The good: Ubuntu is free; will read Windows- or Mac-saved Office files; comes with Firefox and OpenOffice preinstalled; comes with several multimedia applications and a VoIP application preinstalled as well.

Having been to DebConf7, I took advantage to visit a few beautiful places around the venue. Some of them are very hard to photograph with a common camera, specially when you’re trying to capture the full landscape from a hill or the complete sensation from a room in a castle —with all the walls covered with paintings and complicated ornaments—.

Really, this tutorial will be about masking: taking a photograph and separating a foreground subject from the background, for the purposes of doing something interesting with it.

What's new in this release: - A number of gdiplus functions. - More complete pdh.dll implementation. - Support for MSI remote calls. - Messaging support in crypt32.dll. - Lots of bug fixes.

There's nothing like allegations of predatory conduct to bring two organizations together. Nicholas Negroponte's One Laptop Per Child project has decided to bring Intel on board as a partner and a possible future supplier, just a few months after Negroponte went on 60 Minutes and essentially accused the chip maker of trying to destroy his low-cost PC project.

Smolt, the Linux hardware profiler that was introduced by the Fedora project for automatically reporting installed hardware and other system attributes, reached a new milestone last week and is in the process of another. Last week, Smolt reached 75,000 profiles for Fedora after being introduced back in January of this year. At the time of writing, there are now over 78,300 profiles.

Window Maker is a window manager that, while having elements of a desktop environment, does keep very strongly to the principles of a basic, light weight window manager. It has an extremely simple, mouse driven interface and in some ways operates in the old NextStep blueprint of functionality.