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If today you can convince someone to use some Open-Source software package – a document creator, a presentation tool, a web browser, or even a web server – you give yourself the wedge to start pushing for an Open Source operating system.

A friend of mine has an ADSL account with BT/Yahoo here in the UK. For some reason BT/Yahoo feel compelled to supply (nay insist upon) a customised version of I.E. as the browser for their customers. Okay so first things first: why choose I.E.? If you are thinking it’s for that old chestnut of greater compatibility with a higher number of websites, think again. That argument would work if your customised browser was simply IE rebadged and to all intents and purposes presented as IE. This monstrosity doesn’t — it presents as a BT/Yahoo browser based upon IE. Thus some of the IE compatibility works and some doesn’t. But there’s more — much more. Read the full article at Free Software Magazine.

Microsoft announced this past week that anyone could now purchase a CableCard and install it themselves. No need for OEM help or dealing with pesky cable company rental fees. CableCard allows computer systems to view digital TV transmissions without the aid of a cable box or equivalent.

Contrary to earlier reports stating that the forthcoming id Tech 5 engine from id Software would likely not be ported to Linux due to the involved work, cost, and lackluster Linux graphics drivers (according to John Carmack), it looks like we will end up seeing this next-generation game engine running with Linux.

If you find yourself doing the same tasks over and over again in Firefox, maybe it's time you automated some of those things. Free add-on iMacros for Firefox records your keystrokes and actions and saves them as macros. Then you can then perform recorded tasks with the click of a button.

Paul Sherman has released version 13.0 of his Slackware-based distribution, pulling it level with Slack in the version stakes and relying on the slimline IceWM as window manager.

Indie game developer Koonsolo just revealed some surprising sales statistics on the Linux version of their game. 7 months ago they released their game 'Mystic Mine', and in that time the Linux version sold more copies than the version for Windows. Yet they get plenty more website visits from Windows users.

As Google rolls out GFS2 - a major update to the custom-built file system underpinning its online infrastructure - the company's former infrastructure don sees no reason why the open source world can't follow suit. Famously, Christophe Bisciglia taught a course at the University of Washington meant to educate rising computer scientists in Google's epic data juggling ways, and earlier this year, he brought his Big Data know-how to Cloudera, a star-studded startup that's helping to mimic Google's data prowess via open source software.

Juliet Kemp shares some useful regular expressions for finding things on your Linux system. She also guides us through the perilous minefields of single quotes, double quotes, and shell expansion, and shows us how to craft our own custom regular expressions.

A Russian Web developer has found a network of a couple of hundred Linux servers that could distribute malware to Windows systems.

Last week Microsoft unveiled (perhaps sooner than intended) its new CodePlex Foundation,with the mission of “enabling the exchange of code and understanding among software companies and open source communities.” Does it stand a chance of gaining any community participation?

You know what Microsoft doesn't get? -- For one thing, the Internet. Microsoft doesn't control it. What it used to be able to do in the dark now falls out of its noxious bag of tricks into the Internet's bright light, stage front and center. And there stands Microsoft in the spotlight, with its pants down, and let me tell you, it's not a pretty sight. Microsoft also wants, I take it, exactly what Darl McBride wanted and still wants for SCO -- that every Linux install means payment to Microsoft (or SCO, depending on the dreamer). Not to put too fine a point on it, they want billions from Linux without having actually developed it themselves. Microsoft of course has larger dreams -- it wants to replace Linux, the kernel, and be everything to everybody.

The Mint development team has announced the release of Linux Mint 7 XFCE, a Community Edition code named 'Gloria'. Linux Mint is an Ubuntu-based distribution that aims to be user friendly and provide a more complete out-of-the-box experience by including support for DVD playback, Java, plug-ins and various media CODECs.

LAMP is short for Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP. This tutorial shows how you can install an Apache2 webserver on a Debian Lenny server with PHP5 support (mod_php) and MySQL support.

Here's a review aimed at helping open source projects choose a free (like beer) hosting service—particularly for demanding, dynamic sites—covering SourceForge, Google App Engine, Launchpad, and Blogger.

If you have not stopped by the #linuxjournal IRC channel yet, I would encourage you to do so. You never know who you will meet or what sort of new ideas will germinate. For example: the other day, while having !coffee and a danish, I was chatting with our fearless Editor-in-Geek, Carlie, and she was commenting that someone had left the radio on. No, not that radio, the Amateur radio. This got my attention as I was not aware Carlie had her ticket (she does not - I am working on her - browbeating is the term my XYL uses, but I digress). As many of you know, I too am an Amateur Radio operator - a ham. [I should note that personally, I don't like the term...it does not mean anything, but it is what most folks know us as so...]. And we started chatting.

LXer Feature: 14-Sept-2009

This tutorial shows how you can limit the CPU usage of a process with the tool cpulimit on Debian/Ubuntu. cpulimit is a simple program that attempts to limit the CPU usage of a process (expressed in percentage, not in cpu time). This is useful to control batch jobs, when you don't want them to eat too much CPU. It does not act on the nice value or other scheduling priority stuff, but on the real CPU usage. Also, it is able to adapt itself to the overall system load, dynamically and quickly.

Atlanta Linux Fest 2009 will be held Saturday, September 19th, 2009, which is also Software Freedom Day. Ubuntu, Fedora, and openSUSE will be presenting upcoming releases and interesting projects that have been going in their respective communities. Open Source projects like SugarCRM, Drupal, and Blender will be represented. Discussions about GPLv3 and women in OSS wil be held. And of course, much more!

When you open Nautilus you will see files and folders. Most of those files, when double-clicked, will be opened with the associated application. When you double-click on an image icon, by default, the application Eye of GNOME will open and display that file. But what if you wanted that file to automatically open with The GIMP for image editing? There are a couple of ways to do this.