As part of the FOSDEM preparations for later this month, the organization has posted three interviews with Alexander Larsson (Nautilus & GnomeVFS maintainer), Matthias Ettrich (creator of KDE & Lyx, now at Trolltech) and Oliver Fourdan (creator of XFce).

The January edition of the Syllable Development Newsletter is now available, covering news from the project in the first month of 2005. Major topics: CD-writing support, new network driver, kernel plans, Glibc updates and much more.

Today we are very happy to feature an interview with Aaron Hillegass, the famous tech instructor from the Big Nerd Ranch. We have reviewed his Mac OS X books in the past and this time we are going to talk about the actual process of the classes going on in the ranch every so often.

TerraSoft Solutions released an update to Yellow Dog Linux v4.0.1. The press release is here.

Microsoft has released the single largest number of patches since it has started doing monthly updates. The dozen updates include patches for Office XP, IE 6, and Media Player and MSN Messenger. Also, a glitch in the latest version of Microsoft's Tablet PC software is causing significant performance problems for those running the new operating system, the company has confirmed.

The price of "legacy" systems is dropping at a fast rate. Quad PIII servers can be purchased on Ebay for less than $800. Stacks of old SGI systems (Indy and Indigo) systems are being sold for rock bottom prices. But until one single unified API is created to unite all these systems into one single cluster for use by the common computer user, they will remain useless to most people. This is where HPVM comes in. HPVM exists to bring the cluster concept out of the Universities and research facilities and make them useful for everything from video editing, to database servers.

Unfortunately, the cute FreeBSD daemon is sometimes treated with misunderstanding in the religious and cultural context. That's why The FreeBSD Project is announcing a public competition for the new logo design. You can find the rules of the competition in this document. Update: There is now a petition to keep Beastie, however FreeBSD's own Robert Watson emailed us to inform us that they are "seeking a new logo, but not a new mascot", so that petition is really reduntant. Update 2: Rob Watson writes:

If you've used Linux for a long time, you're probably quite familiar with file permissions. Indeed, managing permissions is a critical part of managing a Linux system. In general, you should provide minimal access whenever possible. Every user (or group) should have just enough permissions and no more.

Windows Server 2003 Service Pack 1 Release Candidate 2 has been released, more info here.

Novell's Nat Friedman wrote about a GL-accelerated X server, Xgl, that David Reveman works on.

As I have browsed this site and others like it, I have often seen comments like "The only way to secure a Windows box is to not connect it to the Internet!" and "How can you stand to use Windows when you have to run tons of apps such as spyware removers and spend hours trying to keep it secure?" Some people have even gone as far as to say that it is literally impossible to secure Windows. Well, I'm here to tell you that not only is it possible, it's actually quite trivial! It requires very little effort and you can do it without running a buttload of security apps and without spending a dime.

This article will show you how to benchmark operating system performance using MySQL on these OSes so you can find out for yourself if you're missing out. While this may not necessarily be indicative of overall system performance or overall database application performance, it will tell you specifically how well MySQL performs on your platform.

For over six years I have been hunting for a Linux distro that would allow me to replace my Windows installation. I've tried many versions of RedHat and Mandrake, and more recently, Gnoppix, Kanotix, Ubuntu, Fedora, and Knoppix. In my evaluations, I would start with high hopes that the latest and greatest distro would install smoothly, support my hardware, and create a genuinely usable system, but none of them really worked--until now. I recently came across the first distro that satisfied all my requirements: Ubuntu.

BitRock InstallBuilder is a multiplatform installation tool that supports Linux, Windows, Solaris and, soon, OSX. Free, fully functional licenses for open source projects. The new version added Solaris support. You can also rate the app here.