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In this month's exciting episode of GNU and FSF News, we learn that Eben Moglen has resigned from the FSF, the FSFE starts a list of Free Software legal experts in Europe, Vista has it in for GCC, GNOME will soon fit in the palm of your hand, RMS visits Sweden, and the GPLv3 still can't get along with the Apache 2.0 license. Read on to find out the details of these and other recent stories in the free software community.

On May 4, Robert Love resigned as chief architect of Novell's Linux desktop efforts. He has since announced that he has accepted a position at Google.

Dell became a hero to Linux fans worldwide when it announced last week that it would begin selling PCs loaded with the Linux operating system instead of Microsoft's Windows.

[You don't reckon Daniel's been reading LXer, do you? - dcparris]

Open source and filed IP / live together in perfect har-mo-nyDell has become the first major player to show up to Microsoft and Novell's compatibility love-in.…

In this week's KDE Commit-Digest: Atlantik, KFouleggs, Klickety, KPoker, Kenolaba, KAsteroids, KSnake, KSokoban, KJumpingCube and KTron move to playground/games.

Welcome to Fedora Weekly News Issue 86 for the week of April 29th through May 5th, 2007.

While a properly set up SSH service can give you secure remote access to a server, you might not like the idea of having an SSH server always running on your machine. Secure Back Door (SBD) can open an encrypted connection to your system, allowing you to remotely execute any operating system commands for example start your SSH or Web server or reboot the server.

It's easier than you might think to create your own OpenOffice.org extensions.

Contracts buy you clustering and replication tooIBM is offering "low cost" 24x7 support contracts to users of the free version of DB2, called DB2 Express-C. As well as tech support, coughing up the readies allows users to hook up a second server for high-availability clustering or remote database replication.

Simon Phipps defends the open-source roots of Sun and the GPL-ization of Java.

Open source advocate David Skoll launched Roaring Penguin Software in 1999 because he was restless in his job as R&D project leader at Chipworks, Inc. Roaring Penguin started strictly as a consultancy, but the next year, after Skoll was commissioned to create software to help London's Royal College of Physicians stem the tide of email viruses and spam to its servers, he decided the world needed a better email filter. Skoll wrote the now ubiquitous MIMEDefang email filter, released it to the community, and proceeded to build a successful business on top of GPL software.

LXer Feature: 05-May-2007

In some Google searches for Linux computers, Dell advertisements have cropped up in the advertising links, leading unsuspecting users to Windows-only computers at Dell's website. After initially being ignored, LXer finally gets a response from Dell.

In hindsight, it was correct of the US administration not to pursue plans to break up Microsoft for past anticompetitive behaviour. The company is slowly losing its monopoly of desktop software and on the Web it is foundering against Google.

Opinion: With Linux traveling to its desktops and notebooks, Dell is treading new but exciting ground.

After years of both technical and legal delays, the popular open-source Pidgin IM (instant messaging) client, formerly known as GAIM, has finally arrived.

From Christopher Blizzard on one laptop per child and open source: For once Microsoft is getting the reverse Linux laptop experience: little support and little documentation for the hardware. The result will be a platform that doesn’t include any of the really novel features that we’re building in, bad power management, no systems management via the firmware and apps that will randomly crash because they can’t fix the virtual memory problem in the same way we’re approaching it. A second class citizen, to be sure.

Most presentations from the Consumer Electronics Linux Forum (CELF) conference held Apr. 17-19, 2007 in Santa Clara, Calif. are now available at the CELF WiKi. The event featured 52 deeply technical presentations, many describing original kernel development projects aimed at improving Linux for use in devices.

Puppy Linux is a lightweight live Linux distribution that you can boot and run from a CD, USB stick, or DVD. One of its features is the ability to create specialized "pups" -- new versions of Puppy Linux geared toward a specific purpose. Digipup is one such example, with a focus on amateur radio. I spun it up, and found Digipup to be a great way to check out amateur radio utilities for Linux.

A couple of times I’ve encountered problems with the sound card on Debian boxes. Some notes I’ve found that may help others having difficulties: Check the permissions on /dev/dsp, and make sure that the relevant user(s) are in the audio group in /etc/group. You may need to log out & back in again for this to take effect. If using the alsa sound daemon, install the alsa-utils package and run alsaconf. This should pick up your sound card. You may need to run alsamixer to check the volume levels are correctly set afterwards. Blindingly Obvious (but easy to overlook) Note: make sure that the volume control on xmms (or other media player of choice), and on your headphones/speakers is sufficiently up. (I once spent ages prodding at a user’s sound config before realising that the headphones had their own volume control which I hadn’t noticed, and it was all the way down.) With KDE, I found recently that to get sound running it was necessary to run the KDE sound control utility, turn off KDE’s sound management and click Apply, close the utility down, reopen it, turn the sound management back on, & click Apply again. Then it worked.

The Digital Doorway project, aimed at bridging the digital divide by supplying remote rural communities with access to computer and Internet technology is well on its way to connecting 140 communities to the Internet. Thanks to additional funding, applications are open for 40 more of these robust open source systems.