To start off we introduce ourselves and Fab gives an overview of our plans for the podcast. Dan goes on and tells the story of his Linux epiphany and his discovery of how deep the rabbit hole really is. Fab explains how he got into using Linux.

We then talk a bit about virtual machines and gaming. Both Dan & Fab are running VMware for Linux. Fab used to be a huge Command & Conquer geek and explains why he has never started to play WoW. We later go on to discuss Wine and Cedega as alternatives to gaming on Windows.

Following that, we talk about the argument that Linux supposedly takes too much time to learn because it’s allegedly too complicated. Dan says give it another chance and Fab gives the advice to try as many Linux distributions as you can. Dan is currently using Ubuntu while Fab runs Linux Mint.

Dan mentions that Linux is everywhere, including on his Linksys WRT54G router. We also talked about the elitist attitude of some hardcore Linux users and want you to send us stories of your experience with Linux (please use the contact form on the website).

Package of the Week
Fab: Agave, a colourscheme designer for Gnome
Dan: Comix, a multi-platform comic book reader

Wrapping it up, Dan explains that Mac OS X is based on BSD and Fab recommends Dan’s open source blog.

The theme music for this podcast is a song called “Sudo Modprobe” and was written and performed by Fab. The album art was also created by Fab.

Errata: Dan’s router is a Linksys WRT54GL.

Follow-up to Fab’s package from last time: Big Huge Labs has a free online tool that lets you automagically create a harmonious colour palette from any photograph.

Listener Feedback: Mick from Australia asks about minimum specs for running Linux. We suggest Xubuntu and talk about how Fab put Damn Small Linux on his USB thumb drive to boot from on any machine that supports booting from USB. There’s also Feather Linux to try.

In the main part of the show we talk about the fact that ATI promised to opensource the 3D drivers and specs for their Radeon cards and Fab goes off on a tangent about MythTV. We then discuss 3D graphics acceleration cards on Linux in general.

We also announce that IBM plans to get serious about OpenOffice.org development and talk about ODF, open standards in general and OpenOffice.

The next story is about how Paul Thurrott announced the “revolutionary” new Server Core feature of Server 2008 from Microsoft on Windows Weekly 34 and we go on to talk about how Vista’s networking is broken by design and the very different design of the Linux kernel.

The last story is about Lenovo and their plans to follow Dell’s lead and put Ubuntu on their laptops. Cast your vote in the poll here. We also mention this funny “Linux at Dell” video.

Package of the Week
Dan: KCheckGMail, a tray applet for checking and manipulating your GMail
Fab: wicd, an alternative network manager to replace the broken Gnome NetworkManager in Ubuntu

At the end of the show, we pledge to try out other distros than Ubuntu and then wrap it up.

The theme music for this podcast is a song called “Sudo Modprobe” and was written and performed by Fab. The album art was also created by Fab.

Listener Feedback
We discuss a letter Alistair from Scotland wrote us, in which he brings up the trustworthiness of Linux repositories and your OS provider as well as the general issue of trust and security precautions in computing. In response to all of that we also rathole a bit about the fact that we’d rather trust the open source community than those people from Redmond.

Main Segment
Our first news item is the fact that Microsoft got another kick in the nuts from the EU. We are definitely with the EU on this one.

Fab goes on to rant about the German government and their decision to change the German copyright law as well as the fact that it’s generally a crappy idea to pass laws that make half of the population criminals over night. We then once again totally rathole the topic in the course of which we learn that Fab enjoys the latest Mark Knopfler CD as well as the TV show House, M.D..

Dan then gives us the scoop about how SCO filed for bankruptcy. We say “die and burn in hell!” and also rant about software patents in general and Microsoft’s crusade against F/OSS.

We move on to the story about the U.S. Army switching from Linux to Windows and discuss the fact that the U.S. military now has to be prepared for the fact that their submarines might suddenly bluescreen in the middle of the ocean.

The last news story for this week is the new Windows-based installer for Debian at goodbye-microsoft.com.

Homework for the Greenhorns
Michael Johnson had the idea to this brand new segment. Your assigment for this week is to download and try out a Linux LiveCD. Pick a distribution of your choice on DistroWatch, burn the ISO image to a CD and have fun! Here are a few links to some LiveCD image downloads: Ubuntu, Fedora, openSUSE, PCLinuxOS and Mint. If you need help burning the ISO image you downloaded, you can find help in the Ubuntu community docs or the openSUSE online help.

Package of the Week
Dan: Miro, an amazing video player and media aggregator
Fab: VLC, the ultimate cross-platform media player

To wrap it up, Fab plugs the Outlaw Blog, our new theme song, the fact that we are Creative Commons licensed and we say goodbye.

The theme music for this podcast is a song called “Sudo Modprobe”, it was written by Fab and produced by Dan and Fab. The album art was also created by Fab.

We start the show with Fab confessing that his BIOS ate his homework, i.e. the openSUSE Live DVD he downloaded wouldn’t boot on his system, keeping him from trying it out this week like as he had promised. He will give it another try at a later time.

Listener Feedback
Then we have some listener feedback from the infamous Chopper Read (not really) from Australia. He wants to get back into Linux, dual-booting with Windows. In our reply, we discuss virtual machines, backups and how we think one should best set up a dual boot environment for Linux. If you are trying to accomplish this task, you might find episodes 15 and 16 of the Linux Reality podcast helpful.

Main Segment
In (slightly dated) news this week, we talk about the features of the new Gnome release (2.20) and also the new Linux Mint 3.1 “Celena” — including why we think the name isn’t a good idea and other reasons why we wouldn’t use it. But Fab does like their artwork…

Staying within the topic of releases, Dan tells us about a nice guide giving you instructions how to upgrade to the upcoming Ubuntu version 7.10 (codenamed “Gutsy Gibbon”) which is currently in beta. We then rathole a bit on our general upgrade, maintenance and backup habits. Dan uses a separate /home partition and Fab says he’s fond of nuking his systems with DBAN and running SpinRite before a reinstall.

