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I hope you have a photo or other copy of the license, and stay focused. You will get people trying to run you around in circles so keep a log of who you talk with, when and about what - that will make it easier to escalate. Anyway, here are some examples:

• Getting a Windows Refund in California Small Claims Court
• Toshiba/Microsoft Saga
• User refund for no Windows option
• How to get a Windows tax refund

IANAL, but this same issue has come up before. I'm sure someone will let me know (specifically, with citations please) where I am making incorrect assumptions.

I visted the FA and saw a comment from an alleged HP employee defending this policy. The following is my response to him. See the comment link for the full text of his comment.

...babble above, content below...

In the case of the car industry, most warranties would be voided if you change the most minimal detail on the car. I had a friend that couldn't get the car serviced under the warranty because he changed the seat belts.

If your friend changed the seat belts to street legal parts, then he was protected by the Magnuson-Moss Warranty Act of 1975. The following is the specific text of the US Code which specifies this protection:

(c) Prohibition on conditions for written or implied warranty; waiver by Commission
No warrantor of a consumer product may condition his written or implied warranty of such product on the consumer's using, in connection with such product, any article or service (other than article or service provided without charge under the terms of the warranty) which is identified by brand, trade, or corporate name; except that the prohibition of this subsection may be waived by the Commission if--
(1) the warrantor satisfies the Commission that the warranted product will function properly only if the article or service so identified is used in connection with the warranted product, and
(2) the Commission finds that such a waiver is in the public interest.

In other words, assuming the warranty service had nothing to do with seat belts or their mounting hardware, OR he used street legal parts (and using DOT listed safety harnesses is quite legal, even on the street - replacement hardware must MEET OR EXCEED OE specifications) then it was quite illegal to deny him warranty protection.

By the same token, it is QUITE illegal to deny someone warranty protection because they are using an operating system which is different from that shipped with the unit unless it can be shown that the system will not work properly with that other software installed. Since Linux is no more likely to cause hardware failure than Windows, it would be trivial to prove that this is a violation of US Code (TITLE 15, CHAPTER 50, 2302 (c)) and your employer would lose a fat sack of cash in a lawsuit, to be followed by a bigger sack of cash in a class-action lawsuit for anyone who purchased an HP laptop, etc etc.

I don't see what the big deal is on returning the computer back to factory state. It makes everything easier on everyone. If it wasn't for standardized processes, 2 day turnaround time wouldn't be possible.

The machine should be booted with a diagnostic LiveCD for testing. You cannot assume that hardware problems are actually real problems until you test with a known good software platform. This argument is complete nonsense.

Also, the tech support department is only trained on Windows. Troubleshooting must be done in every case. If the staff is not trained, they can't troubleshoot on that platform.

See my last point. (I found it useful to respond to your points in psuedorandom order.)

Also remember that thanks to those secret deals between HP/Compaq and Microsoft, the computer that that particular customer got was that price and not more expensive.

Those deals are an example of price fixing and bringing them up is the most specious argument in the whole comment.

HPQ's policy on Linux and warranties is quite blatantly a violation of federal law.

IANAL, but this same issue has come up before. I'm sure someone will let me know (specifically, with citations please) where I am making incorrect assumptions.

I visted the FA and saw a comment from an alleged HP employee defending this policy. The following is my response to him. See the comment link for the full text of his comment.

...babble above, content below...

In the case of the car industry, most warranties would be voided if you change the most minimal detail on the car. I had a friend that couldn't get the car serviced under the warranty because he changed the seat belts.

If your friend changed the seat belts to street legal parts, then he was protected by the Magnuson-Moss Warranty Act of 1975. The following is the specific text of the US Code which specifies this protection:

(c) Prohibition on conditions for written or implied warranty; waiver by Commission
No warrantor of a consumer product may condition his written or implied warranty of such product on the consumer's using, in connection with such product, any article or service (other than article or service provided without charge under the terms of the warranty) which is identified by brand, trade, or corporate name; except that the prohibition of this subsection may be waived by the Commission if--
(1) the warrantor satisfies the Commission that the warranted product will function properly only if the article or service so identified is used in connection with the warranted product, and
(2) the Commission finds that such a waiver is in the public interest.

