On the show this time: Lots of M$-bashing again, Dan’s Windows rant and much more.

Unfortunately, we start the show with bad news again. Sadly, Arthur C. Clarke, one of the greatest science fiction writers of all time, has died. Also, we correct a mistake from an earlier show since people told us that there is in fact a multimedia centre distro for Linux, which is called Linux MCE.

Releases (08:24)

Distros:

• PC-BSD 1.5
• Foresight 2.0
• Parsix 1.0r1
• Clonezilla Live 1.0.9-19
• MirOS BSD #10
• Slax 6.0.3

Application:

• TrueCrypt 5

Development Release (Distro):

• Ulteo Applications System Beta 1

News Stories (23:44)

For fun, check out bug #1 for Ubuntu on Launchpad.

• Wal-Mart stops selling the Everex gPC, but only in retail (you can still get it online)

• The release date for Ubuntu Hardy Heron has been announced: 24th April 2008

• The SFLC settles their suit with Verizon on behalf of BusyBox — another victory for the GPL!

• Apache is still the #1 webserver or as Dan says: Apache is still The Daddy!

• Project Peach releases their first trailer for “Big Buck Bunny”

• US anti-trust commitee scrutinises Windows 7 — we also think the name “Windows 7” is shite

• The Supreme Court also gives the go-ahead for Novell to go after M$ and Novell also wants to, even though they are buddies with Ballmer & Co. now

• Also, the SFLC warns against trusting Microsoft

Dan’s Rant & Package of the Week (57:23)

We also have a rant by Dan on Windows as he’s rediscovered the pain of installing and using that particular operating system.

Package of the Week:

• Fab: Firefly Media Server (aka. mt-daap), stream your music over your LAN

• Dan: gBrainy, train your brain on Gnome

We then close the show with wishing everyone Happy Easter (sorry for the late release — it’s entirely Fab’s fault since he was insanely busy at work). Please comment on this show in the forums!

The theme music for this podcast is a song called “Sudo Modprobe”, it was written by Fab and produced and performed by Dan and Fab. The artwork for the album cover and the site including the Outlaw Tux was created by Fab. All material in this podcast is released under the Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 3.0 license.

Our first dedicated listener feedback episode. Released a bit later than originally planned but full of juicy content nonetheless.

Emails (01:56)

• Johan from Sweden tells us about make-kpkg for compiling custom kernels on Debian systems

• James from New Jersey is running Xubuntu 7.10 on his MacBook and tells us he likes the podcast

• Chris (aka. Tony Soprano) tells us about spreading Linux and F/OSS in the schools of North Carolina

• Randy Noseworthy sends us a file we can’t open

• Mark Falkner writes us again and tells us that his dog is really tired now and also mentions Frostwire

• Rob Collins prompts us about Linpus Linux

• John Priest loves the show and is a Firefly fan like Fab

Forum topics (19:37)

• Ger Apeldoorn on Outlook and Evolution

• Using the Drobo NAS with Linux

• The Israeli Ministry of Education moves to open source

If you have any comments on this episode, please post in the forums.

The theme music for this podcast is a song called “Sudo Modprobe”, it was written by Fab and produced and performed by Dan and Fab. The artwork for the album cover and the site including the Outlaw Tux was created by Fab. All material in this podcast is released under the Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 3.0 license.

In this show: The usual Microsoft bashing, Canonical’s Landscape, Fab’s CeBIT coverage and much more.

At the top of the show, we thank James for his donation and Fab plugs the XPS m1330 review on Dan’s blog.

Releases (05:11)

Distros:

• Linux-EduCD 0.9
• Kiwi Linux 8.03
• Frugalware 0.8

News Stories (08:53)

• Microsoft wants NGOs in India to send letters to the government to support OOXML — and they can’t spell!
• US delegation to the ISO votes to support OOXML — what a huge surprise…
• Microsoft admits big delay in fixing the Home Server bug and they are getting slammed even by their own fanboys on that
• Canonical unveils Landscape admin tool for servers
• Sun scoops up Python gurus — what are they planning?
• Quite a surprise: the BBC apparently uses Linux for TV production
• German police raids CeBIT because of mp3 patent violations and Fab narrowly escapes

Main Topic: CeBIT 2008 Coverage (41:06)

Fab talks about his experience at CeBIT, especially at the Novell booth and their whole “Interoperability” campaign with Microsoft (including Miguel de Icaza’s views on this). We also discuss the situation of open source software in the industry in general and some other interesting topics Fab came across like the dominance of Linux in virtualisation and the huge success of Asus’ EeePC at the show.