After this we talk about Red Hat’s success with Linux sales in Q2 of this year which we think is really great news for the open source world and we then go on to talk about a great game that Fab discovered this week and is now completely hooked on. The game is called NERO and can be found at nerogame.org. It is all about training your own, private army of autonomous robots and pitting them against robots trained by the computer or other human players. While it isn’t open source (yet), it is fully cross-platform and actually part of an experiment in AI by the University of Texas. How cool is that?

Package of the Week
Dan: grip, a CD ripper/player for Gnome
Fab: Banshee, a full featured audio player and music organiser

Fab also ratholes Dan’s package and says he still prefers EAC under Wine for ripping CDs.

Before we wrap up the show, we plug Stephen Fry’s new blog and his talent, including the amazing VOCO clock.

Addendum
The slightly annoying background noises you might hear in places throughout the show are coming from Fab’s mouse wheel and buttons. We appologise for this, Fab will make sure this won’t happen again by adjusting his microphone better next time.

The theme music for this podcast is a song called “Sudo Modprobe”, it was written by Fab and produced by Dan and Fab. The album art was also created by Fab.

This week we talk about MythTV, which is a program that enables you to turn any Linux machine into a very sophisticated DVR system. Fab tells the story of his six week long struggle to transform a brand new PC he bought into a MythTV box and gives tips along the way about what to do and what not to do if you want to attempt such a project yourself. But first we start off with some listener feedback and two quick news stories.

Listener Feedback
Michael writes us (maybe from Germany, maybe not…) and tells us about mintUpdate which should ship with the next version of Linux Mint (presumably 4.0) and solve the updater problem we talked about in the last episode. He also pointed us to APTonCD about which we had talked before and Fab says he’s gonna look into that and report back on a future episode. It certainly looks cool!

The next message is from Charlie aka. Techsyslonghorn, who has a problem with his Dell D630. For some reason he seems to be unable to install any Debian-based form of Linux. His machine always refuses to boot with the error “can’t access tty”. At this point, we have no idea what could cause this. If you have any hints regarding a solution to this or even what would cause this particular error, please shoot us a message using the Contact link at the top of this site.

News
First off, Fab rants about Apple bricking people’s iPhones with the 1.1.1 software update and the whole discussion that entailed and we decide that Apple pretty much frakked up.

Dan brings us a story about the new Sourceforge project that wants to bring the BBC iPlayer to Linux. Usually, the iPlayer requires Windows XP SP2 and Internet Explorer 6 (!) — so no go on Vista. Bloody morons!

Main Segment
Fab explains what MythTV is and how he got it going on his system (including all the problems he ran into). We also mention the TiVo and talk about DVRs in general; we also mention the X10 home automation protocol.

Hardware Specs for Fab’s machine:

• Dell XPS210 with Intel Viiv Core2 Duo 2GHz, 1GB of RAM
• ATI Radeon X1300 Pro
• Dell 19” widescreen monitor
• Pinnacle PCTV 400e DVB-S receiver (USB2.0)
• X10 MCE Remote Control (RF) with USB receiver dongle

Installed Software:

• Ubuntu Feisty (7.04)
• All the audio and video codecs Fab could find
• OpenSSH
• Apache, MySQL and phpMyAdmin
• LIRC
• MythTV 0.20.2 (with several plugins including MythWeb)
• Firefox 2

A very nice and detailed guide with screenshots of nearly every step to set up MythTV with Ubuntu can be found here. You might also wanna try Mythbuntu which didn’t work for Fab but seems to be a very cool project or the KnoppMyth LiveCD. For a general overview of MythTV’s features go here or read the MythTV wiki to find out more. However, Fab wants to warn everyone that setting up a working MythTV system isn’t trivial and that if you want to attempt such a project, you have to be prepared to be very patient and to spend a lot of time searching on the web for solutions to the problems that will invariably crop up. You also shouldn’t be afraid of compiling your own stuff (which implies being really comfortable on the command line).

Before we wrap it up, Fab also plugs the new Linux Outlaws wallpaper and says that if you have any questions about MythTV, you can write us and he will try to answer them as best he can in one of the next shows.

Addendum
This is the YouTube video of Steven Fry’s German impression on QI that Dan talks about in the outtakes:

Further Reading
As promised on the show, Fab has written an in-depth article about his experiences in setting up his mythbox. Read about it here. The article also includes a few nice pictures of the setup.

The theme music for this podcast is a song called “Sudo Modprobe”, it was written by Fab and produced by Dan and Fab. The album art was also created by Fab.

Listener Feedback
Michael tells us that he’s most definitely not German, but from South Carolina in the US. Since his grandparents came over from Sweden, Dan tries his Swedish accent while reading from his message.

Jackie sends us a picture of the Linux Outlaws wallpaper on her desktop (you can see it in the new listener gallery on the wallpaper page) and tells us that she enjoys the show very much. She challenges Dan to do a Brummie accent and Fab tells us what “Brummie” means in German. Jackie would like us to do a special about multimedia applications (especially for organising music), which we might do in the future. In the meantime, we point her to episode 4 of the podcast where we discussed Banshee, which is a pretty usable music player and organiser. We also plug Jackie’s excellent blog.

Main Segment
First thing is a rant from Fab again: He is worried about the fact that Google recently bought Jaiku which is a site that both Dan and Fab frequent a lot. Fab remarks that everything Google touches seems to turn into betas, kind of like the Midas touch of the Web 2.0 world. Dan says we have to reserve judgement for now and should wait to see what will happen with it.