In other words, assuming the warranty service had nothing to do with seat belts or their mounting hardware, OR he used street legal parts (and using DOT listed safety harnesses is quite legal, even on the street - replacement hardware must MEET OR EXCEED OE specifications) then it was quite illegal to deny him warranty protection.

By the same token, it is QUITE illegal to deny someone warranty protection because they are using an operating system which is different from that shipped with the unit unless it can be shown that the system will not work properly with that other software installed. Since Linux is no more likely to cause hardware failure than Windows, it would be trivial to prove that this is a violation of US Code (TITLE 15, CHAPTER 50, 2302 (c)) and your employer would lose a fat sack of cash in a lawsuit, to be followed by a bigger sack of cash in a class-action lawsuit for anyone who purchased an HP laptop, etc etc.

I don't see what the big deal is on returning the computer back to factory state. It makes everything easier on everyone. If it wasn't for standardized processes, 2 day turnaround time wouldn't be possible.

The machine should be booted with a diagnostic LiveCD for testing. You cannot assume that hardware problems are actually real problems until you test with a known good software platform. This argument is complete nonsense.

Also, the tech support department is only trained on Windows. Troubleshooting must be done in every case. If the staff is not trained, they can't troubleshoot on that platform.

See my last point. (I found it useful to respond to your points in psuedorandom order.)

Also remember that thanks to those secret deals between HP/Compaq and Microsoft, the computer that that particular customer got was that price and not more expensive.

Those deals are an example of price fixing and bringing them up is the most specious argument in the whole comment.

HPQ's policy on Linux and warranties is quite blatantly a violation of federal law.

http://www.linux.com/article.pl?sid=07/01/03/22723 7
I just ordered a Dell on Saturday and I'm going to try this - seems reasonable and well-documented.

It can be done in the states too.
Actually there's an entire guide with answers to all arguments you might meet.
http://www.linux.com/article.pl?sid=07/01/03/22723 7

This page details some experiences of returning XP to dell.

Personally, I've built my desktops much cheaper than I could buy them with Windows, and I bought my last laptop from System76.com, which sells laptops with Ubuntu (my distro of choice) pre-installed. It might have been cheaper to buy a Dell and get a refund, but this way I know the hardware is well supported under Linux.

I cry bullshit!

specifically, Linux's lack of Token Ring support

Here's a howto dated 2000 that describes setting up token ring:
http://www.linux.com/howtos/Token-Ring/index.shtml

I haven't specifically used this, but I have setup Linux on Arcnet, arguably much older, certainly equivalently obsolete, networking technology.

we were considering using it for a great deal of future internal projects.

This has been covered over and over again here at /. - if you don't distribute it, you don't have to share it. No one is going to sue you for using GPL'd code in internal projects and not releasing the code.

Furthermore, after reviewing this GPL our lawyers advised us that any products compiled with GPL'ed tools - such as gcc - would also have to its source code released.

Also done to death here at /. You need new lawyers!

Linus' usability patches?

http://www.linux.com/article.pl?sid=07/02/16/19372 37

Xen can do live migration

This program has been known for years. The gimp and krita plugins were written in 2005.

For comparison with professional software, see:
http://www.haypocalc.com/wiki/Comparative_GREYCsto ration

gimp plugin:
http://www.haypocalc.com/wiki/Gimp_Plugin_GREYCsto ration
you can find this plugin in any recent version in Filters->Misc.

krita plugin:
http://www.valdyas.org/fading/index.cgi/hacking/kr ita/greycstoration.html

Linux.com ran a article on it last year:
http://applications.linux.com/article.pl?sid=06/01 /12/1744218&tid=39

http://www.linux.com/article.pl?sid=06/06/08/16512 25 says "The Ubuntu installer doesn't set up a root user -- a root account still exists, but it's set with a random password."

Or perhaps it was motivated by Sun's desire to buy their way into the "free" software community's good graces without fully embracing its approach.

What the HELL are you talking about?? After Java was open sourced Stallman said: "I think that Sun with this contribution has contributed more than any other company to the free software community in the form of software. And it shows leadership -- it's an example I hope others will follow.". What more do you want?

This code also is FIPS 140-1 level 1 (the best one can get for software cryptography modules) compliant."

At this point, Linus is the head maintainer of Linux 2.6, so the majority of the work he does is accepting patches, arguing in the mailing lists, and talking with the other main programmers and "sub-maintainers" (I don't know if they get a special name or anything).