If you’re interested, you can also check out Fab’s gallery with photos from the show room floor:

We close the show with Dan’s song The Shed Anthem, which he recently released on his music blog, and mention that we will do a special listener feedback episode next (probably in between this show and the next usual one). If you want to give us feedback on the episode, please leave a comment in our forums.

The theme music for this podcast is a song called “Sudo Modprobe”, it was written by Fab and produced and performed by Dan and Fab. The artwork for the album cover and the site including the Outlaw Tux was created by Fab. All material in this podcast is released under the Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 3.0 license.

This week: Ubuntu Brainstorm, leap year babies mad at Ballmer, Debian stuff and IE8 and standards compliance.

We start the show with bad news: Chess Griffin has announced that Linux Reality will close up shop after episode 100. We then move on to some listener feedback.

Listener Feedback (05:40)

• Alex Bennee gives us some feedback on the various open source licenses, the whole CentOS / Red Hat Enterprise Linux relationship we talked about recently and the different ways companies apply these licenses ie. what that means for the community

• Glen Tyler recommends Rocxshop to Fab as an alternative multimedia distro to Ubuntu Studio

• Nathan Dotz “butters up” and gives us more feedback on Linux in education as well as assuring us that at the unis he’s attended as a student in Computer Science, *nix knowledge is very much required

• David Stephenson is running Windows XP and wants to move to Linux, therefore he wants to know what distro to use to get his online games to work in Wine / Cedega

• Jose aka (TaCo) from HP in Houston asks our opinion on the story that Google is funding a project to make Photoshop run better under Linux

• Jonathan Barford from Liverpool found our podcast while looking for lullabies; he also offers for Dan to try out the eeePC he intends to buy

Releases & News (28:42)

Releases: FreeBSD 7.0, Slax 6.0.1, Momonga Linux 4.1, Parted Magic 2.1, PelicanHPC GNU Linux 1.3, SystemRescueCd 1.0.0 and Linux Mint 4.0 “KDE”

• Ubuntu unveils Ubuntu Brainstorm, their version of the Dell Idea Storm site — so now you can vote on stuff you’d like to see in our favourite poo coloured distro

• Security support for Debian Sarge will be terminated on March 31

• Leap year babies are mad at Steve Ballmer because of a long standing bug in several Microsoft products; apparently they’ve writting a Perl script to get back at him — also, 1900 is not a leap year, 20 year old bugs aren’t automatically a standard!

• Sanger Institute runs huge Debian cluster

• Internet Explorer 8 will apparently follow web standards — well, sort of (it’s Microsoft we’re talking about here, after all)

Reviews & Package of the Week (48:55)

Fab reviews the OSSEC host-based intrusion detection system (which he heard about on TLLTS) and Alpha 5 of Ubuntu Hardy (Alpha 6 came out since).

Package of the Week:
- Dan: Powertop, a CPU power manager for your Intel chips
- Fab: Django (python-django), a Python-based rapid web-development framework

Fab will be at CeBIT this week, we’ll have a special report for you about that in the next episode.

Please comment on this episode in the forums.

The theme music for this podcast is a song called “Sudo Modprobe”, it was written by Fab and produced and performed by Dan and Fab. The artwork for the album cover and the site including the Outlaw Tux was created by Fab. All material in this podcast is released under the Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 3.0 license.

Errata

Red Hat does release their source code, hence CentOS and all the other RHEL clones out there.

Listener Feedback

• The omipresent Verbal sends us an audio tip about how to handle file names with spaces on the command line and also sneakily plugs the Going Linux podcast

• Antone Henderson sends us a cool picture of Noel and another one of his songs which we play at the end of the show

• klaatu from The Bad Apples podcast educates us about OpenOffice on OS X and gives his opinion about the ability to win converts from the Mac side of things

• Daniel Lowe from Mackay asks Fab about his experiences living down under and talks about the flood damage Mackay and Airlie Beach received during a recent cyclone (his news story links: 1 & 2); Fab also mentions the movie Fool’s Gold which was being filmed in and around Airlie Beach & Whitehaven Beach when he was down there

• Drew asks Fab about the kernel he’s running and a possible way to get his Toshiba laptop with an Intel 4965 wireless card and Intel HD audio to work

• Mark Falkner from Devon asks about ways to get Internet Explorer to run in Linux and also mentions Ext2IFS

• Philip Herron (RedBrain) tells us about Linux and Windows at his university

• Jim Shaver explains about the proliferation of Linux at his uni in Calgary and gives a tip about running Internet Explorer in Firefox using IE Tab

Releases & News

Releases: GoblinX Linux 2.6, NetSecL 2.2, CentOS 5.1 Live CD, Scientific Linux 5.1 Live CD/DVD, Linux Caixa Mágica 12, FreeNAS 0.686.1, DragonFly BSD 1.12, grml 1.1 and BSD pfSense 1.2

• The Ubuntu release after Hardy will be called “Intrepid Ibex”; some more not-so-serious suggestions for further releases

• Parasitic sellers of F/OSS on eBay

• Vista SP1 kills and maims security apps and several utilities

• Google doesn’t like OOXML (somehow Borat is involved)

• Microsoft releases Server 2008 — yawn!