Next Dan talks about new releases in the open source world this week: Linspire 6, Madriva 2008, Damn Small Linux 4.0 RC5, Fluxbox 1.0 and Skype 1.4 (which isn’t open source, but still important to us).

Fab, as promised, gives us his APTonCD review, talks about its features and recommends it to everyone using a Debian-based distribution.

After this we talk about the Linux-based in-flight entertainment system eX2 which recently won some kind of award and Fab tells the story how he crashed that very system on his recent flights to and from Australia. But we nonetheless love the fact that the leading system in seat-back entertainment runs on Linux; even if a kernel panic at thirty thousand feet is a bit scary…

The next story is a about a threatened lawsuit again. Apparently, Symantec is suing a guy for calling his open source disk cloning utility Ghost for Linux or G4L which is kinda straightforward but still quite nasty. The poor guy doesn’t make any money whatsoever from it, after all. We propose he’d stick it to the man and rebrand his software Spectre for Linux.

Dan also tells us that Canonical is not only pushing Ubuntu on the desktop, but also wants to get the server edition into wider adoption as a preinstallation option. Most likely partner on the hardware manufacturer side for this initiative is of course Dell due to their recent success in selling preinstalled Ubuntu desktop machines to consumers. We follow this up with a discussion of a story that Dell is already prepping to broaden their Linux desktop offering after the release of Ubuntu Gutsy which would just be plain awesome, we conclude.

We also mention our upcoming Gutsy release episode for next week.

Package of the Week
Fab: md5sum, a MD5 hash checker (part of the GNU core utils which nearly all distros have installed)
Dan: GParted, the Gnome partition editor (especially the Live CD version)

Before we wrap it up, we also mention Fab’s post about killer penguins on the Outlaws blog, plug our wallpaper again and Dan announces his Week Of Distributions.

The theme music for this podcast is a song called “Sudo Modprobe”, it was written by Fab and produced by Dan and Fab. The album art was also created by Fab.

This is our special episode to celebrate the release of Ubuntu 7.10 Gutsy Gibbon which will be out today.

Listener Feedback
First off, a shout out and big thanks to the guys from The Linux Link Tech Show who mentioned us on their last episode as well as adding us to The Linux Link and making our server quake in fear as a result. Thanks guys, you rock! One of their hosts, Dann, also wrote us an email congratulating us on the show and telling us that Agave’s logo isn’t a pot leaf — which Fab also told Dan on episode 1 but neglected to leave that bit of audio in when he edited the outtakes…

We also had another email from thelastknowngod who said he loved the show and wishes us luck with it. He also encourages people to sign up over at the Linux Reality Forums where he’s a moderator. Fab has done so directly after he got the email and has promised to be an active contributor over there before too long.

Our last piece of feedback for this week is from John Kalstrom who asks if Fab has stereo sound on his mythbox. Fab says he’s been trying to figure that out and assumes he does, but can’t be sure. He’ll look into it more, though. If anybody out there has advice for John on how to get the stereo in MythTV on Fedora 5 working, let us know!

After this, Fab shortly talks about the Pligg site he set up at linuxoutlaws.com/contribute for the show to enable listeners to submit stories for the podcast and vote on stories other people have submitted. Please check it out and sign up if you’re interested. You can also leave comments on the various stories and have a look what Dan and Fab are planning for the next show, if you’re interested.

News
Dan tells us about the following new releases that came out recently: Absolute Linux 12.0.7, rPath 1.0.7, Scientific Linux 4.5 and Frugalware 0.7.

We then talk about the Ubuntu Open Week as announced on Jono Bacon’s blog. If you’re interested in learning about Ubuntu, be sure to check that out. We also plug Lug Radio and Jokosher which Fab uses to produce this podcast.

Next we talk about Microsoft having the audacity to promote their shitty FUD-spreading propaganda on Google’s search results for the term “Linux” and also on Linux.com. Fab than ratholes this topic with a hideously geeky analysis, comparing Microsoft and Google to the Shadows and Vorlons on Babylon 5.

In other news, Mozilla announced that they will make a mobile version of Firefox, everbody’s favourite browser. They also say they “plan to rock it”. Also: Windows takes down a TV news station, forcing the poor weather guy to draw his own charts and a british MP says making everyone use Windows isn’t the way to go for a government.

Main Section
On to the main topic of the show, Ubuntu Gutsy. Dan’s been running the last release candidate for some time now and tells us about his experience with installing and using it. He tried the upgrade process and after that did fresh installs of both the 64 and the 32 bit versions to compare them for us. He also talks about some errors he came across in trying to install everything.

Later we talk about new features in Gutsy. Among other things, the following things are new in this version of Ubuntu:

• The new Gnome 2.20
• Compiz Fusion 3D effects
• Desktop search
• Fast user switching
• New interface for installing Firefox plugins automatically
• Graphical configuration tool for X
• Fully automatic printer installation
• NTFS writing
• Power consumption & heat management improvements for laptops
• Harddisk encryption
• AppArmour for improved security
• Improved support for certain wireless cards

We conclude that the improvements are small and gradual rather than big and dramatic, but we think that this is a good sign since it hopefully means all the big stuff is working. Ubuntu is becoming a very easy to use and very polished distribution. It also looks very slick. Also, compared to proprietary operating systems, the amount of changes these guys make in six months are pretty amazing.

Wrapping it up, Dan tells us about his current tour of distributions and Fab reminds everyone again to sign up at the new Pligg site Ante Up! and start contributing. And now go and have fun with Gutsy!

At the top of the show, we talk about why Dan is once again podcasting from a Windows machine (oh, the shame) and what Fab thinks about Gutsy, now that he has installed it and had some time to play with it.