He doesn't need to write code for the kernel to be important at this point. Besides, he contributes code to other things like git (an SCM) and GNOME.

I second the recommendation for Magnatune.

I discovered Magnatune when Amarok integrated Magnatune playlists (for download or stream). In Amarok you can search through all of the artists by name or genre and listen to streams of all of the albums and songs for free. Amarok also integrates the ability to buy and download songs directly from Magnatune.

If you go to the Magnatune website, you can download "low" quality songs and albums for free under a Creative Commons license for non commercial use. I listen to many of these at work, and the low quality versions are as good as or better than most internet radio streams. You can also download high quality versions of albums in many formats (wav, flac, mp3, ogg ...), for as little as $5 or pay as much as you want. You can also order a CD to be sent to your house (you pay for the CD pressing).

There are tons of artists there, known and unknown. I recently found out a favorite group (Zilla) has started distributing their albums on Magnatune as well. FWIW, I first heard Zilla at a local venue here in Hood River OR (BFE) last year, and I am now a frequent buyer of their material.

A good place to start is to check out some of the compilations of Magnatune artists. DJ Cary has put together several comps, and Magnatune has several of their own as well.
http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/

You know, I've tried just about all of the major distros out there, and have come to the conlusion that everyone has it's downsides and it's upsides. Opinions are like assholes everyones got one, and this thread seems to be a bunch of Fedora/RH bashers. IHMO RH/fedora is probably one of the better ones, RH has been a major player( if not THE major player) in linux and open source since the beginning and no one seems to appreciate the contributions they have given back to the community. Yes they may have made some blunders during the RH9->RHEL migration. Where's everyones appreciation? RH/Fedora has consitantly been one of the top distros.

Every package management system has issues: rpm,deb,tgz and dependency issues with their packages and software to resolve them: yum and apt to name a few.
I seen issues with installation,packaging, and dependency issues on virtually every distro out there including Ubuntu. My personal favorite to dislike is Gentoo. (see one of my earlier posts)

If ESR truely did a rpm -e --force --nodeps on a core library then he deserves what he gets. I've done it before with zlib, busted out the rescue cd, and was up and running again un less than 10 minutes. Why didn't he make his own RPM? I've been doing this for years, it's not rocket science, and I suspect that ESR may be smarter than me. Also RPM is no longer "stagnating" so to speak, it is being actively worked on by the major RPM distros: http://www.linux.com/article.pl?sid=07/02/16/07025 2

I guess what I'm trying to say is that Fedora/RH is a good distro that doesn't deserve the bashing that it get here

I get that nothing in the Public Domain can really belong to a single person, but I do claim a certain amount of ownership over the book because I started it, alone, and worked on it alone for many months before it started picking up outside interest. Recently I've gotten back on board with the book and am working to fix some of the problems that have cropped up in the book, such as those that you mention.

You can read more about the evolution of the book here, if you're interested:

http://www.linux.com/article.pl?sid=06/01/30/20292 23

Thanks for the encouragement!

spidey

Working with Zero Install

Actually, my post was not only in response to the op but also to the article (shocking I know). In the article, there is a link that addresses your EXACT concerns with the current mainstream package managers.

"We called it the FUD campaign," he says. "There were all kinds of complaints sent to the CMVP including one about 'Commie code.'"

'While OSSI was not able to review each complaint the CMVP received, the ones they did see often contained redacted, or blacked-out, data about who had filed the complaint. Some documents, however, did reveal the complainant information, and Weathersby says that is how the OSSI became aware that, in some cases, proprietary software vendors were lodging the complaints'

KDE is quickly eclipsing OS X in terms of usability and "must have" features.

http://www.linux.com/article.pl?sid=07/02/01/19352 38

My iPod can't be a USB mass storage device. It's plugged into the Firewire port. Now you know what complicates it, so let's focus on what to do about it.

No, but it could be an SBP-2 device.

SBP-2 is a standard for passing SCSI commands over Firewire. It's supported by default on Windows, Linux and Mac, so SBP-2 hard disks will be recognized on all platforms.

