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I love finding new music, Last.fm can be useful for that but like a lot of web services it doesn’t give much away about how it works internally. Now there are plans afoot to create a completely free (as in freedom) alternative called Libre.fm. I got more information from project instigator Matt Lee (FSF)

It’s time for another distro review and I’m a bit overdue with this one but I’m a big fan of Debian and the dedicated community who develop it, I make no secret of that. When I reviewed Etch (4.0) last year I declared that if I were to finally grow up and settle down with just one distro this would be the one. I like the fact that it’s not backed by any commercial entity and sticks closely to it’s Free Software principals. After some delay version 5.0 Lenny was finally released this Valentine’s Day, how appropriate but would it still be true love? There was only one way to find out…

This week, we interview Matt Lee from the FSF, talk about Dvorak and Linux, how the French police saved millions with Open Source, CC Zero and Ted Ts’o thoughts on Ext4 data loss. You're all very welcome to come and join us for laughs and Linux geekery.

I bought myself a 4gb Freecom Databar for just a few quid and it was about this time I first tried the niftly little program I’d like to talk to you about today. It’s called unetbootin and people have been telling me how great it is for quite some time now, not being a USB stick owner myself - I’ve probably surrendered my last shred of geek cred with that confession - I hadn’t had much call to try it. There are various ways to put a Linux distribution on a USB stick and making it bootable, I don’t even think it’s that hard a process but I wanted something quick, easy and effective. That’s just what I got with this tool. One click and you can download an install image for the distro of your choice, copy it to your USB stick and make it bootable.

“…almost all of the newest hardware coming out has Linux support. The critical mass has been reached. Go download Ubuntu 8.10 and see for yourself what the fuss is about. You won’t regret it” That’s probably just the sort of thing you’d expect to hear from me right? Perhaps so but it’s not the sort of thing you expect to hear from veteran computer journalist John C Dvorak. He has never had much love for Linux and he’s been very critical (some would even say derogatory) in the past. So when someone sent me an email saying he’d been writing about Linux again I groaned to myself and thought “another kicking from the mainstream press just what we need”. I was completely wrong though, he seems to love the latest Ubuntu and is even telling the whole world and his mate to go and try it out. This could have a big effect on the uptake as he’s a guy a lot of people listen to and trust for computer advice. If he says Linux is cool people might actually listen. At least the sort of people who would dismiss me out of hand as a liberal hippie douche. He uses two crucial words "critical mass" but is he right?

Today’s candidate is the latest release of a distro I first looked at some time ago, Sabayon. I’ve had mixed feelings about it in the past, I found 2.2 Professional to be very bloated, capable of interesting innovations but overall slightly disappointing. It’s a Gentoo based distro from Italy and it seems there’s no love lost between the Gentoo and Sabayon camps or so I’ve been told. I wanted to see how it had developed now they’d reached version 4.0, so here goes nothing…

On this slightly belated, massively bloated show: We talk to the DPL about Lenny, Fab reviews CrunchEee and the newest CrunchBang and we also have the usual open source releases, news and some gaming-related stuff.

I decided earlier this week I needed to rip a DVD and looked around at the available options on Linux. I’m not overly experienced at doing this sort of thing, in the past I’ve always got the job done with applications like dvd:rip but not had a very satisfying experience. I’d heard a while back that the popular program Handrake had now released a Linux version with a GUI (Graphical User Interface) and it seemed a good idea to try it out. I have some Mac using friends who really like it and often tell me how good it is for ripping discs. There’s been a command line version of Handbrake on Linux for quite some time I believe but I never used it, I can handle myself pretty well in a terminal but it just didn’t appeal. Handbrake is licensed under the GPL and as such is completely free and open source software, with all these facts and endorsements ringing in my ears I figured I should take it for a spin, no pun intended.