Listener Feedback
Ramkumar corrects us on our misperception that Compiz Fusion isn’t enabled by default in Gutsy. Fab had another problem with the compizconfig-settings-manager package not getting installed by default, though which means he had to install that from Synaptic before he could enable the “Custom” options like the 3D Desktop Cube, which slightly pissed him off. This wasn’t the case when Dan installed the beta version of Gutsy on his system, though.

Kevan corrects another mistake of our’s and tells us that it is in fact possible to block certain companies from appearing in your Google Ads. It is called the “competitive ad filter”. But his advice is to click the Microsoft ads on Linux sites to death since M$ will be charged money and the Linux sites will get payed for that. Good point!

Our third email this week is from Butch who congratulates us on the show and requests a sort of cheat sheet for software new users might like to install on Gutsy. We don’t really have any ideas about this yet, but Dan mentions Automatix and Easy Ubuntu as two possible starting points. If you have any ideas about this, feel free to talk to us about them!

Main Segment
New releases this week: Puppy Linux 3.01,elpicx 1.1, Foresight Linux 1.4.1, Slamd64 Linux 12.0, Kiwi Linux 7.10 (which has nothing to do with New Zealand, as one might expect) and also the development releases of NetBSD 4.0 RC3 and FreeBSD 7.0 Beta1 which Dan might try soon. Fab, however, wants to try Ubuntu Satanic Edition when he gets a chance. He also tells us about the Ubuntu theme add-on for Firefox.

In the news, Microsoft finally caved to the EU’s demands and chose to cut its losses and comply with the court rulings to open up their server products to third party developers.

If you are in the UK, you might be interested in buying your own “L1NUX” license plate on eBay. Maybe the Canonical guys are interested. For something slightly cheaper, you could buy this great shirt:

In other news, Linspire chief Kevin Carmony defects to Ubuntu and Becta says Microsoft is abusing their monopoly in the school market (with which Fab tends to agree since he also does some IT work in schools).

Package of the Week
Fab: Jungle Disk, which is an awesome backup solution using Amazon’s S3 service
Dan: Bluefish, a multi-purpose text editor, especially suited to HTML/CSS and PHP work

That’s it for this week. Be sure to check out Dan’s blog to follow his distribution tour, which we will talk about in detail in a future show.

The theme music for this podcast is a song called “Sudo Modprobe”, it was written by Fab and produced by Dan and Fab. The album art was also created by Fab.

This time we bring you quite a long episode since Fab’s CMOS battery was low on power and subsequently slowed down his system’s internal clock which in turn screwed up his timing of the show. The culprit has been found and exchanged for a fresh battery though, so next week’s show should be more typical in length again.

Kicking it off, Fab tells us that despite his earlier vows of abstinence, he has begun playing World of Warcraft which will probably terminate the last resisting shreds of his social life that were still holding out — well, what can you do if your girlfriend of all people suddenly comes home with months of free game time. We are sure you understand… Dan relates his outlandish experiences with Slackware, including installing Skype by hand which might also be blamed for the fact that he sounds like he’s podcasting from Soviet Russia during this episode. Sorry for that! We then slag off Slackware a bit because of this (we don’t really mean to offend anybody here, it’s just that it doesn’t seem to be a feasible distribution for us — if you like it, more power to ya).

We were also mentioned on TLLTS again, for which we want to say thanks a lot, guys! They are planning to do an aggregated feed of all kinds of Linux podcasts which would certainly be very cool. So guys, feel free to grab our feed or podcast files directly and do with them whatever you want. Whatever gets more people listening is fine by us.

Listener Feedback
Ronald Campbell writes us, suggesting Gizmo as a voice mail service for the podcast. We defibitely would love to set up such a system for our listeners so we will look into the possibilities of doing something like that.

David Roberts from Utah (aka buffalodavid) asks if we have heard of Buffalo Linux which we haven’t, but want to look into if only for the cool name. Another chance for Dan to practice his Generic George W. Accent™!

Our third email is from John, who thanks us for considering an Ogg feed of the show and tells Fab that there actually are portable players out there that support that format. We also would like to plug his Source Trunk podcast.

Main Section
Dan tells us of the following new F/OSS releases this week: Sabayon 1.1 Professional, Finnix 90.0, Trisguel 1.5, PUD Linux 0.4.8, Vyatta 3.0, Damn Small Linux 4.0, MEPIS antiX 7.0 and SystemRescueCd 0.4.1. Fab also mentions interesting new features of the upcoming Fedora 8.

We go on to talk about the hard drive problems that people with laptops seem to have in Gutsy and Fab says that he’s not so sure, if the problem isn’t a bit exaggerated. But read the initial bug report on Launchpad and decide for yourself; there’s also tips on there how to prevent this unwanted behavior which is caused by a bad ACPI setting. Fab also says he has his ACPI disabled anyway since it doesn’t report his CPU temperature correctly. We also talk about Gutsy’s networking problems which seem to be caused by a bug in its IPv6 implementation. During this discussion, Dan expresses his general concern about the amount of last-minute fixes that seemed to be going on with 7.10, which might have something to do with these problems.

After this we talk about more humourous stuff like the fact that someone put up a “W1NNT” number plate on eBay in response to the Linux one from last week. In this context, Dan points out that Microsoft’s old slogan “build on NT technology” makes no sense since it actually means “build on new technology technology”. Fab then tells us about a screenshot he recently saw which shows that on the Mac, the icon for a Windows PC on the network is an old-school CRT with a bluescreen on it. Props to Apple for a nice sense humour for that one!

In other news, the Brazilian Ministry of Education bought 90,000 Linux machines to distribute them in schools over there. Fab says he would be really happy if the German government would do sane stuff like this. Related to this, we follow up on our BECTA story from last week — BECTA now advises schools not to sign any license agreements with Microsoft, which is pretty awesome. Also in the UK, Tesco starts selling Ubuntu pre-installed machines in their stores now which we both agree is another huge step for Linux in the mainstream market. We then talk a bit about Linux adoption in general and also the fact that more and more people we know start considering switching to distros like Ubuntu, even people that are not particularly tech-savvy.

