The UK's budget is looming and the public sector is charged with increasing spending on front line services by 4% while budgets go up 2%. Free and open source software is a way of saving millions of pounds in licensing fees and delivering often better products, this article argues.

This is an amazing device: The RepRap (short for "Replicating Rapid-prototyper"), an open-source printer developed at the University of Bath. It was built using Linux, and all of the project's software and hardware components fall under the GNU General Public License. It's cheap to use, and can even replicate most of its own parts. Most of this article is an interview with the technical lead, plus there are links on the first page to videos and sample parts and objects made with the RepRap.

"«A change after 2.6.24 broke ndiswrapper by accidentally removing its access to GPL-only symbols,» noted Pavel Roskin, offering a patch to address the issue. Linux creator Linus Torvalds was unimpressed, «I'm not seeing why ndiswrapper should be treated separately. If it loads non-GPL modules, it shouldn't be able to use GPLONLY symbols» [...] «Ndiswrapper itself is *not* compatible with the GPL. Trying to claim that ndiswrapper somehow itself is GPL'd even though it then loads modules that aren't is stupid and pointless. Clearly it just re-exports those GPLONLY functions to code that is *not* GPL'd.» [...] « So stop blathering. ndiswrapper has one purpose, and one purpose only: to load non-GPL'd code. So OF COURSE it shouldn't touch GPLONLY functions. »"

Best Buy has started selling the Asus Eee Laptop to consumers on their website. The Asus Eee Laptop comes pre-bundled with the Xandros Linux operating system.

Tweak Ubuntu the old fashioned way. Well if old fashioned is using a GUI interface (like TweakUI for Windows) instead of command line tweak, then this is it! Great little open source project.

Preload is an "adaptive readahead daemon" that runs in the background of your system and observes what programs you use most often, caching them in order to speed up application load time. By using Preload, you can put unused RAM to good work, and improve the overall performance of your desktop system. Best of all, it's easy to install and use!

“[Google] has sponsored developers from Codeweavers to make Photoshop CS and CS2 work better under Wine,” according to a computerworld article. This could mean more users switching from Windows to Linux.

See, it’s kinda like in Star Wars. We’ve got the evil bad guys, the Microsoft people (did I just classify the Microsoftans as human?). They’re a wealthy organization that wants to rule the galaxy. Then there’s the Apple… individuals. They’re a bunch of people obsessed with being perfect and with white cases. They’re the Empire, and they’re even worse than the Federation.