GeeXBoX, a small media center Linux live CD distribution, can run from any small device, such as a USB disk or a wallet CD-R, and can play both disk-based media like DVDs and online media like Icecast streams. The project has been in development for several years and has just released version 1.1.

While Linux is a power to be reckoned with in the enterprise server room it continues to struggle for acceptance on the consumer desktop. On the desktop the most popular distributions, far and away, are Ubuntu and Fedora. Which one is more popular is an ongoing debate between the companies.

The other feature worth writing about, is ROSA Media Player, or ROMP. It is a media player with a feature you will not find in Totem or other media players in other Linux or BSD desktop distributions. It is actually a fork of SMPlayer and was first released in November 2011.

Embedded development firm NthCode announced a media player for IP-ready DVD players, TVs, and other Linux-based devices. NthCode Player automatically connects to home networks, and then catalogs all available media, offering WebKit browser access to media, plus feeds from BitTorrent and RSS.

In the past few days/weeks in Slovenian media there was a big boom about three Slovenian citisens who allegedly cooperated in the Mariposa botnet. If you don't know what this is about read this press release from the FBI. The media has repeatedly called these alleged cybercriminals "hackers".

Media Center PCs have been around for almost a decade—even longer if you count earlier forays like Gateway's Destination PC lineup from the mid-1990s. It's not just about PCs, either.

The Exaile media player has been attracting fans over the past couple of years. I asked the project’s founder, Adam Olsen, about the project and their use of Launchpad.

KDE is proud to announce the first release (1.0.0) of Plasma Media Center. Built on Plasma and KDE technologies. Designed to offer a rich experience to media enthusiasts. KDE's Plasma Media Center (PMC) is aimed towards a unified media experience on PCs, Tablets, Netbooks, TVs and other devices. Plasma Media Center can be used to view images, play music or watch videos.

With the final release of Fedora 8 last Thursday, I decided to perform a simple experiment with four distributions. I'd boot them on my two Gateway notebooks. I didn't want to try anything fancy or complicated. I just wanted to see if they'd boot up to their default graphical desktop.