Our next topic is a Linux distribution by the peculiar (at least for German speakers) name of “Vixta”. Vixta is a distro made with the single purpose of emulating Vista’s “Aero Glass” interface — although it isn’t nearly as much of a resource hog, of course (it’s basically a fancy KDE skin with really cool effects). Dan goes on to tell us about porn-get, a nifty little utility that aims to be apt-get for porn. We also talk about the Linux distro which came up with this, Lesbian Linux and Fab also reports he picked up on his promise from last week and tried out Ubuntu Satanic Edition, which is basically a very cool skin pack for Ubuntu

Fab actually also wanted to talk about his new WRT54GL router, but we decide that we are going to do a special episode about this next week. We then talk a bit about Fab’s experience with World of Warcraft in Wine, which is great fun. Fab’s character is a human warrior called Aleksandar which he plays on the Ghostlands realm. If you have a character on this server, feel free to check him out.

Homework for the Greenhorns
Install Wine, get a Windows application of your choice to run (be sure to check in the Wine AppDB that it has at least gold rating beforehand, though) and then tell us about your experiences with the whole process.

Package of the Week
Fab: Alien Arena, a great, open source, Quake-like first person shooter
Dan has no package this week due to his stress with getting Slackware to work. He promised to bring one for the next show, though.

To wrap it up, we talk about the recent influx of visitors on Dan’s blog and his continuing distro tour on there and then finally close down shop.

The theme music for this podcast is a song called “Sudo Modprobe”, it was written by Fab and produced by Dan and Fab. The album art was also created by Fab.

This week Dan and Fab talk about the Linksys WRT54GL router which both of them use because it runs Linux and is very customisable for that reason.

Listener Feedback

Daniel writes us about the homework from last week’s show: He’s trying to get the Rosetta Stone language learning software, which uses Adobe’s Shockwave, to run in Wine. Fab initially thought Shockwave wouldn’t work in Wine, but the program entry for Rosetta Stone in the AppDB seems to prove him wrong. When rathole this topic a bit and talk about Photoshop vs. the GIMP and Dan mentions the GIMPshop mod which gives you a more Photoshop-like GUI for the GIMP.

We got another very long email this week from John, who lives in Munich but is actually from the UK (what a perfect listener for a podcast produced by two guys from the UK and Germany). His email contained comments on nearly every show we did so far, which is really awesome! He also says he thinks the little music bumpers we started to put in between the different sections don’t really work for us. What do you think? Do you agree? Do you like them? Please use the feedback form to tell us about it! John also has the idea that we could sell CDs of the shows to recoup some of our expenses and Fab says he’s planning to set up a merchandising shop at CaféPress, possibly in time for christmas. If you have any suggestions about this, please also tell us about it! Fab also plans to put a PayPal donation button on the site, but we definitely want to avoid advertising (both in the show and on the site) as long as we can.

News & Releases

New releases this week: OpenBSD 4.2, openSUSE 10.3 Live, paldo Linux 1.12 and dyne:bolic 2.5.1.

Next, we quickly discuss some news. First off, we mention a news story that suggests Dell might have dropped Ubuntu in the UK and debunk it right away. We also talk about debianshop.com, where you can get very cheap systems with Debian pre-installed (as the name suggests). They also donate some of the proceeds to the Debian developers, which is very nice.

Fab also says he’s aware of the fact that you shouldn’t call Ogg/Vorbis files “Ogg files” like he frequently does, but he also says that he finds the whole container vs. file type issue very confusing and will probably keep saying the wrong thing just because it is much easier to say.

Main Segment

As we promised in the first episode, we wanted to spend a whole show on talking about the great WRT54GL router. Dan starts with summarising its history and we speculate about the fact that Linksys first chose Linux as its operating system and later switched to a proprietary system when they realised they had to open source the original software under the GPL. Dan also tells us the story how he got his copy of the router (after a few tries) and how he uses it. If you want to get one of these, you basically have to watch out to get the right version, ie. one that is using Linux. The safest thing now is probably just to buy a *GL one (Amazon.com sells them for a reasonable price, for example) like our mate Butch did.

We then talk a bit about the different firmware choices you have (most are based on the original open-sourced Linksys OS) and what you can do with them. Dan is using the Whiterussian firmware from OpenWrt, which is being replaced by a newer version called Kamikaze. Fab is using Tomato which is pretty much an optimised version of the stock Linksys firmware with some very cool features and a very nice AJAX interface. We also mention the reasons why you would want to hack your router and why we did it and the fact that flashing the firmware isn’t really as scary as it sounds, as long as you read up on stuff first and don’t plunge head first into things. For a nice overview of the different versions of the device (with screenshots) and links to the many firmware choices, check out this Wikipedia page.

We don’t have any packages this week, but Fab plugs the open source multiplayer FPS Tremulous which Dan mentioned last week and we close with saying goodbye and recommending Dan’s blog, as always.

The theme music for this podcast is a song called “Sudo Modprobe”, it was written by Fab and produced by Dan and Fab. The album art was also created by Fab.

Fab starts off with mentioning the integrated lab IT system (which runs Windows XP) he saw at the Medica tradeshow in Düsseldorf. Sorry for the dismal audio quality yet again, by the way. In trying to boost his voice, Fab must have done something stupid to his mixer this time. We promise, we’ll get it fixed for the next show.