So it's technically possible to build a device which allows Mass Storage Class type access over Firewire. What I, and I guess the GP, want is a device where you can copy a load of mp3s and maybe an m3u playlist and have it recognize them. Since m3u playlists are easy to generate (eg with a dir *.mp3 /s /b > playlist.m3u in a batch file), it means you can drag'n'drop files from your friend's MP3 collection to the device, run the batch file and have it play them. Whereas iTunes has to be seen to discourage people doing that because it's illegal. Plus, I can't install iTunes on my work machine. And all the music management apps I've seen, including iTunes, annoy the hell out of me.

That's the problem, and the reason that people don't like it.

Gentoo in the server room?

I think Gentoo CAN work in the server room. glsa and other tools make it a better candidate than it was a few years ago.

Some of the other popular distros capable of running X-less (e.g. Debian) and the *BSDs have been and are in wider production deployment. Of course, if one is tied to a storage, database, or backup vendor, one may be tied to Red Hat or SUSE.

Prosecutors, police and lawmakers all seem to be making the assumption that computer owners should be responsible for everything that is sent to and from the Internet. Yet, we have average people with little knowledge of computer security who are using hard to secure Windows computers. A large percentage of all Windows computer have been infected by spyware or browser hijackers or have had back doors placed in them my hackers or the malware itself. A recent New York Times article was titled the Attack of the Zombie Computers Is Growing Threat. It says that "botnet programs are present on about 11 percent of the more than 650 million computers attached to the Internet". Most of those zombie computers are probably spewing out spam for porn, pump-and-dump stock schemes, or illegal activities such as phishing schemes that steal peoples charge card numbers or passwords. Should those 70 million Windows computer owners around the world also be arrested and sentenced to years or decades in prison?

Last night on ABC, on TV, I saw a 20/20 segment about "Prison Time For Viewing Porn". In that case a teenage boy was facing the possibility of 90 years in prison because several child porn files that were found on the family computer. Police pounded on the door of their Phoenix home at 6:00 a.m. and seized the family computer. The sixteen-year-old boy offered to take a lie detector test and passed the test, but prosecutors continued to press charges. A computer expert later looked at the hard drive and found more than 200 infected files and back doors that allowed hackers to access the family computer from remote locations. Most likely someone else used the insecure Bandy family computer as a place to store the files which they did not dare store it on their own computer.

I have heard that many computer repair people spend much of their time removing spyware from computers belonging to people who complain that computers are running slowly. Prosecutors and police should take into account that these people were not using a more secure operating system such as MAC OS X, Linux or BSD. However, security problems or other misleading circumstances can occur when using Mac, Linux, or BSD. For instance, I use Linux and when I find an interesting website with various interesting Linux, ham radio, solar energy or nutrition related files, I occasionally use the wget command to download most of what is on that web page. I latter frequently am surprised to discover that the wget command also downloaded hundreds of pictures of New England covered bridges or family photos too. I most would most likely not notice if child porn photos had also automatically been downloaded into an obscure subdirectory.

How can law makers, police, prosecutors and child protection supporters seriously suggest holding people accountable for what is found computers without outlawing the use of Windows first? Furthermore, where I live the local cable companies provide their customers with broadband routers which are wide open to being used by nighbors by default. The telephone company where I live provides wireless routers which by default use insecure WEP encryption method. About half of all wireless networks do not have any security enabled and many of the others just use WEP or are still using the defalt SSID and password. Many people also do not use antivirus software, spyware removal software, properly secured firewalls or the latest security updates. Even with Windows security patches installed there are frequently unpatched zero-day exploits out there such as the one for Word documents that Microsoft failed to patch earlier this week on "patch Tuesday." How can police and lawmakers seriously suggest holding people accountable for what is on people computers in these circumstances.

Check out the Envelope Sender Signature technique described here:

http://howtos.linux.com/howtos/Spam-Filtering-for- MX/collateral.shtml

The idea is to tag outgoing messages in such a way that legitimate DSNs are distinguishable from illegitimate backscatter (which can then be discarded).

As a Slashdot Subscriber (highly recommended BTW), I saw this story in the "Mysterious Future" and needless to say, it is EMERGENCY ALERT on Komar.org as I'm sure Scotty will be saying shortly "Control Circuits threatening to overload Captain!" The four dedicated 100 Mbps Apache/Linux web servers (using mod_perl) handled a doubleheader of DIGG and FARK on December 13th and are already getting hammered ... but Slashdot could be another level ... lets see how high the load factor goes on this snowy Christmas Eve.

