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Your occasiodaily dose of FOSS and Linux news as delivered by your host, Marcel Gagné (aka WFTL). Today's news features bad news for the economy, a Linspire suit, a turnabout wind, Norwegian OOXML dirt, some Google, and an important birthday!

Your occasiodaily dose of FOSS news as delivered by your host, Marcel Gagné (aka WFTL). Today's newscast features political debates the day after, China spying on Skype users, RedHat in government, ODF in government, and 100 reasons.

Your occasiodaily dose of FOSS news as delivered by your video host, Marcel Gagné (aka WFTL). Today's video news features a bailout for billionaires, rotten Apples, dried up venture capitalists, and two attempts to spread the Linux word to the masses.

Is it me? or has information security completely changed? Give you a bit of a background - I live, breathe, eat and sleep computer security. I'm not one of those"masturbating monkeys" as Linus puts it. But that's not what this rant is about.

Thank you so much for releasing Flash Player 10 beta 2 for Linux. Thanks even more for (finally) building in support for video4linux2 Webcam technology. You have no idea how much we appreciate that. The only problem is that many (if not most) of us can't use it. You see, it crashes our browsers within seconds.

So, you have all this wonderful FOSS/Linux know how and a passion for it. Your passion is so great that you want to make a living doing it. That is sooo cool. But before you do, you need to learn how to boil to water and develop a solid business model around it so you can actually make money.

Last night I went to a presentation/pitch for Vista deployment in the enterprise (there's a Star-Trek joke in there somewhere). It's not that I'm dissatisfied with Linux, but I like to know what's going on with Windows, especially since we do deploy Windows machines at work. At some level I always want to learn something new. What I learned was more pitch than enlightenment. The presenter, Mitch Garvis, did a great job of pitching Vista, though I would disagree with him on several points (which I will below), but my impression (keep in mind most of the room were Windows-centric IT Professionals) was that a few people were buying the pitch, but not too many.

Low tech games for a high tech world . . . Who says you need a fancy high-end graphics card to play some great Linux games? Heck, who says you need graphics at all? Seriously.

Joomla! is a world class content management system that allows you to easily create high-quality, professional Websites. Out of the box, provides a very robust feature set, and with the recent release of 1.5 Stable, the programing API allows it to be extended far beyond most people's wildest dreams. Highlighting some of the features Joomla! supports out of the box would take up an entire article all on its own, but here we'll touch on some of the highlights!

Earth Hour aside, 2008 may mark the year of "lights out" for power hungry computers. The gPC sold at Wal*mart and the Asus Eee PC led the way, both running Linux of course. The trend began in 2007 when we were introduced to the Koolu PC: I test drove a Koolu at the Ontario Linux fest last year and I was impressed with its speed and graphics capability.

I recently picked up "Firefly, The Complete Series", and would like to enjoy viewing it on my newly recycled laptop. Placing a Firefly DVD in the drive, after a moment, the 'what do you want me to do with this?' window popped up. I pick play with Kaffeine, a short banner appears, and then Kaffeine dies, being unable to read the DVD. What to do?

Open Source empowers business. This article describes some of the facts, outlines how EnQii, the Digital Signage company where the author is Chief Technology Officer, is benefiting from FOSS, and outlines how in the future, FOSS will be increasingly used.

If you've ever wanted to save those videos you watch on YouTube, you've no doubt looked to (or wondered about) various Firefox plugins or programs to do the job. Well, no need to go hunting and installing. The whole process is a lot easier than you think.

Nothing says high performance like a good race. Got your Linux box? Got a good accelerated video card as well? Then get yourself these great racing games, get behind the wheel, and drive!

Today, I'm going to show you a great little application for easily generating a Web gallery of images that requires no server side coding. Just generate your gallery with a simple command, then upload to your Web site. Of course, coding a Web page is easy enough if you know even basic HTML, and you can create thumbnails with the tools in ImageMagick easily enough, but setting up that little web slide show can be a tad time consuming even if you know how to do all these things. There are also some great Web photo gallery packages out there, like Zenphoto, but what if you don't have shell access to your Website or you aren't allowed to install programs or run scripts? You might well be in a bind. This is where iGal comes into play.

It took about a week to get here, but it finally arrived, my Asus Eee PC is here. First of all I had to curb my excitement as the batteries took some time to charge – up to two hours. So why did I buy this? Well I have to admit to a wee bit of technolust. But avoiding technolust was the very reason I did not just go out and purchase one as soon as the Eee PC came out. After I had one in my hands for 3 minutes, I knew that I wanted one and that it would be useful. How useful? Well, let me tell you.

In the first part of this series, I introduced you to the concepts behind IRC. The second installment is somewhat more practical in nature and focuses on the default IRC client used by most distributions running the GNOME desktop. This is Peter Železný's XChat.

So why does a person install one Linux, then another, and then yet another? Because a person can, of course! Such is the nature of choice, and Linux gives you a choice . . . and what a selection. The trouble, of course, comes when you have to backup, wipe a system, reinstall, over and over. The answer is virtualization. There are many virtual machine tools out there nowadays, but your system probably came with one and in this edition of "Cooking with Linux", I will show you how to work with the software.

If you are old enough to remember CB radio (i.e.: mid-30s and up), you pretty much understand IRC-at least in the human sense of the experience. The younger crowd can think of IRC as a suped-up free version of text-messaging in serious steroids.

Good news, everyone! Dell is now selling PCs with Ubuntu Linux preinstalled. Read on to discover what happens when one man decides to buy one of these PCs, then chooses Dell's Complete Care solution to protect his new hardware. Chaos, or at very least, confusion, ensues.