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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.