Zonker's article is excellent - highly recommend /.'ers RTFA (hah!) since there is ... uhhhhh ... a bit of history associated with my "controllable" Christmas Lights ... ;-)

People around the world are hammering it allready (Google Maps mish-mash) so I'll try to keep the web servers going while everyone turns the lights ON ... OFF ... ON ... OFF ... ON ... etc.

Have fun with it and Merry Christmas to all,
alek


P.S. The web site is totally free ... but raises awareness/funds for the University of Maryland Center for Celiac Disease. This is something my kids have, so it's personal for me ... so if you are feeling the Christmas spirit and want to donate a few dollars, please do so at their site.

To all home, business and corporate admins, you want control? Of which PC can connect to your LAN? Complete with OS versioning and all?
Best existing methods are in combo:

1. IEEE 802.1X (wlan_supplicant)
2. VLAN (IEEE 802.1Q)
3. IPSec (various IEEE RFCs)
4. THEN finger protocol

Every protocol "enhancement" that came out of Redmond has been demonstrably disruptive and rarely beneficial to the general network community (i.e., evil bit in MIT Kerberos), not to mention, highly inefficient. This stems largely because Microsoft repeatedly failed to engage or brusquely abuse the power of various standards community without proper and sufficient in-depth review of the professional network standard community.

Vinton Cerf said it best.

"Be liberal in what you receive and conservative in what you send."

Use the standard, Luke.

Ahem..

OO VBA support

Yes.. I know it's not complete yet, but it is being developed. Yes, I know the guy that's writing it works for Novell. Yes, I know about the MS-Novell deal. But, this was being developed long before that and is still open source, last time I checked.

Also Novell recently made a module for OpenOffice that adds VBA MS-Excell compability scripting (patented and copyrighted by MS), and canceled an Exchange server replacement project, and now supports another another ms-pantented OpenXML makes me wonder as well. hmmm

There are now 3 very suspicious activities Novell has made since the deal and all deal with patents and copyrights that I fear.

Its a shame as the following story here on /. is about Xandros 4.1 that includes Exchange compatibility with their product. If I were a CIO I would be worried about lawsuits from using such a Linux distro that is MS patented. BS and fud of course but the CFO and CEO would not care and fire me if I chose a product that could bring liability. That ticks me off and this stuff is viral. I feel the patches the same way about the patches from Novell

Openoffice and other FOSS projects and distro's need to not accept any Novell patches whatsoever. ITs essential for survial of Linux and if SuSE wants to include their MS sanctioned apps then let them. At least keep it away from me.

I find what Adobe said about software development for Linux simply being hard more interesting than the security question. My experience has been that most people expect any platform to not be as secure as they'd like the same way they've expected their computers to not be as stable as they'd like. The thing they need is good software and now Adobe is pointing out that writing and maintaining software for Linux is difficult because, despite some good efforts, there still is no standard definition for what a linux system is or contains...

"Q. What, exactly, is Novell paying for?"

"Nat Friedman: We're paying for the promise that Microsoft made to our customers not to sue them .."

What authority do you have to make such a decision on behalf of your 'customers'. Does a Novell customer somehow enter into an agreement with Microsoft merely by using SuSE code. Does a Novell customer want to have any contractual association with Microsoft. I ask this as a SuSE user.

I can see what MS have got out of the agreement, you've handed MS ammunition in there FUD war against Open Source. I can't for the life of me see what Novell get out of it. Personally I haven't decided to switch, I'm going to wait and see.

In Windows, you can setup Alt-Shift-Number to change to a different keyboard. I've used three different ones (Dvorak, US English, and Norwegian) for three years, no problem.

In Linux, you can even use the otherwise useless Caps Lock to rotate layouts.

The Optimus keyboard should be another stepping-stone in making non-English layouts a whole lot more mainstream.

They discovered that the default start page in IE was http://www.linux.com/

"The vendors aren't offering indemnification, Ellison said, and because of SCO, there's all this uncertainty and doubt about intellectual property. He says he will offer indemnification. In the Q&A at the end, he was asked if Oracle was planning to buy SCO to bring that uncertainty to an end. No, was the answer.