• Stallman steps down from Emacs team, again, gets replaced by Cheech and Chong?

• Microsoft gets fined a record sum by the EU — this story even made the BBC front page

Review

Dan gives us the lowdown on Foresight Linux.

Gaming Corner

We talk about Frets on Fire, the open source Guitar Hero clone written in Python and the fact that the original SimCity has been open sourced as Micropolis.

Package of the Week

• Dan: Mplayer-Plugin, the best browser plugin to play your media
• Fab: phpBB, the ultimate forum software

Fab might be getting a Gumstix and will get back with a review in the future. We also thank the guys from LugRadio for their mention of our podcast and wish them a happy 4th birthday.

We end the show with the song Old Heroes Like Me by Noel Watson.

Please comment on this episode in the forums.

The theme music for this podcast is a song called “Sudo Modprobe”, it was written by Fab and produced and performed by Dan and Fab. The artwork for the album cover and the site including the Outlaw Tux was created by Fab. All material in this podcast is released under the Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 3.0 license.

On this special episode, we talk about Linux in schools and universities and Dan sticks a fork into his Dell.

Listener Feedback (04:35)

• Nathan Dumont (hairymnstr) sends us a link to his EeePC review and his guide to install Ubuntu with Compiz Fusion on it

Fab also explains what happened to the SCaLE coverage we wanted to do and mentions that we will be at CeBIT and LugRadio Live UK (check out the links for forum threads about details on how to meet up with us).

Releases & News (09:55)

Releases: Debian 4.0r3 and Greenie Linux 1.2.8 “Battle For Wesnoth”

• SCO’s back — apparently they got 100 million dollars by some investment firm

• Play.com starts selling DRM-free music downloads

• Hackers exploit last week’s kernel security hole to hack Claranet — this leads us to talk a bit about security in Linux and also computer security in general

Main Topic: Linux in Education (25:10)

We talk about our experiences concerning Linux in schools and universities over here in Germany / the United Kingdom and how we see the whole situation. Fab talks a bit about what he does in his part-time job supporting schools with everything IT-related and Dan explains how it worked during the time he was studying for his degree. We also discuss corporate sponsorship of schools and universities, Edubuntu and the amazing applications Linux could have in the education field.

Before we wrap it up, Dan also tells the story how he fixed the CD/DVD drive on his brand new Dell using only a fork and gives us a preview to his upcoming review of Foresight Linux.

Please comment on this episode in the forums.

The theme music for this podcast is a song called “Sudo Modprobe”, it was written by Fab and produced and performed by Dan and Fab. The artwork for the album cover and the site including the Outlaw Tux was created by Fab. All material in this podcast is released under the Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 3.0 license.

This week: Crazy accents galore, Linux kernel exploit, lots of Ubuntu news and more U-Boat games.

Listener Feedback (05:09)

• George Walkey starts us on a discussion on the topic of free “community” vs. paid “enterprise” editions of Free Software

• Rob Collins likes the game reviews on the show and tells us that he posted the second part of his “Linux Newbie in a Windows World” article on his site

• Steve Cole gives us some excellent reasons for using Linux

• Gordon Coupar gives us his thoughts on Linux in Scottish schools and also provides a link to Windies Twa Thoosan’ (beware, Fab needed a dictionary to read this)

• Our mate JP from Canada tells us how much he enjoys the show and tortures Dan by making him do a Canadian accent

• Randy Noseworthy (we assume that’s his real name) says we should be more John Wayne like and Fab apologises for failing horribly

Releases & News (20:07)

Releases this week: Nexenta Core Platform 1.0, LinuxTLE 9.0, Parted Magic 2.0 and SLAX 6.0.0
Development release: openSUSE 11.0 Alpha 2

• Important security bulletin: Linux Kernel 2.6 Local Root Exploit; patch here

• This week is Ubuntu Developer Week

• Canonical starts to distribute commercial apps straight from their official repos

• In more Ubuntu news, it was recently announced that the next version of the distro will ship with KVM, not Xen — we discuss this

• VirtualBox has been bought by Sun; Fab’s not happy

• Some people in the F/OSS community are calling for a boycott of Trend Micro, we are sceptical

• The EU announces that it will investigate Microsoft’s OOXML campaign — no, that’s not OpenOffice XML!

