Issue #141 / Aug 2012

I’m waking up today to headlines heralding the end of an era. This era, of course, will be over somewhere between 4 and 10 weeks by the time you read this, but something as important as an era deserves a little time for mourning and reflection. The reason why this era is ending, according to the newsphere, is because Microsoft just announced a new tablet computer, which they are calling the Microsoft Surface tablet. The reason this new tablet ends an era is because Microsoft has never before embraced this role of selling PC-like hardware.

This month’s DVD features the latest release from Fedora – the popular community Linux sponsored by Red Hat.

Partnership
• Red Hat and Dell combine for hard/software IT solutions
• Fedora 17 released
• News Bites

Linux Mint Announces mintBox

ownCloud Introduces Version 4

Mozilla Updates Thunderbird

Obnam 1.0 Released

More and more Windows applications run on Linux thanks to Wine. If you spend a little time on configuration and troubleshooting, you won’t be stuck in Windows – even with applications that no one dreamed would run on Linux.

Sure you can access Windows partitions from Linux. But what if you want to connect to your Linux partitions from Windows? Ext2Fsd offers an easy solution.

If Wine has thrown you into the impenetrable depths of operating system arcana, you might try CrossOver, a commercial application that contributes to the Wine project.

If you’re locked out of your Linux or Windows system, a handy Live Linux troubleshooting distro might be all you need to get back in. We’ll show you how to pick the lock with SystemRescueCd.

At the end of April, Aldebaran Robotics let their 57cm-long humanoid Nao robots loose on a human audience of mostly open source developers. The robots possess 25 degrees of freedom, a child’s gaze, and anthropomorphic interactions.