"Red Hat has a separate indemnification policy. In Red Hat's case, this policy is called the Open Source Assurance program."

Presumably if Larry really believed the SCO case had any validity he wouldn't even consider using RHEL. And in relation to RHEL and the GPL what's stopping anyone buying a single copy of Oracle Linux and repackage it and selling it with support contracts. Presumably if Larry doesn't allow this then Oracle is in breach of the license.

"We protect your rights with two steps: (1) copyright the software, and (2) offer you this license which gives you legal permission to copy, distribute and/or modify the software"

you should try Gwenole Beauchesne's nspluginwrapper . Linux.com says: The screenshot you see here shows the Adobe Flash plugin -- a 32-bit, i386-only download -- running happily inside a 64-bit AMD64 build of Firefox. Beauchesne lists Flash, Adobe Reader (formerly known as Acrobat Reader), DejaVu Libre, JPEG2000, Mplayerplug-in, and RealPlayer as working "reasonably well" at this time.

CMYK with one set of inks isn't the same color space as CMYK with another set of inks, just as RGB with one set of phosphors isn't the same as RGB with another set of phosphors. So isn't it the printer driver's responsibility to translate images from sRGB to whatever color model your printer uses?

32bits-per-channel

Do you mean 16bits/channel or do you have superhuman perception?

CMYK

Tell me why you need CMYK, this comes up every time the GIMP is mentioned and it's always by people that have no use for it.

ICC

Here I agree, full ICC support would be cool.

Other Reiser issues aside, the SuSE folks at Novell are looking to leave the nearly unsupported reiserfs3 (in maintenance support, which isn't enough for them) and move to ext3 as their default FS. Why? They feel ext3 is a lot more mature & better/wider supported then reiserfs4, is an easier migration, and appreciate that there is a solid roadmap from ext3 to ext4.

Of course this would also be the week that (coincidentally) Andrew Morton gives reiserfs4 the green light for eventual mainline kernel inclusion.

Oh that's nice. I come back to check ./ and this is what I find? Some random guy who made his account like yesterday is calling me a moron for posting a link that was mentioned in the original article. I don't know what your problem is, buddy, but like most Slashdot posters I use this in conjunction with this and I'm adware-free. I even had to look up what Zango was just to figure out what the hell you thought was so important that you posted about it like a million times.

I don't know what kind of bizarre, self-important crusade you think you're on by cluttering up ./ with your ridiculous tirades, but it really makes you seem like a real jackass. Just a little FYI.

What exactly has Joe Barr said that is false

1. "The MPlayer gang seems to relish nothing more than belittling their users and reminding them of just how little they know about Linux and computing in general" -- If the shoe fits. Don't email the developer list asking questions that belong on the Mplayer-users list. Mplayer-Dev is busy enough without all that.
2. "The journey began when I downloaded the latest CVS snapshot from the MPlayer Web site" -- A review of a CVS snapshot??
3. "The first thing to bite me was the configure script itself. It refused to run after detecting gcc 2.96, which is the default with Mandrake 8.1." -- Errrm, GCC 2.96?? A review of a CVS snapshot compiled with a broken compiler, greeeaaaat.
4. "It wants a file name on the command line." -- Duh.
5. "I needed video files. That called for gnutella." -- Because we all know the only thing worth watching is stolen from P2P networks.

1. "Gentoo doesn't ask what it can do to make things easier, it asks you exactly what it is that you want it to do, and then does precisely and only that." -- Funny, I don't remember being asked anything while installing Gentoo. There's no installer.
2. "For a proper Gentoo install, you'll need to read the fine manual. Read it a couple of times. Cover to cover. Pay particular attention to the sections on USE flags and Portage." -- Uhhh, not really. The Quick reference is more than sufficient.
3. "You will hear, see, and read "RTFM" dozens of times before you're done. But don't make the mistake of thinking that simply means having a copy handy as a reference during the installation, because by the time a question appears, it may already be too late. You need to RTFM before you begin." -- I don't even know what the fuck he's talking about there.
4. "Study GCC and the options that govern the behavior of GCC version 4.1.1." -- Forget studying GCC. If you don't understand what you're doing use the recommended $CFLAGS.
5. "After reading a few pages of the manual, I realized that the minimal live CD did not equal the Gentoo 2006.1 live CD. So I stopped and got the real thing." -- Dumb. You can bootstrap Gentoo from in Knoppix, that's what I always do. The CD you boot from makes very little difference. All you really need is bash, and something to download a stage tarball like wget.

