been thinking and thinking about everything, and I've figured out what I need to explain to you next. Reading the log of the recent OpenSUSE board meeting discussing setting up a foundation for the project turned on the light in my head: you need to understand bylaws. Because corporations are setting up foundations to get you to donate code to, and they set them up to suit themselves, not to benefit you. There's a difference between the community setting up a foundation to be a project's home and a corporate sponsor doing it. I'm going to write about that in more detail later. To really explain it, I need to explain some things that you might think will be boring or too foreign, but if you can learn Perl, you can learn bylaws.

Firewall Builder is a firewall configuration and management GUI that supports configuring a wide range of firewalls from a single application. Supported firewalls include Linux iptables, BSD pf, Cisco ASA/PIX, Cisco router access lists and many more. In this tutorial we are going to cover how to use Firewall Builder to configure a NAT rule that translates both the source and destination IP addresses of the original packet. This type of NAT configuration can be useful in a variety of network configurations.

LXer Feature: 27-Dec-2010

Welcome to the last Roundup for 2010 and please accept my apologies for being a day late getting this to you. It seems the holiday festivities have caused me to lose track of time.. Enjoy!

Vladimir Putin has signed an order calling for Russian federal authorities to move to GNU/Linux, and for the creation of 'a single repository of free software used in the federal bodies of executive power

If you have an old cam that you are not using, you can use it as a security cam. Control Motion is a program that monitors the video signal from one or more cameras and is able to detect if a significant part of the picture has changed; in other words, it can detect motion. The program is written in C and is made for the Linux operating system (using the video4linux interface). Motion is a command line based tool whose output can be either jpeg, ppm fies or mpeg video sequences. Motion is strictly command line driven and can run as a daemon with a rather small footprint.

AMD has allowed their Radeon GPUs to be overclocked on Linux since 2008 when using their Catalyst driver with OverDrive support. Previous to that there was Rovclock for overclocking select ATI Radeon ASICs using an open-source program along with support for tuning the video memory timings and other options, which was a program written via reverse engineering. The Catalyst Linux driver supports OverDrive manipulation of the core and memory clocks, which is enough for most enthusiasts, but if you've been looking for more extensive features there is a new option.

Linux distributions tend to fall into one of two camps. The first are those, like Ubuntu and Fedora, that are aimed mostly at enthusiasts and others happy to teeter on the bleeding edge of technology. The other group consists of more stable, commercially supported software, designed for those after less excitement, and includes products such as SUSE Linux Enterprise and Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL). New releases are a rarity in this category, so when a major new product like RHEL 6 comes along it's a big event, and one worthy of close attention.

This guide explains how you can run virtual machines with VirtualBox 4.0 on a headless Ubuntu 10.10 server. Normally you use the VirtualBox GUI to manage your virtual machines, but a server does not have a desktop environment. Fortunately, VirtualBox comes with a tool called VBoxHeadless that allows you to connect to the virtual machines over a remote desktop connection, so there's no need for the VirtualBox GUI.

It's a testament to how far Linux has come that users today don't typically have to use the command line if they don't want to. Such is the quality of the graphical user interfaces in many modern Linux distributions that there's simply no need, in general.

Popular Linux game Nexuiz was forked into a new game Xonotic earlier this year as there was some disagreement between Nexuiz developers and community. Now Xonotic developers have released first preview version playable on Linux, Windows and Mac.

Novell throws FOSS under the bus to make a deal with Microsoft. Pamela Jones wonders why bother with Groklaw, if helping companies like Novell only leads to getting the shaft yet again?

All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy, but paying for everything make Jack rather poor. Here's a look at the most popular places to score free games online for some cheap end-of-year fun.

DockBarX 0.42 is released, this version comes with some improvements and a new feature codenamed "ScrollPeak" : " With ScrollPeak instead of rising windows while scrolling, the windows will simply be opacified one by one until you found the one you are looking for and when you move the mouse cursor away from the group button it will be raised. Nothing revolutionary but it should improve the work flow for some of you."

I took a few days off from writing any articles, partly to try to make a serious dent in transcribing the Comes v. Microsoft exhibits. We're in the home stretch, and a quiet weekend, marking on a curve, is perfect. I know there's lots going on, other than work. I also needed to take some time to think about the recent discovery about Novell taking money from Microsoft and contractually agreeing to show up at Open XML standards meetings and events. Should Groklaw stop helping people like that, I asked? Is it time to shut Groklaw down? If not, is there a way to carve out helping Linux and FOSS, which is what we are about, from helping self-interested executives and board members so that in essence we end up being used by them so they get larger piles of money because we worked ourselves to the bone and then they repay the community with such a deal as this?

Dan Kegel released winetricks 20101008 today. new verbs icodecs, msnasn1, opensymbol, wmi, xmllite; removed obsolete verbs audioio, dcom98, eadm, urlmon

Back in 1998 when I started using Linux, it was ugly. In those days you installed it by inserting around 40 floppy disks into your computer and praying that one of them wouldn't be a duffer and make you have to start again. After this lengthy installation process, you were typically presented with this not-entirely-intuitive interface:

Photoshop users who have switched to GIMP will notice that some of the PS features are not readily available in Gimp. Drawing arrows is one of them. As a tech blogger who have to edit plenty of screenshots everyday, there are times where I need to draw arrows on the images to illustrate the point. While this can be easily done in Photoshop, the feature is not available in the default installation of GIMP. Here is what you can do to enable the arrow feature in GIMP.