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In my spare time I like to do graphics work. During my GNU/Linux journey I have designed themes for XMMS, gKRELLm, icons, splash screens, GNOME Display Manager, Metacity, GTK2, fluxbox, openbox, desktop wallpapers, logo's, PmWiki, and HTML templates. Nothing makes a person more proud than having their artwork featured by a major open-source project.

Recently, I stumbled upon a new Linux distribution aimed at the x86, general use, desktop microcomputer. Naturally, I had a bit of an urge to groan, moan, and otherwise throw a temper tantrum. The predisposition to loathe new Linux distributions is not based in a dislike of Linux distribution plurality, but more of a dislike for redundancy.

The last few years has seen the company formerly known as Trolltech open their arms to one of the largest parts of their supporting community, KDE, in a new way: By offering a few members of the KDE community free admittance to the Qt Developer Days conference. This year is no different, and they have invited a number of people to attend this year's conferences. Yes, that's plural: There are two conferences. One from the 12th to 14th of October in Munich, Germany and one from the 2nd to the 4th of November in San Francisco, USA.

The free software community has produced a wealth of tools for the manipulation of image data. For simple changes, such as cropping, resizing, or basic contrast tweaking, any of a number of programs can be used. More complex changes will require falling back to tools like the GIMP, krita, or cinepaint. Anybody who has tried to join together two or more independent images in those tools will have discovered, however, that certain manipulations fall into a class of their own. For that kind of work, hugin would appear to be the only choice. Your editor has long intended to play with hugin; the threat of having some real work to do finally provided the necessary motivation.

Why is it that Linux distros divide and multiply? And do we have a better name for how and why that's done than, say, "forking"? That question goes through my mind when I look at the ever-changing Top 100 list at DistroWatch, and when I look, for example, at the many children of Debian, including grandchildren through Ubuntu.

Mac OS X Snow Leopard? Windows 7? Forget it. The coolest OS release of the year is Puppy Linux 4.3.

Yesterday afternoon, the Google Chrome team released another update with performance gains for platforms, but Mac and Linux users will see the greatest boosts and new, useful functions. Every OS version received some tweaking, including improved New Tab load times and changes to how Chrome handles extensions.

Software Freedom Day (SFD) is a worldwide celebration of Free and Open Source Software (FOSS). The goal is to educate the people around the world about the benefits of using FOSS in education, in government, at home and everywhere else. So wear your favorite FOSS t-shirts, burn a couple of disks of your favorite distro to give away and tell the world how FOSS is the wave of the future!

I consider myself to be a FOSS proponent and there is only one thing that counts to me: great code. I don't care whether you are black or white, atheist or Christian, male or female. I don't check the "About" boxes before I give my judgment. Great code is just great code. It's what FOSS is all about: meritocracy. Because I'm convinced that is the real driving force of FOSS, not "sexism" as some are trying to make us believe.

Announced by UPR team the release of the second stable release of Ubuntu Privacy Remix 9.04. All software packages including the kernel were updated to their newest version to close security holes and fix bugs.

Surfing the net all this time on topics related to GNU/Linux, Free and Open Source Software, I came across various interesting, imaginative and some times funny advertisements and videos. Here are the top 12, in random order.

In this article we will describe how we can create a bootable Backtrack 4 USB Drive that will save all the changes we make on the USB itself. In this scenario we will use 2 USB Drives. One USB drive of 1GB and the 2GB USB drive which will hold our changes.

On the outskirts of the OpenSUSE Conference, core developers revealed details on the new openSUSE version 11.2. Although it will have Kernel 2.6.31, browser users will have to wait a bit longer for YaST.

I recently mentioned Linux in a conversation that started with "I'm tired of the problems my computer has with Windows" and was told that Linux doesn't have any support. Really? Then the dozens of websites, mailing lists, news feeds and IRC channels that I use must be figments of my imagination.

Julius Genachowski, chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, plans to propose a new so-called net neutrality rule Monday that could prevent telecommunications, cable and wireless companies from blocking Internet applications, according to sources at the agency. Genachowski will discuss the rules Monday during a keynote speech at The Brookings Institute. He isn't expected to drill into many details, but the proposal will specifically be for an additional guideline on how operators like AT&T, Verizon, and Comcast can control what goes on their networks. That additional guideline would prevent the operators from discriminating, or act as gatekeepers, of Web content and services.

[Not really FOSS related but certainly of interest to our readers. - Scott]

When I started work on The Art of Community I was really keen that it should be a body of work that all communities have access to. My passion behind the book was to provide a solid guide to building, energizing and enabling pro-active, productive and enjoyable communities. I wanted to write a book that covered the major areas of community leadership, distilling a set of best practices and experiences, and illustrated by countless stories, anecdotes and tales. But to give this book real value, I was keen to ensure the book could be freely accessed and shared. I wanted to not only break down the financial barrier to the information, but also enable communities to share it to have the content be as useful as possible in the scenarios, opportunities and problems that face them.

COBOL is celebrating its 50th birthday. Or at least the name is. In May 1959, during a meeting at the Pentagon in Washington, D.C., the US Department of Defense organized a committee charged with developing a "short range" approach to a common business computing language. And on September 18th of that year, the new Short Range Committee coined the name COBOL, short for Common Business-Oriented Language.

Today is about sexism towards women in FOSS. It is about treating women differently, and poorly, just for being women. It is about doing harm to FOSS. There are a number of reasons why the participation of women in FOSS is so low, around 1.5%, and cruddy treatment of women is a big one. I don't know if it is worse in FOSS than in other arenas, and I don't care-- I'm not grading on a curve.

Latest statistics from Black Duck Software show version 2 of the General Public License (GPLv2) sliding in popularity. Just under half of all the open source projects contained in the September 2009 statistics used the GPLv2.

If your interest is in becoming a Linux administrator one skill you must have is the ability to network servers and understand the interaction between servers. You will also need to know how to build servers using RAID, LVM and optional file systems. These skills can be practiced on a virtual network of practice servers. You can build a training network using one workstation. I use several options for building a training network; VMWare Player, OpenVZ and VirtualBox.