Listener Feedback
John corrects us on the fact that Source Trunk, which we mentioned during episode 9 isn’t his podcast, as Fab thought it was. Chris O’Byrne, from New Mexico (apparently), gives us his thoughts about the music bumpers and the fact that the opening song is way too long (which we tried to fix right away in this episode). He also plugs Xubuntu which he really likes and wants people to check out.

On a side note, Fab bought himself an iPhone which just came out recently here in Europe and he’s really fallen in love with it. Yes, we know: It ain’t open at all, but at least it runs some kind of Unix which has got to be a step up from the Windows Mobile crap he used before…

News & Releases

New releases this week: Red Hat Enterprise 5.1, BLAG 70000 and StartCom Enterprise 5.0.1.

First off, we talk about the fact that Red Hat wants to put Linux on half of all new servers and partners with Amazon to create datacentres on demand which sounds pretty cool. Next, we talk about SCO losing another lawsuit which is always good news. This time, they were found guilty of spreading FUD about Unix by a German court. We also talk about the fact that SuSE is actually German for “Software und Systementwicklung” — which used to be the name of the company developing that particular distro before they got bought by Novell.

On the Microsoft side of things, we found out this week that Windows’ pseudorandom number generator isn’t as random as everyone thought it was, apparently. We then rathole that topic a bit, as usually.

In more Red Hat news, Dan gives us a summary of his review of Fedora 8. He especially like the virtual machine features, but thought compared to distributions like Ubuntu, Fedora isn’t as easy to set up and use as it could be. He also had some pretty frustrating problems with installing RPM packets through YUM. We also don’t really get the point of the Codec Buddy (as always, VLC comes in handy here). Fab wants to know more about the colour changing wallpaper, though. He is also interested in Pulse Audio for use in recording this podcast.

Package of the Week

Fab: Avant Window Navigator, a Mac OS X like dock and application launcher
Dan: IcePodder, a native podcatcher for Linux that just works

Before wrapping it up, Fab plugs the new Ogg feed and then heads straight to bed.

The theme music for this podcast is a song called “Sudo Modprobe”, it was written by Fab and produced by Dan and Fab. The album art was also created by Fab.

Although we were aiming to do a shorter show this time, so that Dan wouldn’t miss England’s football match (we recorded the show last wednesday), we still hit 50+ minutes as usual — go figure. Anyway, we start with the amazing news that we came second (with 8/10 points, right behind the great LugRadio) in a review of Linux podcasts by Linux Format Magazine, the UK’s biggest Linux publication. We especially liked their comments that we are “much more laid back than the other podcasts” and that we are “proof that you don’t have to even share a country with your co-podcasters to produce a decent output”. Their final verdict:

Linux Outlaws should definitely be on your playlist.

Thanks a lot, guys & gals — you rock! If you live in the UK, definitely pick up an issue of LXF; they seem to have excellent taste and we definitely want to return the favour. Also a big thanks to Jackie for bringing this to our attention!

Listener Feedback

Tombstone Tommy from Tupperville says he loves the show and the new intro and he want’s to know which VM we prefer. We both use VMware for nearly everything we do, but we have also tried QEMU — which can be a bit slow — and both of us are definitely interested in learning about Xen when we get a chance. There is also Parallels (which isn’t as good as VMware on Linux and has some unresolved legal threats hovering over it) and VirtualBox (which like Xen is open source and gets extra points for that).

/dev/null wants to know how Dan was using Ewedrive in Linux. Dan explains that he didn’t mount it but was only using the web interface. Fab managed to mount his share via webdav from the Ubuntu “Places” menu without problems, however. It was a bit slow for him, though.

Chris O’Byrne send us another message telling us about a project he might do in the future: Setting up a GUI-less laptop and then using only command line tools for email, websurfing and other day-to-day tasks. He might also set up a blog or a podcast to talk about his experiences with that. We think it’s an awesome idea!

Peter Cannon aka. Dick Turpin tells us about his distro time trial article. Sorry about forgetting to credit you on the show, Fab lost the email header when copying your feedback to our show notebook.

Gordon Coupar from Scotland also thinks we are laid back and thanks us for doing the show, which we are happy to hear.

The last email this week comes from Andrea Di Muzio, who gives us a lot of feedback on the show and also suggests we could mention some Linux equivalents for commonly used Windows programs to help people switch to the Light Side. We think that is a great idea and will definitely think about doing that. Fab then mentions that we are looking at doing an episode that explains how we produce the podcast to help other podcasters on Linux and we talk about Andrea’s problem with removing Swiftfox as a default browser on Kubuntu about which we give some general ideas that might help to solve it.

Main Section

Releases: Zenwalk 4.8 “Live”, PC-BSD 1.4.1, Linux Mint 4.0, ArtistX 0.4, Pie Box Enterprise 4, Pardus 2007.3, Bluewhite64 12.0 “miniLive”, sidux 2007-04 and Skype 2.0 beta for Linux — with video chat features!

Our first story this week concerns Hans Reiser, creator of the popular ReiserFS file system, whos trial for murder of his estranged wife just started this week. The whole circumstances surrounding this case are really weird… Dan suggests to get Columbo on the case, which would probably be a good idea. We also discuss ReiserFS for a bit.

Keeping with the theme, we talk about the German police and their desire to leave the Windows world behind, which seems to be a very sensible plan considering the problems they seem to have right now.

Next, we talk about Macedonia buying 20,000 Ubuntu PCs. Canonical seems to be able to pull off one of these deals every other day now, which is very good news for both desktop Linux and the Macedonian educational system.

The Evil Empire on the other hand, seems to concentrate on shady scare tactics: This time, it looks like Kyocera fell for a patent deal that supposedly “allows” them to “safely” use embedded Linux in their printer hardware. What a load of FUD, as always…

On a lighter note, Fab tells the story how he crashed a pristine Ubuntu server at work. Never do a forced symlink from /bin/bash to /bin/sh and vice versa. Believe us!