This is a sad recycled article which featured at linux.com today around 4 months back !!!! http://www.linux.com/article.pl?sid=06/05/01/22352 42/

Ever wonder why HP has seven consecutive years of Linux market share
leadership? Maybe it's our portfolio of best-of-breed partner products, or
HP value-add in management, high availability, and virtualization. Maybe
it's the integrated, consolidated infrastructure of HP BladeSystem,
single-source accountability and solution support from HP Services in 160
countries, or just our unwavering commitment to the open source community.
See: http://showcase.linux.com/hposms.tmpl

There are many good resources on the web. The standard resource is The Linux Documentation Project, or http://www.tldp.org/. Another site, which is much better than it used to be, is http://www.linux.com/. http://www.linuxjournal.com/ has many great articles to guide you through a wide variety of small projects. A great newer site with helpful articles is http://www.howtoforge.com/. For help on the desktop side, http://www.desktoplinux.com/ has many articles you may find of use. Documentation and information about KDE is, of course, available at http://www.kde.org/ and it's affiliated sites (linked from their homepage). IBM is always putting up new articles at http://www-128.ibm.com/developerworks/linux/ that can provide usefull information for development work under Linux. You may also find the articles on http://www.debian.org/, http://www.gentoo.org/, and http://www.ubuntulinux.org/ usefull even though the articles were written for other distros.

If you can't find what you're looking for there, you can always head over to irc.freenode.net. The #suse and #opensuse channels will be of particular interest to you. You may find #kde helpful for KDE applications. ##linux is basically a catch-all channel; we'll generally be able to field just about any question you throw at us there. If we can't, we will point you in the right direction.

Keeping up with the FOSS news can also teach you quite a bit. You already know about Slashdot. http://osnews.com/ is another very nice resource. http://www.kerneltrap.org/ is a less frequently updated site which can provide you with more advanced information. Keeping an eye on http://www.freshmeat.net/ can help you get a better feel for the various software available for Linux. And of course, with gmail you can setup alerts for Linux, KDE, etc.

If you really want to learn more about Linux, there's no better way than distro hopping. Go to http://www.vmware.com/ and download their free VMWare Server 1.0 to allow you to try out various distros without having to wipe your hard drive. This does, however, require you have a decent amount of RAM (I'd recommend at least 1 GB). Go to http://www.distrowatch.com/ for a fairly complete list of the available Linux distros, sorted by popularity.

If all these links really don't solve your problems, take yourself over to your best local bookstore and buy a book or two. The drawback of doing this, however, is that most of them will be pretty much out of date by the time they hit the shelves. On the other hand, they will give you a great foundation upon which you can build (update yourself) easily by utilizing the online resources.

Also, never forget about http://www.google.com/linux!

Since I cant figure out how to reply to the article I will chuck something here (perhaps someone can help a slashdot noob here). http://www.linux.com/article.pl?sid=05/11/08/19402 10 http://www.cs.wisc.edu/condor/

Only real advantage of this is if messing with your windows MBR gives you the willies - since lilo/grub offer more facilities & you have go via those anyhow.

Festival is a free text-to-speech (TTS) system written in C++ that'll work. If you're on a Debian-based system, apt-get install festival should do the trick. Others should follow the installation instructions on Festival's Web site.

That would be because the distros apply the patches that Schilling doesn't want. Google for "cdrecord linux 2.6" and you'll get plenty of perspectives from all sides of the story. Here is a not-horrible introduction to the whole mess.

If you want to rely on your distro, stick with your distro; if you're more of a roll-your-own and like to track the latest upstream, just move to dvdrtools. cdrecord and Linux have parted ways at this point, and both code and documentation are subject to bit rot.

After that going even deeper would be a waste.

Not really. This article explains a bit more.

"swich to something better, nobody is forceing you to use microsoft's product http://linux.com/ [linux.com]"

If true, does that mean that the DOJ erred in calling Microsoft a "monopoly"?

RE:"And what can us consumers do about it?"

swich to something better, nobody is forceing you to use microsoft's product http://linux.com/