Reviews & Package of the Week (43:27)

Fab talks about running Silent Hunter III in Wine and asks if anybody knows how to get the successor SH4 to run. If you have any hints about that, please tell us in the forums.

Package of the Week:

• Fab: Tomboy, a note-taking program with wiki-style features for Gnome

• Dan: NoScript, a Firefox extension to block JavaScript for safer browsing

We end the show with another song by Noel Watson. This time its his wonderful version of Waltzing Matilda, the unofficial Australian national anthem. Thanks again for providing us with your great music, mate!

Please also comment on this episode in the forums.

The theme music for this podcast is a song called “Sudo Modprobe”, it was written by Fab and produced and performed by Dan and Fab. The artwork for the album cover and the site including the Outlaw Tux was created by Fab. All material in this podcast is released under the Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 3.0 license.

This episode is dedicated to the memory of Roy Scheider, who recently passed away.

On the show this time: U-Boat games, Fab goes Debian, Stephen Fry loves open source and Linus calls Mac OS crap.

Listener Feedback (05:27)

• Hendo sends us two awesome songs from his mate Noel Watson one of which, called The FX Holden, we play at the end of this show

• Trevor McDougall from Newcastle, Australia tells us the story how he recently got a USB modem to work in Linux — he also thanks all the helpful people who help new users out in various forums, which we wholeheartedly second

• Matteo gets back to us and mentions a new distro he and a friend are working on, called Bornheim Linux (named after a German town not far from where Fab lives); he also prompts us on educational use of Linux — a topic which many people have asked us about and we are planning to do a show on

• Brian Lampe gets all brown-nosey on us and also asks Dan about how he turned his back on the evil that is .NET

• Eric Mesa really enjoys Dan’s music and wonders why he loses his accent when he sings

Releases & News (21:33)

Open source releases since the last show: UHU-Linux 2.1, GoblinX 2.6 “Mini”, X/OS 5.1, Pioneer Linux 3.1, Bluewhite64 Linux 12.0r1, Yellow Dog 6.0 and PostgreSQL 8.3 — Development releases: Ubuntu 8.04 Alpha 4 & Fedora 9 Alpha

• We talk about some art concepts for Hardy (it’s very brown)

• Linus calls the Mac file system “complete and utter crap”

• Stephen Fry (of “A Bit of Fry and Laurie” fame) praises open source on his blog

• OpenOffice 3 will run natively on the Mac without X.org

Reviews & Package of the Week (38:06)

Fab recently moved to Debian lenny/sid and tells us about his experiences so far as well as explaining how and why he installed it. We then talk a bit more about Debian, as well as tattoos and the fact that Fab’s name has a lot in common with the distribution’s name (as Dan also observed on the forums).

Next up, Fab reviews a game he was told about by VulcanRidr (also on the forums) called Danger from the Deep. It’s still early in development, but it’s completely open source and cross-platform and it looks very promising. If you like submarine sims, like Fab does, check it out!

Package of the Week:

• Dan: gnormalize, a sound file normalizer for Gnome

• Fab: Thunar, an awesome file manager (originally from Xfce) with lots of features

We end the show with the song The FX Holden by true blue Aussie Noel Watson — what a great tune!

If you have any feedback on this episode, please use this topic on the forums.

P.S.: If you are asking yourself what that crazy show title is this time, you have definitely missed a great movie classic and should rent the DVD right now!

The theme music for this podcast is a song called “Sudo Modprobe”, it was written by Fab and produced and performed by Dan and Fab. The artwork for the album cover and the site including the Outlaw Tux was created by Fab. All material in this podcast is released under the Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 3.0 license.

This week, Dan and Fab talk about M$ buying Yahoo!, Nokia buying Trolltech, Linus and his mobile, the Gendarmerie and Ubuntu, the Dell XPS m1330 and EVE Online.

Listener Feedback (04:40)

• Audio feedback from Aussie listener Antone Henderson, who tells us about the HP C4380 printer which works out of the box in Ubuntu; good to know if you are looking for a Linux compatible printer

• Cam DeCoster is looking for a multimedia-fileserver solution; Dan recommends FreeNAS, Fab suggests Debian — maybe on a NSLU2

• Rob Collins shares his Linux story with us

• Steve tips us off about the story of Trend Micro threatening to sue Barracuda Networks for their use of the open source ClamAV; we discuss the story

Releases & News (23:19)

Open source releases this week: Shift Linux 0.6.2, Finnix 91.0 and Musix 1.0r3 Test 5

We had quite a few big news items in general this week:

• Microsoft offers to buy Yahoo! for a looooot of money — God help us all, if this goes trough…

• On the other hand, the french Gendamerie switches to Ubuntu; we say “Vive la France!”

