Although we were aiming to do a shorter show this time, so that Dan wouldn’t miss England’s football match (we recorded the show last wednesday), we still hit 50+ minutes as usual — go figure. Anyway, we start with the amazing news that we came second (with 8/10 points, right behind the great LugRadio) in a review of Linux podcasts by Linux Format Magazine, the UK’s biggest Linux publication. We especially liked their comments that we are “much more laid back than the other podcasts” and that we are “proof that you don’t have to even share a country with your co-podcasters to produce a decent output”. Their final verdict:

Linux Outlaws should definitely be on your playlist.

Thanks a lot, guys & gals — you rock! If you live in the UK, definitely pick up an issue of LXF; they seem to have excellent taste and we definitely want to return the favour. Also a big thanks to Jackie for bringing this to our attention!

Listener Feedback

Tombstone Tommy from Tupperville says he loves the show and the new intro and he want’s to know which VM we prefer. We both use VMware for nearly everything we do, but we have also tried QEMU — which can be a bit slow — and both of us are definitely interested in learning about Xen when we get a chance. There is also Parallels (which isn’t as good as VMware on Linux and has some unresolved legal threats hovering over it) and VirtualBox (which like Xen is open source and gets extra points for that).

/dev/null wants to know how Dan was using Ewedrive in Linux. Dan explains that he didn’t mount it but was only using the web interface. Fab managed to mount his share via webdav from the Ubuntu “Places” menu without problems, however. It was a bit slow for him, though.

Chris O’Byrne send us another message telling us about a project he might do in the future: Setting up a GUI-less laptop and then using only command line tools for email, websurfing and other day-to-day tasks. He might also set up a blog or a podcast to talk about his experiences with that. We think it’s an awesome idea!

Peter Cannon aka. Dick Turpin tells us about his distro time trial article. Sorry about forgetting to credit you on the show, Fab lost the email header when copying your feedback to our show notebook.

Gordon Coupar from Scotland also thinks we are laid back and thanks us for doing the show, which we are happy to hear.

The last email this week comes from Andrea Di Muzio, who gives us a lot of feedback on the show and also suggests we could mention some Linux equivalents for commonly used Windows programs to help people switch to the Light Side. We think that is a great idea and will definitely think about doing that. Fab then mentions that we are looking at doing an episode that explains how we produce the podcast to help other podcasters on Linux and we talk about Andrea’s problem with removing Swiftfox as a default browser on Kubuntu about which we give some general ideas that might help to solve it.

Main Section

Releases: Zenwalk 4.8 “Live”, PC-BSD 1.4.1, Linux Mint 4.0, ArtistX 0.4, Pie Box Enterprise 4, Pardus 2007.3, Bluewhite64 12.0 “miniLive”, sidux 2007-04 and Skype 2.0 beta for Linux — with video chat features!

Our first story this week concerns Hans Reiser, creator of the popular ReiserFS file system, whos trial for murder of his estranged wife just started this week. The whole circumstances surrounding this case are really weird… Dan suggests to get Columbo on the case, which would probably be a good idea. We also discuss ReiserFS for a bit.

Keeping with the theme, we talk about the German police and their desire to leave the Windows world behind, which seems to be a very sensible plan considering the problems they seem to have right now.

Next, we talk about Macedonia buying 20,000 Ubuntu PCs. Canonical seems to be able to pull off one of these deals every other day now, which is very good news for both desktop Linux and the Macedonian educational system.

The Evil Empire on the other hand, seems to concentrate on shady scare tactics: This time, it looks like Kyocera fell for a patent deal that supposedly “allows” them to “safely” use embedded Linux in their printer hardware. What a load of & Doubt">FUD, as always…

On a lighter note, Fab tells the story how he crashed a pristine Ubuntu server at work. Never do a forced symlink from /bin/bash to /bin/sh and vice versa. Believe us!

The last story this week is about the Everex Green PC selling out at WalMart. Fab has recently tried the gOS Ubuntu-based distro which comes pre-loaded on these machines and says he likes it at lot. It’s definitely something different.

Package of the Week

Dan: Freeciv, a great open source, cross-platform Civilization clone
Fab: Inkscape, the ultimate open source vector graphics manipulation program

Before we wrap up the show, Dan quickly gives us a condensed version of his Linux Mint 4.0 review and talks about the features he liked best. Bottom line: A very cool release, Dan might even recommend it over Ubuntu for new users — although we still hate the naming scheme.

We also want to give huge thanks to Michael Johnson and Matt Jelliman for their generous donations via the PayPal button. Thanks a lot, guys!

The theme music for this podcast is a song called “Sudo Modprobe”, it was written by Fab and produced by Dan and Fab. The album art was also created by Fab.