"This beginner article by Mark Rais provides step-by-step instructions for installing Moodle, a Learning Management System, on to a Fedora Linux server. It provides everything necessary to setup a full powered intranet web-server that can support course listings, event calendars, student/teacher communication and much more."

Peter Aitken points out that text is just a graphic image and therefore can be manipulated like any other graphic. .NET provides some built-in tools for manipulating the size, shape, and orientation of text. Just be sure it remains readable!

Microsoft has said that the version of IE7 for Vista will differ slightly from the one for XP and down. "I want to announce that we will be naming the version of IE7 in Windows Vista 'Internet Explorer 7+'. While all versions of IE7 are built from the same code base, there are some important differences in IE7+, most significantly the addition of Windows Vista-only features like Protected Mode, Parental Controls, and improved Network Diagnostics. These features take advantage of big changes in Windows Vista and weren’t practical to bring downlevel."

"A prerelease of X-Windows version X11R6.3 for OS4 is now available on OS4-depot. It is a complete unix-like environment, which is meant as a base for ports from the linux-world." It includes X11R6.3 and various other components.

The spirit of the RISC OS desktop can now be easily be installed on Debian GNU/Linux systems, after the ROX desktop collection was released in a Debian package. The package came about after Dennis Tomas decided pull the suite into one place for users to download and install. The ROX desktop takes familiar user interface components from the RISC OS desktop, such as drag'n'drop and the filer, to create a more friendlier desktop for users of Unix-like operating systems. User Dan Macdonald told us: "It is now incredibly easy for people to install a full ROX (RISC OS on X) desktop, complete with auto-mounting of removeable discs, under Debian Linux."

"I had a course on distributed system in my Engineering curriculum, and I was really fascinated with the way people use this technology for work. As my interest grew in this field, I started to read a lot on this. As a result, while browsing a few pages, I found a link to Google File System. Honestly, it didn’t make any sense to me. Where would Google deploy this proprietary file system? Or is Google planning to have an operating system? I decided to have a look at it nonetheless and here’s a quick overview of my findings."

Jeremie Le Hen has created some ProPolice patches for FreeBSD 6.x and 7-CURRENT. ProPolice is a gcc extension written by Hiroaki Etoh for IBM that tries to prevent stack-smashing attacks. You can find the announcement of the patches here, more info about ProPolice on the IBM ProPolice page, and you can download the FreeBSD patches from here.

The 2006 OpenBSD Hackathon, c2k6, is well underway in a conference room at a hotel in downtown Calgary, Canada. The event started yesterday, May 27th, attended by nearly 50 OpenBSD developers from all over the globe. OpenBSD creator Theo de Raadt is thrilled by what is already proving to be another successful event. "I don't think anybody else does this, developers suspend their lives for a week to focus entirely on just development."

Mother Nature likes object-oriented development! C++ programmers often can't afford the luxury of creating a universe of objects; our platforms are intrinsically limited. However, the flyweight design pattern provides an elegant means of sharing objects, with a small price in terms of storage and retrieval. Stephen Morris describes C++ code that uses the flyweight design pattern to solve a knotty problem in networking. Also on the same web site, "Mastering the Requirements Process".

In this, the 60th anniversary year of the computer, it may be interesting to look back at a couple of key events in the evolution of this very important market. This is a market now amounting to extraordinary numbers of machines. In 2010, the last year for which we have numbers, there were no less than 10 million machines shipped! This growth and penetration is unparalled in the history of industrial products in the last 100 years, and is an amazing success. However, to get to this stage, the industry had to make its way through some issues and decision points. There are generally agreed to have been key turning points. What would have happened if they had gone differently?

"Lately I've been blogging quite a bit on the state of on-line journalism. One aspect of that topic that I haven't touched on for awhile is the way in which a story breaks, builds, morphs and spreads electronically. The recent announcement of the Backdoor.Ginwui virus provides an interesting opportunity to do this once again, in order to see who addressed the story and how (including by me), and what, if anything, it all means." OSNews did not report on this Backdoor.Ginwui virus.

"In a decision that could set the tone for journalism in the digital age, a California appeals court ruled Friday that bloggers, like traditional reporters, have the right to keep their sources confidential. A panel of three judges said in a 69-page decision that a group of bloggers did not have to divulge their sources to Apple, contending that the same laws that protect traditional journalists, the First Amendment, and California's Shield Law, also apply to bloggers." My take: You already know how I feel about this, but I still need to say it, and I do not care if I get flamed for saying it: this is a clear-cut victory for the freedom of speech and press in the US (I live in The Netherlands, though), and you should all be happy Apple did not win this case. Update: Ars has an analysis and history of the case.

GNU-Darwin has gotten support for AMD's Opteron processors. "Mac OS X users are welcome to give free software a try now. I finally got a chance to try GNU-Darwin-1.1 on an Opteron machine with Darwin-7.2. Testing with glxgears confirms that the MesaGL is performing about twice as fast as on a comparable 32-bit CPU, although some other tasks are clearly not yet optimized. The machines are otherwise roughly identical. Here is a screenshot."

This guide explains how to expand Damn Small Linux to fit your needs. "For those unfamiliar with the Distro, DSL is a severely stripped down version of Debian/Knoppix. The distribution aims to include as many useful applications as possible while remaining under 50MB. It uses a 2.4 series kernel, busybox, a tiny little Xserver, Fluxbox as the default WM, and a host of other microscopic office, media and Internet applications. It is designed to be easily expandable by via a system called 'MyDSL'."