Version 1.1 of FreeSBIE, a FreeBSD Live CD, was released last week, and here's a first look. Update: Screenshots via OSDir.com.

Jeri Ellsworth, a 30-year-old high school dropout and self-taught computer chip designer, has re-created the entire Commodore 64 on one chip and inserted it into a joystick, with several games, (like the cool Atari-in-a-joystick games) allowing nostalgic thirtysomethings to relive their youths. A NYT/news.com article has an interesting profile of Ellsworth, her creation, and other projects she's worked on.

I guess shelling out big bucks for a New York Times ad is paying off. The New York Times has published an article about Firefox in their technology section, outlining its provenance, its recent rise in fortune, and the competitive landscape of the newly-competitive-again browser wars. (Firefox users can take advantage of the Bugmenot Extension to handle the NYT login).

Oreilly has an interview with the developers of Rosegarden, a Linux music application that handles MIDI and audio recording and sequencing, sound effects and synth plugins, and a score editor.

Microsoft Office is fast becoming a software platform unto itself. There are a growing number of programs being developed that run on top of Office, much the same way that Office and other programs run on Windows.

The current changelog informs us that Patrick is back in good health from the strange ailments that affected him previously He also muses about his plans for Slackware 10.1 and kernel 2.6 possibly in Slackware 11.

I noticed that IBM released a new Redbook this month: "Linux Client Migration Cookbook -- A Practical Planning and Implementation Guide for Migrating to Desktop Linux" Among the most interesting topics which are focused on the desktop deployment and technology are the chapters about "Migration best practices" and "Desktop automation and scripting".

The Sun-sponsored OpenOffice.org project based on open sourced StarOffice code has released a preview of the upcoming OpenOffice 2.0 product. This version touts better MS-Office loading and parsing, strict XML compliant output, a new database program that mimics Microsoft's Access, and much more. The Inquirer took it for a spin.

University students tasked with finding flaws in Unix applications as homework have uncovered 44 bugs. But since the University of Illinois at Chicago students were asked by tutor Daniel Bernstein to find 10 bugs each, most will likely flunk his Unix Security Holes course. The assignment counted for 60 per cent of the marks available to the 25 students taking the course.

I'm not upgrading my Fedora Core 2 machine to Core 3, even though the new version has been out for a couple of months. There's not anything wrong with FC3 itself, it's just that system upgrades are both a blessing and a curse.

The EU council has decided to pass the heavily controversial patent directives on software without any vote or debate. We reported recently that Linus Torvalds and other European Open Source developers called this the single biggest threat to Free and Open Source software.

According to an article at DesktopLinux.com, TheKompany.com today formally launched Mindawn, a music download service that, unlike iTunes and Napster, targets Linux desktops. Mindawn is claimed to provide CD-quality song files and "virtually no" digital rights management (DRM) restrictions, offer full previews of the entire songs, and provide downloads in Ogg Vorbis and FLAC, and other formats. Update: Deleted some extraneous text outlining which formats are "lossy" and which aren't.

In the past months we came across a variety of issues that we wanted to discuss with the company that came up with the Mini-ITX form-factor and the EPIA boards. In the past weeks we also collected our readers’ questions and included them in this interview. EpiaCenter.com features an interview with VIA's Werner du Plessis.

Live Linux CDs are a simple concept with many possible uses. Here are 10 things you can do with a live Linux CD.