When I started a house church ministry in 2002, I chose to compile our very own hymnal, with a limited number of the most popular classic hymns of the faith.

Jeff Moe is a 37 year old self-employed father. Better known as jebba, he is the main developer behind the 100% Free distribution BLAG (for BLAG Linux And GNU). He is also leading a couple of other Free software projects. He kindly agreed to give Blue GNU an interview by Jabber.

BOSTON, MA, USA — May 1, 2008 — The gNewSense project today announced the release of DeltaH[1], the second version of their all free-software GNU/Linux distribution.

In a few days, both the gNewSense and Gobuntu project will release a new version of their distributions. Based on Ubuntu Hardy Heron, they will aim at satisfying the most exigent users in terms of freedom. This apparent duplication of work may not perpetuate. Indeed, some developers behind Gobuntu (including Mark Shuttleworth himself) think of "channelling the energy from Gobuntu into gNewSense".

The ASUS EeePC is fairly popular, and is really a decent tool, overall. The nice folks at ASUS threw in some educational applications, which is really nice. But is it suitable for use in schools? Well, certainly not in its default state. Let's look at some of the more important limitations on the ASUS EeePC, in terms of school use, and how to work around the problems.

BOSTON, Massachusetts, USA -- April 8, 2008 -- End Software Patents (ESP) has filed an amicus curiae brief in the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit's (CAFC) rehearing of the In re Bilski case.

I have been examining the ASUS EeePC since February, and would like to share my experience and viewpoint on this popular tool. The good news is that it works as advertised. And the bad news? Well, see for yourself.

This article pursues the analysis of DistroWatch.com's logs I started one week ago. Last time, the data were prepared so that we could investigate the evolution, in time and space, of the popularity of GNU/Linux distributions. Pre-processing the logs in a different manner allows to focus on other interesting questions. In this way, although the extracted patterns will have the same "shape" as in last week's extraction, they will, this time, help us in discovering groups of distributions fulfilling similar purposes.

Good Faith Discussions Result in Dismissal of Copyright Infringement Case

Mining the logs from the famous DistroWatch.com website enables to formally assess the trends in the GNU/Linux ecosystem. In particular, this first part analyzes the popularity of Ubuntu with respect to the former predominance of Mandriva.

I finally managed to get a child in front of the XO PC from the One Laptop Per Child project. I thought I would share my observations from watching her interact with this interesting tool.

I have previously discussed the XO's hardware, as well as its multimedia and web activities. The XO has several tutorial activities that can be used in a fairly productive (read 'useful') way.

Vlogger is a little tool with which you can write lighttpd logs broken down by virtual hosts and days. With vlogger, we need to put just one accesslog.filename directive into our global lighttpd configuration, and it will write access logs for each virtual host and day. Therefore, you do not have to split lighttpd's overall access log into access logs for each virtual host each day, and you do not have to configure lighttpd to write one access log per virtual host (which could make you run out of file descriptors very fast). At the end of this tutorial I will show you how to use webalizer to create statistics from the lighttpd access logs.

Having thrown around a few initial impressions about the OLPC XOs, I thought I would take a more in-depth look at the user interface and some of the activities kids can engage in. And I have a couple of comments about their durability and adjustable screens.

djbdns is a very secure suite of DNS tools that consists out of multiple parts: dnscache, a DNS cache that can be used in /etc/resolv.conf instead of your ISP's name servers and that tries to sort out wrong (malicious) DNS answers; axfrdns, a service that runs on the master DNS server and to which the slaves connect for zone transfers; and tinydns, the actual DNS server, a very secure replacement for BIND.

I have been asked to review the XO computers from the One Laptop Per Child project. This is the first in a series of blog posts about my experiences, as well as those of some children with whom I will be working. I could easily gush over it or complain about how small the keyboard is in a single article, but I think the XO requires a more in-depth review than that. So I hope you'll join me as I explore these interesting tools aimed at children.

Bazaar is a distributed version control system (VCS) available under the GPL; it is similar to Subversion (svn). Bazaar is sponsored by Canonical, Ltd., the company that develops the Ubuntu (GNU)Linux distribution, and therefore the Ubuntu project is the most prominent user of Bazaar. This article explains how to set up and use Bazaar on a Debian Etch system, and how to configure an SFTP-/HTTP server to host your Bazaar repository.

Are you using SSH in the best way possible? Have you configured it to be as limited and secure as possible? The goal of this document is to kick in the new year with some best practices for SSH: why you should use them, how to set them up, and how to verify that they are in place. All of the examples below assume that you are using EnGarde Secure Linux but any modern Linux distribution will do just fine since, as far as I know, everybody ships OpenSSH.

Dutch charitative venture capitalist NLnet [1] has requested IT company Microsoft to release its previous file formats into the public domain. According to the not-for-profit investor this will allow businesses, open source-developers and the standards community to better access their own documents in the future, and will help getting Microsoft's products to work with the new open standard ODF.

This document describes how to install a Postfix mail server that is based on virtual users and domains, i.e. users and domains that are in a MySQL database. I will also demonstrate the installation and configuration of Courier (Courier-POP3, Courier-IMAP), so that Courier can authenticate against the same MySQL database Postfix uses. The resulting Postfix server is capable of SMTP-AUTH and TLS and quota (quota is not built into Postfix by default, I will show how to patch your Postfix appropriately). Passwords are stored in encrypted form in the database (most documents I found were dealing with plain text passwords which is a security risk). In addition to that, this tutorial covers the installation of Amavisd, SpamAssassin and ClamAV so that emails will be scanned for spam and viruses.