The last story this week is about the Everex Green PC selling out at WalMart. Fab has recently tried the gOS Ubuntu-based distro which comes pre-loaded on these machines and says he likes it at lot. It’s definitely something different.

Package of the Week

Dan: Freeciv, a great open source, cross-platform Civilization clone
Fab: Inkscape, the ultimate open source vector graphics manipulation program

Before we wrap up the show, Dan quickly gives us a condensed version of his Linux Mint 4.0 review and talks about the features he liked best. Bottom line: A very cool release, Dan might even recommend it over Ubuntu for new users — although we still hate the naming scheme.

We also want to give huge thanks to Michael Johnson and Matt Jelliman for their generous donations via the PayPal button. Thanks a lot, guys!

The theme music for this podcast is a song called “Sudo Modprobe”, it was written by Fab and produced by Dan and Fab. The album art was also created by Fab.

Listener Feedback

We mention our first audio feedback submission from Leon Vayman and the fact that it was a great clip, but a bit too long to include it into the show. John from Munich requests a manual download link for the Ogg files, which Fab is working on.

Adam asks about a theme park sim game for Linux. If you know anything like that, send us some email! There is a project called Lincity, maybe you want to check that out. As for running Windows games under Wine, Roller Coaster Tycoon looks good, Sim Theme Park doesn’t.

Peter Cannon sends us another hilarious email.

Also, Andrea clarifies that he indeed is a guy an tells us how he solved his problem with Thunderbird and Swiftfox which is greatly appreciated. He also mentions osalt.com and linuxappfinder.com/alternatives where you can find free alternatives to a given Windows program (original Lifehacker article).

We also talk a bit about the ATI experience under Linux and 3D graphics cards and drivers in general. If you have any opinions on that, feel free to write in and let us know.

F/OSS Releases

• Devil-Linux 1.2.14
• ParallelKnoppix 2.8
• KDE 4.0 Release Candidate
• Shift Linux 0.5
• RoFreeSBIE 1.3
• StartCom Enterprise Linux 4.0.5
• Pioneer Linux 3.0.2
• Guadalinex 4.1
• Firefox 3 Beta 1

Main Section

We talk about the Linus Torvalds interview on iTnews.com.au. Cool stuff! In more negative news, Asus seems to be in hot water over the eeePC violating the GPL.

The new ATI driver for Linux supports Ubuntu 7.10 now. If you have an ATI card, this is certainly good news.

We also discuss the recent controversy involving Microsoft’s OOXML and the GNOME Foundation. Check out Bruce Byfield’s full article on Linux.com for the full scoop. We also rathole about Richard Stallman, Miguel de Icaza and Australian cricketers.

Just for fun, Fab plugs the amazing Mr. T ad for World of Warcraft. Download or watch it and also the William Shatner one here.

Disclaimer: Linux Outlaws is not in any way sponsored or affiliated with World of Warcraft or Blizzard Entertainment. We just love their ads…

Packages of the Week

Fab: Lynx, a CLI-only, text-based browser — very geeky!

Dan: Exaile, a media player and the de facto Amarok replacement for Gnome

The theme music for this podcast is a song called “Sudo Modprobe”, it was written by Fab and produced by Dan and Fab. The album art was also created by Fab.

We start the show off with asking the listeners if they rather had a forum or something else instead of the /contribute site. If you have any ideas, write us email!

Listener Feedback

Lukas reports some problem with our Ogg files not being downloaded correctly in OS X. We cannot reproduce this behaviour (well, we both don’t use OS X for a start) and would be greatful for further hints regarding this. Things definitely look alright from our end.

Butch tells us about a nifty solar-powered computer that runs Linux. Very cool stuff! Looks like something straight out of Q Branch.

F/OSS Releases

• Turbolinux 11 Server
• ASPLinux 12
• Ubuntu Muslim Edition 7.10
• IPCop 1.4.18
• CentOS 5.1
• Damn Small Linux 4.1
• dyne:bolic 2.5.2
• MoLinux 3.2

News and Stories

Novell’s been given the go ahead to counter-sue SCO in Utah, according to Groklaw. We say: “Give ‘em hell, guys!”

On an even lighter note, Microsoft is in hot water over the very naughty Santa bot they put into their messenger client, which forced them to eventually kill Santa — the bastards!

Main Section

Dan tells us about his recent tour of Linux distributions and the experiences he made during those weeks. He tried the following distros (click on the names for links to Dan’s original reviews on his blog): Ubuntu 7.10 “Gutsy Gibbon”, openSUSE 10.3, Mandriva One 2008, PCLinuxOS 2007, Debian 4.0 “Etch”, Slackware 12, Sabayon 1.1 Professional, SimplyMEPIS 7.0, Fedora 8 “Werewolf” & Linux Mint 4.0 “Daryna”. If you’re interested, also check out Dan’s complete wrap-up article comparing all ten distributions.

The theme music for this podcast is a song called “Sudo Modprobe”, it was written by Fab and produced by Dan and Fab. The album art was also created by Fab.

At the start of the show, Fab tells us why this episode will probably be released a bit late (as it indeed is) — but to make up for this, he announces our brand new line of Linux Outlaws merchandise.

Listener Feedback

Peter Cannon sends us another hilarious email and tells us about his experiences with gOS and Linux Mint. Next, Cam DeCoster congratulates us on the podcast and prompts us about Zune support in Linux. We don’t really know about that and rathole a bit about the Zune and other media players in general instead and we also talk about squircles and tigons. Cam also tells us about ReactOS, which we haven’t seen either but are determined to have a look at. In another email, Jason gives us an alternative to yum for rpm-based package management: the Smart Package Manager, which sounds like it’s really useful.

