Matt Asay, CNET New's columnist on the business and politics of open source, takes new comers and the nostalgic among us on a retrospective of just how far the FOSS community has come over the past few years, paralleling his own introduction to and involvement in the community. A good introduction to FOSS for beginners and a good indicator of how far we've come and what we've yet to accomplish.

A larger casper-rw loop file is particularly useful for those who have performed a linux install to a large thumb drive and need more persistent storage space for saving changes.

gBrainy is a brain teaser game and trainer to have fun and to keep your brain trained.It contains Logical Puzzles, Mental Calculations, Memory Trainers etc.

eee-control is an easy-to-use utility for controlling Eee PC hardware under Linux. It can toggle hardware (WiFi, Bluetooth, etc.) ON and OFF, lets you configure all hardware hotkeys, enables aggressive powersaving, and more. Almost all Eee PC netbook models are supported to varying degrees.Ubuntu9.04 and higher will support eee-control with out any kernel modification.

This tutorial shows how you can set up an Ubuntu 9.10 (Karmic Koala) desktop that is a full-fledged replacement for a Windows desktop, i.e. that has all the software that people need to do the things they do on their Windows desktops. The advantages are clear: you get a secure system without DRM restrictions that works even on old hardware, and the best thing is: all software comes free of charge.

This Ubuntu 9.10 Mini-Course will help you set up a secure an Ubuntu 9.10 Server using Postifx, Dovecot and Thunderbird with TLS and SMTP AUTH. The goal of this configuration is to create a secure mail server using encrypted communication to retrieve mail and to send mail through your mail server.

Homing in on the right Linux distro for you can be tricky. In addition to hardware considerations, there are compatibility issues, support requirements and even the culture of the community to take into account.