• Nokia buys Trolltech (the makers of QT); Fab has a bad feeling about it

• We learn that Linus doesn’t own a mobile phone — w00t!?

• Microsoft whinges that IBM “killed” OOXML, the evil bastards!

Reviews & Package of the Week (44:13)

We review the Dell XPS m1330 laptop which we both bought. Fab also posted a more exhaustive review of the machine (with photos) on his blog. Our verdict: We love it. Especially as it is now available with Ubuntu preinstalled, as we mentioned last week.

Fab also talks about EVE Online, which he’s been playing a lot recently. It’s an awesome space combat MMORPG that allows for very freeform gameplay in a huge universe. If you love games like Privateer or Freelancer or shows like Firefly, you’ll have a lot of fun here. If you want to meet up with Fab in-game, his handle is “Clay Reynolds”.

Package of the Week:

• Dan: The GIMP, the #1 open source and cross-platform image editor

• Fab: Cheese, a little Gnome program to capture photos and video from your webcam

We also want to remind everybody again to check out SCALE 6x if they have the chance. We’ll have Donald Burr from Otaku no Podcast as our embedded reporter over there to promote the podcast and bring us reports from the floor.

If you have any comments about this episode, please use the forums.

The theme music for this podcast is a song called “Sudo Modprobe”, it was written by Fab and produced and performed by Dan and Fab. The artwork for the album cover and the site including the Outlaw Tux was created by Fab. All material in this podcast is released under the Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 3.0 license.

This week on the show: Sun buys MySQL, everybody loves Ubuntu, our electrocuting laptops, and we review KDE 4 and Enemy Territory: Quake Wars.

Part 1 - Intro & Listener Feedback (03:40)

Due to some unforseen circumstances, we are a bit late this week — but to make up for it, we have a really long show for you. First of all, Fab talks about the new, slightly revamped show structure and his new section where he wants to talk about gaming on Linux. We then go on to the listener feedback we received this week:

• Philip Herron writes to us about gaming on Linux and Wine and tips Fab off about EVE Online (which we will talk more about in next week’s show)

• Matteo asks about Google’s Android and wants us to talk about educational use of Linux; we also talk a bit about Android vs. OpenMoko

• Tom praises our podcast and tells us about podcastready.com

• Gordon Coupar send us a wallpaper photo for the gallery

• Cam DeCoster Tells us how shocking our new laptops are

Part 2 - Releases & News (20:00)

Releases: Scientific Linux 5.1, Zenwalk 5.0, FreeBSD 6.3, SystemRescueCd 0.4.3, Ubuntu 6.06.2, GoblinX 2.6 “Micro”, Parsix 1.0r0 and SchilliX 0.6

On the news front, quite a lot happened since our last show:

• Sun buys MySQL; we don’t really know what to think about that yet…

• Dell releases the XPS m1330 laptop (which we both bought recently) preloaded with Ubuntu

• Acer also started to offer Ubuntu laptops now, apparently

• IBM snuggles up with Ubuntu: it looks like they are planning to deploy Ubuntu in Enterprise environments; they also talk about the fact that they get many requests for Linux from their customers

Part 3 - Reviews & Package of the Week (38:08)

Fab tried out KDE 4 and tells us about his opinion. If you want to try it out for yourself, you can download the Kubuntu KDE Four Live CD. He also reviews Enemy Territory: Quake Wars, which is an awesome first-person shooter game with a native Linux client. We also shortly discuss Peter Cannon’s Nokia N810 review and our feelings towards the device.

Package of the Week:

• Dan: gLabels, print labels and business cards in Gnome

• Fab: Conky, a very subtle but still cool system monitor

This episode ends with Dan’s song “Reality?” from his music blog shedmusic.net. If you want to send us a song to play on the show that is your own, original music, feel free to send us a message using the contact form and we’ll be happy to consider it. Also, please leave feedback on this show in the corresponding thread on the forums.

The theme music for this podcast is a song called “Sudo Modprobe”, it was written by Fab and produced and performed by Dan and Fab. The artwork for the album cover and the site including the Outlaw Tux was created by Fab. All material in this podcast is released under the Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 3.0 license.