The US government's plan to boost energy savings by moving Daylight Saving Time forward by three weeks was apparently a waste of time and effort, as the technological foibles Americans experienced failed to give way to any measurable energy savings.

While many CIOs like the idea of Linux in principle, most of those who have shifted have done so in limited ways. Committing to Linux on servers can be justified through cost and performance considerations, but when it comes to the desktop, most enterprises are still reluctant.

This week, Distrowatch Weekly has redone their top 10 distributions and included PCLinuxOS inside of that top ten for the first time ever. In fact, when I began using PCLinuxOS, it was around 15th on the distrowatch charts. If you look at 2005 vs. 2006 charts, you’ll see that out of the top 15 distros tracked, PCLinuxOS was the largest gainer over the course of that year.

Bayanihan linux is a Debian based distribution that is fully equipped, developed in the Philippines by their Advanced Science and Technology Institute. This distribution is filled with everything one would need in a distribution, games, office productivity, Internet tools and graphic programs.

Installation

Virtualisation is ultra-cool. For the uninitiated, virtualisation is being able to have a virtual computer running on top of a real one. It’s a great way to run two operating systems at the same time, or test out the latest stuff without committing a physical machine.

Sean Daly met up with Richard Stallman in Brussels, where Stallman just gave a speech on the GPLv3 draft. Mr. Stallman was kind enough to do an interview for Groklaw right afterward, which we appreciate, especially because Sean tells me rms was so exhausted before his speech that he pushed the chair away and did it standing up, to make sure he stayed awake.

Like clockwork, the GNOME project released GNOME 2.18 six months after the release of GNOME 2.16. The new version carries a number of improvements over the 2.16 release, but doesn't bring many "must have" features that would compel users to upgrade right away.

There may be no such thing as a "free lunch", but the web is awash with free software, some of it excellent. Could it be that you need never pay for software again?

<skip long list of free windows software to the good part>

Issue 17 of Free Software Magazine is here and it's a big one!

Being a commercial Linux distribution editor is tough.

There are a few commercial Linux distribution editors in the world: Red Hat, Novell/Suse, Turbolinux, Mandriva, Ubuntu/Canonical, Linspire, Xandros, Red Flag, CS2C and Sun Wah to name the key ones.

I recently returned from a whirlwind trip to Singapore and China. In China, I spoke at the 2007 Software Innovation Summit - Open Source Software and Trends in Internationalization event organized by Stephen Walli and Anne Stevenson-Yang. Stephen blogged about the event and has posted the slides from the talks. You can get mine here.

In the last installment of this series I showed how to quickly mount a shared folder on a Windows Vista machine from a Linux machine (specifically, from one running Ubuntu 6.10). This solution works if you just want to read files on the Vista PC and you don’t mind re-entering the mount command the next time you reboot your Linux PC.

As the cost of equipping classrooms with everything from chalk to chairs continues to escalate, many school districts are turning to open source solutions as a viable alternative to expensive software for in-class computers.

This is bad news. AppArmor is a weak design. IMHO it gives the users a false impression of security, while leaving too much open to bypass security.

Not content with bringing version three of its GNU General Public License to market, the Free Software Foundation is about to start work on a new license that will make the GPL applicable to software-as-a-service.

One of the core problems for open source has always been that as a radical force outside the mainstream it is hard for its supporters to influence conventional players there. In part, this was what made Dell's Ideastorm so important: it gave a voice to those hitherto unable to communicate usefully with the company.

ffective immediately, there are a number of changes in the Firefox review process. Most notably, there are a lot more reviewers who can share the load, including Seth Spitzer who is now a module peer.

When you ask someone to name a couple of GNU/Linux distributions, in most cases, you will hear the names Debian, Red Hat, Ubuntu and then, SuSE Linux which is now a days known as OpenSuSE.

Red Hat has declared itself unimpressed with Oracle's list of 26 customers for its Red Hat Linux support business.

In a Q&A session with financial analysts on Thursday, Red Hat chief executive Matthew Szulik said that Oracle's high profile win of Yahoo's business is in fact limited to a few Oracle database servers.

"Freedom That Works" is to me the sort of "Freedom as in what makes me feel cozy", not like "Freedom like in gNewNonsense".

"Free as in free beer" vs. "free as in free speech" are just childish terms no one should use: the beer is never free and it's not something to value that much anyway ("free sex" would be a better choice), and speech is even less free, no matter what your illusions are.