Linux Mint 7 Gloria XFCE was just released featuring the Linux 2.6.28 kernel, Xorg 7.4 and XFCE 4.6 desktop. Linux Mint 7 has introduced us to some exciting improvements to mintInstall, mintUpdate, mintWelcome, and mintUpload along with several artwork enhancements.

While both editions just work out of the box, they leave a very important feature disabled by default. That feature, is the firewall. The really bad thing about this distribution is not just that the firewall is not configured, but that there are open ports that leave your computer wide open for Black Hats to mess with.

Its been some months since we released KOffice2.0.0, the first official release for the new platform KOffice2. What then, you may ask, is 2.1 going to change for them? Well, here is what we are working on.

Besides its outstanding mint green graphical setup, the Ubuntu-based Linux Mint includes Mint specific tools such as MintInstall, MintBackup, MintUpdate and others. Linux Mint 8 was just released yesterday and it includes some great new features worth looking into.

Today’s experiment was to get Ubuntu Linux running in a virtual machine on my Mac. It gave me the opportunity to play with two things — Ubuntu Linux and VirtualBox, an open source alternative to VMware and Parallels.

"Fred Chien from Taiwan has published some results on the LXDE blog about his current work for the LXNetworkManager and I am happy to present some screenshots here. Besides having Fred working on code related to wireless networks, the goal of teaming up with him in the Freifunk Google Summer of Code is to bring him closer in touch with the global free wireless community.

Okay, it has been a few months since I have set my 83-year old grandmother with a desktop PC running Kubuntu 7.10. Just to recap, she has never used a PC before. She doesn't know Windows or Mac or Linux. It was the first time she used a mouse, though she is a touch-typist. I configured everything in advance. I removed everything that I thought would be distracting or not used.

The development of Ubuntu 10.04 has been underway for nearly two months now, and will produce our third long-term (LTS) release in April. What I want to talk about, though, is not the individual projects we’re working on. I want to explain how the whole thing comes together, and what’s happening behind the scenes to make 10.04 LTS different from other Ubuntu releases.

When it comes to code, Google's support has made a big difference to the Tor Project. Providing privacy and helping to circumvent censorship online is a challenge that keeps our software developers and volunteers very busy. The Google Summer of Code brings students and mentors in the open source community together to write code for three months every year.