The Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter, Issue #68, for the week November 25th - December 2nd, 2007 is now available. In this issue we cover Full Circle Magazine Issue #7, Hug Day, Hardy Heron Alpha 1, the release of JeOS 7.10 and Launchpad 1.1.11, newly approved teams and members, Ubuntu Server ads, and much much more!

Even if you work only in Linux, you'll likely have to use Microsoft Compiled HTML Help (CHM) files at one time or another. Several open source projects use this common format, including Apache, MySQL, PostgreSQL, Python, and PHP.

It’s December, and with the holidays just around the corner it is time to spruce up your browser to help spread the Christmas cheer! What you need are some Christmas Firefox themes to get the ball rolling while you put up the decorations around the house. And we’ve got you covered in that department! :-)

Well, I'm kind of disappointed. I was all set to whine and moan about Edubuntu screwing things up on my LTSP in the outside lab and how it made me reinstall the entire OS again but then a funny thing happened. After I reinstalled the OS I noticed that it not only worked exactly as it should, but it also had solved one of the most annoying changes from Feisty to Gutsy. So now I guess this is going to be more of a fanboy post than I originally planned to do. Oh well.

Gmount-iso is a small tool written using PyGTK and Glade. It allows you to easily mount your cd images. This is a frontend to the 'mount -o loop -t iso9660 foo.iso /mountpoint' command.

Add some secret ninja power to your Ubuntu system today with Easy Crypt. With only a right click you can open or close a ‘top secret’ file, protected by military grade encryption (AES 512-bit Whirlpool). Easy Crypt is a cute little menu which brings the power of TrueCrypt to your system tray. No terminal commands necessary.

IPCop is a specialized Linux distribution whose sole purpose is to safeguard the computers and networks it is installed on. The distro proudly claims, "The Bad Packets Stop Here!" I recently installed IPCop 1.4.16 on my SOHO LAN, and found that it accomplishes what it sets out to do.

Ubuntu Muslim Edition, an Ubuntu-based Linux distribution enhanced with Islamic software, has been updated to version 7.10 "The Ubuntu Muslim Edition team is proud to announce the final version of UbuntuME 7.10. This version has exactly the same features as the 7.04 version but is built on Ubuntu 7.10 (Gutsy Gibbon)." Some of the differences between Ubuntu 7.10 and UbuntuME 7.10 include:

For many average users, GNU/Linux support for PDF files may seem reasonably advanced. They can create PDF files in programs like OpenOffice.org, read them with programs like Kpdf, and edit them in programs like pdftk or PDFedit. But that's not the whole story, says José Marchesi, founder of the recently created GNU PDF project:

Its been an interesting experience so far - notably my reading and writing of blogs has suffered as I’ve been tinkering and tweaking, but I think I now have a stable environment, notably:

rdiff-backup backs up one directory to another, possibly over a network. The target directory ends up a copy of the source directory, but extra reverse diffs are stored in a special subdirectory of that target directory, so you can still recover files lost some time ago.

Creating a high-quality chart for the Web can be a challenging task, but open source software like Open Flash Chart (OFC) makes it a cinch. As you might guess from its name, the core engine of OFC is written in Adobe Flash.

After four months of hard work we are proud to announce another release of the user manual. It features:

• documentation for GIMP 2.4
• new content, spelling and grammar fixes for English, German, French, Russian, Italian, Norwegian and Spanish
• an alternate CSS stylesheet for HTML
  

Ubuntu is great, but every now and again I like to take a look at a different Linux distribution. The other day I finally got around to downloading and having a quick play with gOS, the much talked about operating system installed on the budget Everex PCs sold by Wal-Mart. gOS is an Ubuntu/Debian derivative. Continue reading "gOS 1.0.1 - A Quick Review"

Late last nite I downloaded the Ubuntu 8.04 Alpha 1 release iso and will begin testing soon. I encourage anyone that is apt for adventure, has spare VM space, or otherwise wants to help out to download the image as well.

Last month I thought I would return to give Ubuntu a shot at mythtv. This time it was the new release ubuntu 7.10. Last time I tried ubuntu the drivers were so bad for my Nova-T and it was hard to setup that I gave up.

poMMo, the "post modern mass mailer" with the not-quite-right acronym, is a powerful Web server-based mass mailing program firmly rooted on a Linux+Apache+MySQL+PHP (LAMP) base. poMMo has been developed with the end user in mind, which shows in its quick Web-based installation, in its powerful yet simple way of creating and sending mailings, and in its intuitive usage.

The release of OpenOffice.org 2.3 brings several significant improvements to the open-source office productivity suite, including easier upgrade paths for existing Microsoft Office users, improved measures to prevent security breaches, and an array of snazzy new features introduced in the suite's word processing, spreadsheet, presentation and database applications.

gOS, the hot new Linux distribution, has been generating a lot of buzz because it comes with the Everex Green PC, sold at Wal-Mart for $200. Linux reviewers are totally in love with it, and are praising it to the skies. Naturally, I had to find out if it lives up to the hype.

With all due respect to Kevin Smith, the web is no longer only for complaining about movies. In fact, there are a large number of very helpful sites that teach you how to do things. These are do-it-yourself sites, but we're not talking about building a deck or baking a cake -- the web is full of more general interest sites that give quality instruction on all sorts of fun and useful projects. Including, sometimes, how to build a deck or bake a cake.

So far, the most useful new feature I’ve found in Firefox 3 is the  much improved location bar autocomplete that unlike Firefox 2 which only looked for web addresses in my history, this one looks on visited and bookmarked page titles and tags along with web addresses.

Dell agreed to ship PCs and laptops with the Ubuntu operating system after more than 130,000 people promoted the notion on the company's IdeaStorm web site. It would seem, however, that only a fraction of these zealots were willing to back their votes with cash.

Switching operating systems is not for the faint of heart. You're essentially forcing yourself to do some serious remapping of your ingrained work habits, but that doesn't mean it isn't worth it. With both Vista and Leopard off to somewhat bumpy starts, Linux is starting to look better everyday, but what about all those software tools you're used to from Windows and Mac OS X?

The 7th Issue of Full Circle, the Ubuntu Community Magazine has been released!

This issue comes with:

• Step-by-Step Ubuntu Studio install
• How-To : Simply Install SSH, A Terminal on your Desktop, Easily
• Convert from Windows and Learning Scribus pt.7. Review : Wubi Installer
• Top 5 - Audio/Video Apps.
• Interview with Howard County Library.
• News, Letters, Q&A, MyDesktop and more!

Get it while it’s hot! The English language versions can be downloaded here. English language only at the moment, translations on the way.

Try to describe Hotwire, and you'll eventually wind up saying something that sounds like an oxymoron, like "command-line GUI," "graphical shell" or "GUI xterm." Well, that's pretty much what Hotwire is: something halfway between a text-based shell and a modern graphical user interface.