This week’s Open Source Business Conference was a strange meeting. What is apparent is that in the open source software Red Hat’s no longer exciting. Here are some of the companies that may well be the new open source superstars.

I saw an announcement that the OpenMicroServer (OMS) is now available in the U.S. It has been produced in Japan for some time but has just been made available domestically. What's cool about it is that it is small  and can be powered from an Ethernet port. It reminded me of the BlackDog USB Server that made a splash a couple years back.The little OMS only measures 9'' x 4'' x 1.3' It's officially supported for Debian (Etch) and NetBSD. Plat'Home also maintains their own OS SSD/Linux which is a combination of Linux and BSD code. I love little gadgets like these and try to figure out some innovative ways to use them.

Some folks have started the "Top X Commands" topic around the blogosphere again, and it always fun and interesting. So, here are mine, both user and root. What are yours?

About three months ago I was looking for a wiki for a private project and used WikiMatrix to figure out what wiki software best met my needs. My main requirements were that the software was open source, easy-to-use, and there was a free hosted version to play around with.

I've decided to have a little fun with creating my own "distro" of Linux. For this, I'm using the program, Reconstructor. What it does is it has the information of a basic and generic version of Linux, based on Ubuntu. It gives you choices of packages you wish to include in the distribution and other elements. Very neat. I will be posting more as I go along, but for now, here is some info:

I have been a fan of (K)Ubuntu since ages. It goes back to the 5.x days. I have been using the 6.06 LTS till now. I like the LTS concept and would definitely try to stick with that.

Vector Linux 5.9, released in late December of last year, is a Slackware 12.0-based distribution that uses Xfce 4.4.2 as its default user interface. Generally speaking, Xfce requires less horsepower than other UIs, like GNOME and KDE, and so Vector Linux bills itself as an excellent operating system to install on older, lower-powered computers. I've been using it for the past two weeks, and like what I see.

Everyone likes a top list. This one can make people hate them, after all writers do not like critics. This is less a top list than an advice. Please, do not occur in the same mistake listed here. Everytime I started to read a review or article I ask myself how many of these annoying inserts I will find.

I have made several linux cheat sheets to speed up the learning process of some tools.

Recently I decided to put them on my blog.

Here is a link to all the cheat sheets on my blog:
cheat sheets at catonmat (my blog)

They include:

Brightside adds actions to the corners of the screen in GNOME, such as switching virtual desktops and controlling the volume. You can even enable the screensaver and control the screen brightness on your laptop.

Just thought I'd throw an update out there. I haven't blogged here in over a year, and that trend is likely to continue into the foreseeable future.

I recently moved off-campus to a lovely little apartment. I like the privacy and the space, but I do miss having constant access to the internet.

In the past we could divide Linux distributions in two main categories, the livecds and the installable ones, nowadays we have a third category, the D.T.C.R.F.C. or 'Distributions That Can Run From Cds'.

Seems I've been having some connectivity problems as of late. The adsl connection keeps disconnecting and causing the intermittent connectivity problems to the site. I've switched out modems, even now using a brand new model, but it's not helping much.

By now, every Linux user's heard of KDE 4.0, and the controversy surrounding its release. Here's one partisan KDE user's take on it — with screenshots.

According to the Dolphin webpage, Dolphin is: "a file manager for KDE focusing on usability." To expand; from my experiences with it, along with words from developers, Dolphin is a light-weight file-manager, meant to be strictly used for file-browsing. It is not meant to be a replacement for Konqueror. While it all sounds very interesting, I still have a few concerns. My main issue is the fact that the majority of the developers are against adding tabs.

I apologize to the folks that come to tuxmachines looking for the latest in linux and open source news and reviews for not updating the site the passed coupla days. I've been sicker than I've ever been in my life.

“This is the answer from Hoang le Minh (Vice director of HCMC Post & Telecom service - Government) to a reporter from Echip questioning him about the Classmate PC project from Intel and the possible choice of Hacao linux as operating system (instead of Windows). In summary : the CMPC has some physical limitations (256 MB Ram, 1 GB Flash memory) which prevents it from effectively using Windows operating system.

One of the great things about Firefox is that the community can contribute to it with add-ons, some of the are really fantastic. There are a lot of them, so much, that is really difficult if not impossible to know all of them, here I present three of them to you.

With 2007 ending, it start to appear reviews of the year everywhere, so this is my contribution to that.
I decided to pick up the best (at least for me) Digg front page stories about Linux in 2007

The web is filled with so many views and opinions about Linux, that its simply mindnumbing to even try to read it all. The time spent should be focused on actual coding and coming up with new, practical ideas that are of use to most people.