The Ubuntu team is proud to announce the release of Ubuntu 6.06.2 LTS, the second maintenance release of “Dapper Drake”. This release includes updated Server installation CDs for the i386 and amd64 architectures.

A dissertation is composed of two elements: the content and the form. The author is certainly the person best qualified to speak about the content. We, however, will focus on the form. We are going to see how to get a fine composition with low time expenditure using LaTeX.

Why waste your money on expensive commercial games when you can play for free, and, if you're so inclined, dive into the code and modify the game to suit your exacting requirements? Apcmag.com presents its selection of the most addictive, fun and refined Open Source games for January 2008.

KDE 4.0 was officially released last week after extensive development. The long-awaited 4.0 release ushers in a new era for the popular open-source desktop environment and adds many intriguing new features and technologies. Unfortunately, the release comes with almost as many new bugs as it does features, and there is much work to be done before it sparkles like the 3.5.x series.

The DARPA’s Urban Challenge is an engineering competition to develop an autonomous vehicle capable of navigating urban streets safely while obeying traffic regulations and covering the 60 mile course in 6 hours or less. The goal is to develop vehicles that can one day self navigate through dangerous urban environments.

I know there are plenty of articles and posts for setting up a development server. Yet I still find the need to write up the exact commands and process for my later self to refer to, especially since I haven’t found a clone function in VMware Fusion like the linux version has. A pet “when-I-have-time” project would be to turn these steps into a bash script.

I'm starting to wonder if anything about Linux is going to be easy. But I remain undaunted in my efforts to use Ubuntu 7.10, or Gutsy Gibbon, to accomplish the same computing tasks I use Windows for. Now that I've got Flash and Quicktime working in Ubuntu, I feel like I'm nearly there.

Hardy is now open for translation! If you want to help make sure it’s accurately translated into your language, you can start work straight away at:

A few weeks ago I decided that it might be fun to attempt to remaster Ubuntu. I've been using Ubuntu for a number of years and while I think the distribution is great, my set-up does differ a fair amount from the standard Ubuntu installation. So, remastering Ubuntu into a distribution that more closely matches my set-up seemed like a logical thing to do.

The Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter, Issue 74 for the week January 13th - January 19th, 2008 is now available. In this issue: layout contest for Kubuntu.org, Ubuntu case studies, mugs from Germany for your Loco Team, FOSS in Egypt, and much, much more!

Let’s get right to it: considering the popularity of open source applications and utilities, why hasn’t the open source flagship - the Linux operating system - caught on with mainstream PC users?

If you needed to convert a YouTube video to, say, 3gp format for your mobile phone a few months back, you would probably have to use several applications ran with impossible to remember options. First, you would have to get the video in .flv format using youtube-dl and convert it to avi, mp4, 3gp and so on with a huge command like ffmpeg -i a1Y73sPHKxw.flv -ab 48 -ar 32010 -b 700 -s 320×240 -vcodec xvid -acodec mp3 video.avi (don’t use it). But fortunately, times change, things evolve and new awesome applications hit the Linux streets (not all the time but still..).

I've spent the last two weeks on the road, meeting with customers and prospects. It has been enlightening, to say the least. One primary theme has emerged: the Web 2.0 revolution is over. The web has already won. Its chief weapon? Open source.

As you might have noticed yourself by now, the Grub screen looks quite plain, simple and dull. Even with colours or Grub themes. Gfx Boot is a powered version of GRUB Bootloader and it’s able to load themes instead of 16 colour splashes. Here are a couple of screenshots, just to get an idea about it and maybe make you want to beautifulize grub (yeah, i know it’s not a word but it sounds cool):

If you've switched from Yahoo! over to Gmail because you prefer to read your email in a desktop client such as Thunderbird, you probably are wondering how you can do the same thing with Yahoo! for free.

Did you ever get to struggle against your text editor’s random format feature while trying to write a document? Open Office may be a great project, but when you want to focus on the content, it can be annoying to have your editor format or unformat your text, seemingly at random.

I couldn't find any Ubuntu logo GIMP brushes on the Ubuntu Wiki Artwork/Official page, so I've created some. The brushes are quite large, but now that GIMP supports scalable brushes they can be easily scaled down in size.

AMOR stands for Automatic Machine Object Recognition. It is a toolbox built upon Orange which allows end-users as well as computer vision scientist to do object recognition. It features most of the standard object recognition algorithms (SIFT, SVM…).It provides several different characters who prance around your X screen doing tricks and giving you tips.

Many customers, particularly those who are security conscious or those who have public terminals like to display a legal notice before users can login.

Today, I thought I'd go over a simple shell script that runs on both Linux and Unix (hopefully, pretty much any flavor) to wrap a popular password cracking program called John The Ripper, JTR from here on out, which you can download directly from this page, if you're not already using it.

Just as easy to add and remove applications or programs icons and descriptions from Windows Start menu, customizing Ubuntu Gnome menu bar panel is a snap for ex-Windows users.

To continue my look at how non-profits and the free software community can engage, I’ve decided to look at some popular free software products and see how well they fit the need of an average charity—namely my employer. I’ll start with OpenOffice.org.

Lots of open source tools can help you transfer photos and videos from your cameras to a Linux computer and burn them on to a DVD. But before you mail them to your uncles, aunts, and cousins, wouldn't it be great if you could add a customized case cover to your disks? Koverartist is a KDE application you can use to quickly put together an artistic cover for a CD case.

While the /tmp folder is not a place to store files long-term, occasionally you want to keep things a little longer than the next time you reboot, which is the default on Ubuntu systems. I know a time or two I’ve downloaded something to /tmp during testing, rebooted after making changes and then lost the original data again. This can be changed if you’d like to keep your /tmp files a little bit longer.  The default on Redhat systems, for example, is to keep files roughly ten-days.

For all the hype about the relative security of the two most popular browsers, is Firefox really any more secure than Internet Explorer? For that matter, is it even possible, as a British company with a “zero-footprint” browser claims, to develop a truly secure browser?