"James Burgett of the Alameda County Computer Resource Center calls himself a 'tattooed freak' and a recovering drug addict, but CNN is calling him a hero (video) for diverting tons of computers from landfills, installing Ubuntu Linux on them, and giving them out to schools, non-profits, and poor people.

Advice on free systems is almost non-existent. To fill this gap, the Free Software Foundation (FSF) has been developing its own hardware list, and, as the next logical step, has been working with Los Alamos Computers (LAC) to develop a line of free (as in speech) computers pre-installed with GNU/Linux.

My wife and I have been using (and collecting) computers for years, and we've shared this interest very effectively with our children. Now I am the victim of my own success: my household now has four physical computers, one of them dual boot. All are on a single internal Local Area Network (LAN) with five real users plus sundry administrative ones on each.

"I received my XPS with Ubuntu today. The first thing I will say is that when the Fedex guy delivered it he asked if Dell was having some kind of liquidation sale because he has delivered more Dells today than ever before. He told me that he had already delivered five and there were eleven more on the truck. (Just throwing that out there.)"

Mark Shuttleworth delivered the closing keynote at this year's inaugural Linuxcon. He delivered an enticing vision of the future of Linux and Free software, with a catch-- it means breaking drastically from the old ways. Carla Schroder reports on the highlights of his keynote, and readers can view the keynote as well.

James Hall is a very experienced software and system engineer who is probably best known for creating and maintaining the freeDOS project for several years. James is eminently qualified to provide an oriention to FOSS and to discuss its sometimes obvious and sometimes rather nuanced significance.

TinyMe is a scaled down version of PCLinuxOS 2007. The latest version is delivered as a 177 MB liveCD and features the Lightweight X11 Desktop Enviroment, Synaptic, and the PCLinuxOS Control Center. It comes with a few applications, so it could be a really light version of PCLOS for older computers or a foundation on which to build your own system as you choose.

In the earliest days of computers, just about everything could be considered free software. Computers were so large, unwieldy and difficult to understand that any reasonably well-written program would be passed around via punch cards or paper tape. Into that free software world Richard Stallman was born.

Computers started making their way into homes, en masse, 15 years ago. After 15 years, computer users should not be afraid of using their computer.