W.I.L. Tech-News Highlights 2008, Part 2

Dreamlinux is extremely simple, covers a broad ranges of requirements, and is a beautiful desktop system. It is recommended for first-time Linux users - link.

• • Linux Distribution News and Reviews • •

andLinux is very cooperative with Windows - link.
Bluewhite64 ports Slackware to the AMD64 architecture - link.
Fedora 9: Linux desktop alive and well at Red Hat - link.
Fedora 9 makes waves by emphasizing contributors - link.
Fedora 9 and the road to KDE4 - link.
Linspire tightens Click-N-Run ties with Mint, Ubuntu - link.
PCLinuxOS Gnome a fast, stable, attractive desktop distro - link.
Puppy Linux 4.0: Has it learned new tricks? - review.

Puppy Linux 4.0 on a Dell Inspiron 1150 - review.
Puppeee: Puppy for your Eee PC - link.
Ubuntu 8.04: Upgrade or clean install? - link.
Hardy Heron converts an Ubuntu skeptic - link.
Use Wubi to install Ubuntu without partitioning - link.
Xubuntu is a lightweight offspring of Ubuntu - link.
Zenwalk continues to impress with 5.2 beta - link.

Lightweight Linux distributions Arch, Damn Small Linux, Puppy, TinyMe, Xubuntu and Zenwalk compared - link.

New SymphonyOne distribution simplifies the desktop concept. Newest release brings a new level of stability to the design, making it a viable alternative to KDE, GNOME, or Fluxbox - link.

KVM (Kernel-based Virtual Machine), Linux's own baked-in virtualization program, has been gaining popularity. Now the company behind KVM is releasing a commercial virtual desktop called Solid ICE based on KVM technology - link.

Ask Linux.com:
Partitioning, creating a mountable disk image, and how to post productively - link.
Prepping for updates, GRUB versus LILO, and forum tools - link.
Redistributing a distribution, running non-native apps, and forum guidelines - link.
Startup commands, cloning, and anti-virus software - link.
Choosing a distro, working with external hard drives, and learning how to write - link.
Sudo and user passwords, monitoring the Web - link.

toast takes the burden out of building, installing, and keeping track of software built from source - link.

Top 7 wireless apps for Linux (once you get your wireless card working!) - link.

Opera 9.27 reviewed. It is fast, powerful in the hands of a skilled user and available on multiple platforms. But it needs to get a handle on better page rendering - Part I, Part II.

Flock is a pretty slick browser alternative for anyone with a ton of cyber friends - link.

Thunderbird 3 fledges with first alpha release, a very promising indication that Mozilla Messaging is moving forward and making some progress - link.

The SIMILE Seek Thunderbird extension adds faceted browsing, which allows you to search and manage your email messages in a radically different way than you are used to - link.

JWChat is a Jabber instant messaging client that is written using only HTML and JavaScript, which means that you need not install a Jabber instant messaging client in order to use Jabber, assuming you already have a Web browser installed - link.

Blog host WordPress version 2.5 impresses - link. • Three feed plugins for WordPress - link.

Twitter is a popular social networking utility that is gaining popularity as a micro-blogging tool. Six Twitter clients for the Linux desktop and one for the road reviewed - link.

Automatically watching Web sites for changes - link. • Monitor Web page changes with Python-based Specto - link.

AbiWord 2.6.0 looks solid but suffers from age-old Linux problem: it is a pain to install - link.

Producing visually pleasant documents from plain text with reStructuredText and rst2a - link.

Tomboy, an open source notetaking app, helps you cull and organize the hundreds of bits of information you track, and to prioritize it on to-do lists on the fly - link.

KnowledgeTree open source turn-key document management software can be tailored to a business's needs - link. • KnowledgeTree co-founders explain their commercial open source business strategy - link.

Inkscape 0.46 is out, showcasing new tools, new effects, new filters, and a host of interface and speed improvements - link.

Pencil is an open source, cross-platform animation application that lets you create in glorious 2-D. It mimics hand-drawn animation techniques, but it is easy to use and produces high-quality output - link.

Fyre is an open source application which creates images and animations based on histograms of chaotic functions - link.

Three utilities for automatically converting audio for portable music players - link.

Open source programmers flocking to the Mac? - link. • Do not expect a flood of Mac open source - link.

Tim Bray, director of Web technologies at Sun Microsystems, provides a bridge between Sun and developers - link.

How to create an application that looks and feels like a desktop application but runs on a typical Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP stack. It uses Mozilla XUL instead of HTML, and Mozilla Prism to create a streamlined version of the application that will run outside of a typical browser - link.

Using Firefox extention Firebug, you can monitor, edit, and debug live pages, including HTML, CSS, JavaScript code, and network traffic - link.

OOo Basic crash course: Creating a simple game using strings in a database - link.

A growing and more dangerous threat, called Internet counter-intelligence, is the use of sophisticated Web analytics to uncover corporate-user identities to analyze and track enterprise surfing habits. Doing so affords the perpetrator the ability to capture IP addresses and network identities - link.

gpgdir uses GnuPG to encrypt and decrypt files or a whole directory tree - link.

Keep You Safe makes it possible for subscribers to store all their personal data securely in a virtual online "safe deposit box", and share the key with someone they trust - link.

How to make your Asus Eee PC secure from prying eyes by using a privacy filter - link.

"Pay attention to your freedom instead of self-serving forecasts": Richard Stallman speaks with Poornam Media - link.

The OOXML document format war is over, and the good guys lost. The world will be a worse place because of it, for a long time to come. Now Jeremy Allison goes back to coding Samba - link. • Microsoft and ODF: Has Hell frozen over? - link.

Bradley Kuhn is one of the founding team members of the Software Freedom Law Center, and a longtime advocate for the cause of Free Software - link.

New York State Supreme Court rules that Dell and its affiliate, Dell Financial Services, engaged in fraud, false advertising, deceptive business practices, and abusive debt collection practices - link.

Court reaffirms right to sell used copies of software regardless of any licensing agreement - link.

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W.I.L. Tech-News Highlights for 2008: 2