manchicken.com: Next time you go into Best Buy or Circuit City or $RETAILER, why don’t you bring your Kubuntu Live CD (okay, you can bring an Ubuntu Live CD if you really want) with you? I did that today, and it actually went really well. Here’s the story.

DesktopLinux: Desktop operating systems numbers, even when gathered by top research companies, such as IDG and Gartner, are often a bit fuzzy. When it comes to uncommon desktop operating systems, like Linux, the numbers often amount to little more than an educated guess. Now, a new open-source program, statix, promises to give accurate data on how many Linux desktops are actually in use.

kernelTRAP: "People who think 'volatile' really matters are just fooling themselves," Linus Torvalds quipped during a lengthy discussion on the Linux Kernel mailing list.

red hat mag: If a home chef wants to whip up a nice dinner for guests, he don’t want to have to understand the entire history of French cooking. Therefore, for me, the best benchmark of a code cookbook is how effectively I can go from the idea, “I need a script to do ‘foo’,” to having a script that does “foo” effectively.

informit.com: There are two kinds of snake oil in the software world that still seem to sell well. The first is DRM, where purveyors seem able to convince their customers that they can provide something that has been shown to be impossible. The other is that cross-platform graphical user interface.

mepis.org: MEPIS has announced the upload of the first official Beta of the upcoming 7.0 release of SimplyMEPIS. Version 6.9.60beta1 for 32 and 64 bit processors is available from the testing directory at the MEPIS subscriber site and the MEPIS public mirrors.

linux.com: Ever thought about how nice it would be if you could edit the files stored on your Web server directly without the cumbersome download-edit-upload routine? Web-based Distributed Authoring and Versioning (WebDAV) is the way to do it.

beranger: As "potentially dangerous" is a more or less infinite set these days, OpenBSD 4.2 will get a better approach to sudo.

laserjock.wordpress: The response to my first post was pretty overwhelming. I’ve got a little bit more openSUSE experience under my belt and wanted to talk a bit more about Gutsy:

vertito.blogspot: We all know most user's desktop runs and boots operating system from their harddisk. Simply from a harddisk, which is usually composed of files and folders. But trying to think how these data are scattered out or organized and logically located without overwriting each other and knowing where the other sector part ends and continued from your harddisk would be almost impossible for an average desktop user like me! And the light shows up.

• How To Configure Apt Sources.List - For Complete Newbies

• Howto setup a print server for Windows (and others) using CUPS and zeroconf
• Generating md5 encrypted password for chpasswd

computerweekly: The website has selected Red Hat Enterprise Linux as the platform to support the website, after previously using the less scalable Red Hat-sponsored Fedora open-source solution.

Also: Linux security holes identified

linux.com: No other hardware nowadays supports GNU/Linux as weakly as wireless network adapters. Between the constant release of new models and major vendors who are uninterested in supporting the operating system, free drivers for wireless cards are next to impossible to reverse engineer. Nor can you find many retailers willing to customize laptops as readily as they do workstations. In this situation, ndiswrapper and the Broadcom firmware cutter provide a functional, if not always satisfactory, solution.

Michael R Head: Finally got Ubuntu running on the T61P (which has assumed the name of my last laptop which is in the process of having the contents of its hard drive transplanted). I encountered some issues in the process of doing this.

the register: The trends suggest that Linux will become the dominant OS - the commodity OS - both for the PC and the server, to the eventual detriment of Microsoft's revenues.

computerworld: Linux buffs tend to scoff at one of the major reasons that Windows users like me haven't switched yet: We don't want to give up our favorite applications. With countless open-source options, plus a rising number of commercial apps for Linux, their argument goes, we can certainly find a replacement for whatever software we're running on XP or Vista. But, Linux fans, it's not so simple.

technocrat.net: 60 Minutes called yesterday regarding the Hans Reiser story - Reiser is a brilliant filesystem developer and is about to go to trial.

• How can I make dd give me a progress report?

• Linux Testers Wanted for EVE Online
• Red Hat in talks with states for open source solution
• Is Open-Source A Business Model? $500 Million Says It Is
• An Interview with Matt Asay
• MIT’s ‘$100 laptops’ to go to Pacific islands
• Xandros dance with Microsoft turns to a smooch
• What made Kevin’s jaw hit the floor today?
  

Steve Carl (bmc blogs): Success with one Dell leads to trying another. The "old" Dell also runs Linux like it was made for it. Oh. Wait. Linux is made for almost everything.

debian.net: The Debian project has updated the stable distribution Debian GNU/Linux 4.0 (codename Etch). This update adds security updates to the stable release, together with a few corrections to serious problems.