At the start of the show, Fab tells us why this episode will probably be released a bit late (as it indeed is) — but to make up for this, he announces our brand new line of Linux Outlaws merchandise.

Listener Feedback

Peter Cannon sends us another hilarious email and tells us about his experiences with gOS and Linux Mint. Next, Cam DeCoster congratulates us on the podcast and prompts us about Zune support in Linux. We don’t really know about that and rathole a bit about the Zune and other media players in general instead and we also talk about squircles and tigons. Cam also tells us about ReactOS, which we haven’t seen either but are determined to have a look at. In another email, Jason gives us an alternative to yum for rpm-based package management: the Smart Package Manager, which sounds like it’s really useful.

Releases & News

Before we get into the releases proper, Fab mentions the Endian firewall, which he recently discovered at work and says that he likes the web-based admin interface a lot. We then cover the following new software releases:

• SystemRescueCd 0.4.2
• EnGarde Secure Linux 3.0.18
• Frugalware 0.8 Pre 1
• Astaro Security Gateway 7.1
• Skolelinux 3.0r1
• Geubuntu 7.10
• Berry Linux 0.87

On the news side of things we talk about Nokia claiming that Ogg Theora is proprietary and also useless because it doesn’t support DRM, which is both quite hilarious. As always, we rathole the whole topic thoroughly and Dan even ends up mentioning the OpenCola in the process.

On the topic of open standards, we also talk about some disturbing developments sourrounding the NoOOXML petition. At least the Dutch government seems to have some sense and sticks it to Microsoft big time, mandating the use of truly open document formats in their governmental services. In more DRM-related news, the MPAA embarrasses itself by violating copyright law with their copyright enforcement software, go figure.

It also seems as though Seagate’s “Free Agent” drives ain’t so free after all, since they don’t work in Linux because of some stupid power management feature. As Seagate deliberately excludes Linux users from support, we conclude you should probably stop buying their drives altogether.

Another big story this past week was the fact that the SFLC filed another lawsuit regarding GPL violation on behalf of BusyBox, this time against Verizon. After discussing this, we also talk a bit about the Firefox usage stats that Mozilla recently released and our own observations regarding this. Before we go on to talk about packages, Dan quickly mentions the fact that Sun is now offering cash incentives for open source developers, which is nice.

Package of the Week

Fab — EasyTAG, a very powerful mp3 & Ogg tag editor
Dan — KTorrent, a great and very full featured BitTorrent client

After the packages, we quickly talk about gOS which Dan didn’t really like at all (you can read his full review of it here). We than wrap up the show and say goodbye.

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.