Releases & News

Before we get into the releases proper, Fab mentions the Endian firewall, which he recently discovered at work and says that he likes the web-based admin interface a lot. We then cover the following new software releases:

• SystemRescueCd 0.4.2
• EnGarde Secure Linux 3.0.18
• Frugalware 0.8 Pre 1
• Astaro Security Gateway 7.1
• Skolelinux 3.0r1
• Geubuntu 7.10
• Berry Linux 0.87

On the news side of things we talk about Nokia claiming that Ogg Theora is proprietary and also useless because it doesn’t support DRM, which is both quite hilarious. As always, we rathole the whole topic thoroughly and Dan even ends up mentioning the OpenCola in the process.

On the topic of open standards, we also talk about some disturbing developments sourrounding the NoOOXML petition. At least the Dutch government seems to have some sense and sticks it to Microsoft big time, mandating the use of truly open document formats in their governmental services. In more DRM-related news, the MPAA embarrasses itself by violating copyright law with their copyright enforcement software, go figure.

It also seems as though Seagate’s “Free Agent” drives ain’t so free after all, since they don’t work in Linux because of some stupid power management feature. As Seagate deliberately excludes Linux users from support, we conclude you should probably stop buying their drives altogether.

Another big story this past week was the fact that the SFLC filed another lawsuit regarding GPL violation on behalf of BusyBox, this time against Verizon. After discussing this, we also talk a bit about the Firefox usage stats that Mozilla recently released and our own observations regarding this. Before we go on to talk about packages, Dan quickly mentions the fact that Sun is now offering cash incentives for open source developers, which is nice.

Package of the Week

Fab — EasyTAG, a very powerful mp3 & Ogg tag editor
Dan — KTorrent, a great and very full featured BitTorrent client

After the packages, we quickly talk about gOS which Dan didn’t really like at all (you can read his full review of it here). We than wrap up the show and say goodbye.

The theme music for this podcast is a song called “Sudo Modprobe”, it was written by Fab and produced by Dan and Fab. The album art was also created by Fab.

Please feel free to comment on this show in the forums.

This is the last episode of the year. We are gonna take a week off since it’s a busy time for anybody anyway and Fab will be completely without Internet access over the holidays. So enjoy this extra-long Christmas episode and then go and spend some time with your families, we’ll be back in 2008! We also mention that Fab has set up some forums for listeners of the show, so you can also spend the time between shows in there, if you want. We already have some nice discussion going and we would be happy to welcome you there. You can leave feedback on the show and talk about Linux, open source or anything else you might be interested in, so head over there and have fun!

Listener Feedback

The first email is by Jonathan Hull from Texas, who enlightens us about the fact that Maxtor were bought by Seagate some time ago. So if you want to boycott Seagate for their rediculous behaviour regarding their new drives, which we talked about on last week’s show, you’re gonna have to boycott Maxtor as well, it looks like. Thanks a lot for clarifying that, Jonathan!

Antone Henderson from Oz tells us about the licensing jungle that is Ogg — Vorbis vs. Theora and all that confusing stuff and why manufacturers are unlikely to use Theora for their video devices. Once again, really helpful info. Thanks for telling us!

Steve Anderson writes in to tell us that he likes the show a lot and that he’s been a Unix/Linux guy for ages, which is way cool. We also discover that Fab apparently sounds like an alien.

Eric Amundson also wrote us, telling us that we kept him on top of stuff while was at home recovering from being sick (wich we are glad we did) and prompts us to do a review of on-site backup solutions like we did for S3 and Ewedrive. We will certainly look into this in the future and do a show on the topic. Right now we both use rsync pretty much exclusively.

Releases & News

Fresh releases this week:

• LliureX 7.11
• Litrix 7.12
• CentOS 4.6
• Damn Small Linux 4.2

Fab also mentions the development releases Elive 1.2.3 (Unstable) and GobblinX 2.6 RC1 “Micro”. Furthermore, the Django book has finally been released. We know, it’s not software, but it’s open source. You can read it for free online or buy a real copy. Dan also tells the story how he bought Stuart Langridge’s book by accident.

The first story we talk about, is the fact that Movable Type is now an open source project. We also talk about the fact the we both prefer either Wordpress or Drupal personally. After that, we discuss NASA’s new open source rocket.

Next, Opera is taking Microsoft to court in an anti-trust case involving pre-bundleing and poor standards compliance of IE. We are kinda sceptical if this will work out for Opera, but nice try either way. It’s always good to see people stand up to the piece of steaming crap that is IE. And speaking of crap, we also talk about the embarassing blunder in Microsofts programming that shares your files with the Recycle Bin instead of with other computers. Another great feature from the guys in Redmond. And their “fix”, apparently, would be to “recreate the files” you lost. Brilliant!

Dan also mentions that the BBC finally have their iPlayer working on Linux, although it’s “only” a Flash version. Of course, this only applies to you when you live in the UK (or are willing to use TOR or something). We go off at a slight tangent about TV licenses in the UK and Germany at this point, too.

The last news story we talk about this week is the growing Chinese Linux market and the ironic fact that piracy of Windows seems to hurt Linux in this regard.

Package of the Week

Dan — PuTTY, this crossplatform SSH & Telnet client is an essential server admin tool

Fab — Personas for Firefox, a lightweight theme plugin for Firefox

Before we wrap it up, we also talk about Dan’s review of Pardus 2007.3 on LinuxPlanet and why he likes that distribution so much. Fab then mentions CRUX which he would like to try sometime. He also mentions paedML which is a Linux-based school server from Germany and we rathole a bit on the topic of governments sponsoring their own distros. Dan’s also reviewing Zenwalk at the moment.

The theme music for this podcast is a song called “Sudo Modprobe”, it was written by Fab and produced by Dan and Fab. The album art was also created by Fab.