LinuxForums gives a short review of BLAG Linux and concludes: "BLAG is not just a distribution for the Free Software elitist, it may not include non-free software, but it is a fully functioning operating system. You can surf the web, write your essays, and listen to your music, just as you would do with any other operating system. BLAG is a distribution which will install with ease, and be low on hassle."

"The National Archives of Australia has announced that it will move its digital archives program to software that supports the ODF. The significance of this example is that the NAA gathers in materials from multiple sources, in many different formats, which will need to be converted to ODF compliance for long term archival storage. The NAA's decision provides a new and distinct case study for those considering a move to ODF. Unlike Mass. or Bristol, the NAA will deal almost exclusively with documents created elsewhere. As a result, it provides a 'worst possible case' to test whether operating an ODF environment in a world that uses multiple non-ODF compliant formats is practical."

In my house today, all of the computers are Macs. This is a long way away from three and a half year ago, when I said that Jaguar could not replace my PC. We're chugging along happily running Tiger, just as productive as before, and enjoying every bit of eye candy. But OS X isn't always cherry pie, it's got its own set of faults, and some can be downright annoying. UPDATED

Abraham Lincoln once said "Better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak out and remove all doubt." Apparently, Tuttle, OK city manager Jerry Taylor never got the memo. Barely a week after his humiliating brush with celebrity after the CentOS fiasco, Taylor has definitively proven that arrogance and ignorance make a humorous combo. The Tuttle Times covers the embarassing incident, along with Taylor's gotta-see-it-to-believe-it response.

Modern machines have far more power than what you need, which can lead to CPU problems. What do you do? David Chisnall suggests virtualization and paravirtualization applications such as Xen, which is discussed in this article.

Combining power with ease of use, the Rexx scripting language is enjoying a surge in popularity. Howard Fosdick introduces this free language and explores some of the basics you need to know before getting started. Elsewhere on that site, this chapter describes Python's built-in operators as well as the precedence rules used in the evaluation of expressions.

As Apple moves from IBM's and Freescale's PowerPC RISC architecture to Intel processors, developers must rebuild their products to support both platforms, into what Apple calls a UB (Universal Binary). And while Apple lists over 1000 UB applications currently available, this process is challenging developers, especially those of some of the largest and most critical applications for the platform.

The community effort hosted by the Apache Software Foundation to create an open source, J2SE 5.0 compatible Java runtime/virtual machine is progressing slowly but steadily. Despite some indifference and prejudice by some OSS pundits, the project has been recently moving along nicely with key players like Intel and IBM contributing their own programmers and source code to the effort.

"In any Linux distribution, some services are enabled to start at boot up by default. For example, on my machine, I have pcmcia, cron daemon, postfix mail transport agent, just to name a few, which start during boot up. Usually, it is prudent to disable all services that are not needed as they are potential security risks and also they unnecessarily waste hardware resources. For example, my machine does not have any pcmcia cards so I can safely disable it. Same is the case with postfix which is also not used. So how do you disable these services so that they are not started at boot time?"

Folks, as the webmaster of OSNews, I'm sorry to report that the OSNews server was hacked early this morning by a l33t haxx0r known only as "osV_rul3z." Although our database server does not appear to have been comprimised, all of the advertising code was deleted and our code was slightly modified to make everyone a premium level subscriber. Rest assured, we are working on the problem and hope to have OSNews restored to its original state as quickly as possible. UPDATE: As everyone suspected, April Fools!

El Reg has made a few phonecalls to the big Microsoft OEMs, and confirmed that Microsoft will ship Vista to OEMs before Christmas 2006. It seems like only the retail version of Vista wil be delayed until January 2006 2007. When Microsoft delayed Vista about a week ago, it excluded the corporate version from that delay, saying that version will ship in November. It seems as if the OEM version will be available at that time as well.

"The Ubuntu team is proud to present the 6th Alpha test, called Flight 6 of our next release, Ubuntu 6.06 (Dapper Drake). With Flight 6 comes additional Look-and-Feel improvements, Live-CD installer enhancements, GNOME 2.14 final, and much more." Download the regular Ubuntu, Kubuntu, or Edubuntu. As usual, PowerPC, x86, and x86-64 are supported with both live CDs and install CDs.

BeleniX 0.4.1 is now available with several additions and improvements: improved bootup time via a variety of mechanisms with further room for improvement in the future, OpenSolaris build 34, improved Monitor auto-detection code, and much more. Get it from their download page.

"Over all, Fedora Core 5 seems to be alot more of a solid distribution than the last time I ran it (FC3), they finally got rid of that nasty up2date that seemed to hang at the worst possibly opportunities - when you're 98% of the way there. The applications also seemed to be tested alot more than previous releases, and the speed as improved substantially, especially with GTK; whether its due to the compile, cairo or some other mystical voodoo I don't understand, what ever the case, the improvement is great. Over all, this is probably the best distribution I've tried; if you're looking for an easy to use, no fuss UNIX-like desktop, look no further than Fedora Core 5."