Listener Feedback
Michael tells us that he’s most definitely not German, but from South Carolina in the US. Since his grandparents came over from Sweden, Dan tries his Swedish accent while reading from his message.

Jackie sends us a picture of the Linux Outlaws wallpaper on her desktop (you can see it in the new listener gallery on the wallpaper page) and tells us that she enjoys the show very much. She challenges Dan to do a Brummie accent and Fab tells us what “Brummie” means in German. Jackie would like us to do a special about multimedia applications (especially for organising music), which we might do in the future. In the meantime, we point her to episode 4 of the podcast where we discussed Banshee, which is a pretty usable music player and organiser. We also plug Jackie’s excellent blog.

Main Segment
First thing is a rant from Fab again: He is worried about the fact that Google recently bought Jaiku which is a site that both Dan and Fab frequent a lot. Fab remarks that everything Google touches seems to turn into betas, kind of like the Midas touch of the Web 2.0 world. Dan says we have to reserve judgement for now and should wait to see what will happen with it.

Next Dan talks about new releases in the open source world this week: Linspire 6, Madriva 2008, Damn Small Linux 4.0 RC5, Fluxbox 1.0 and Skype 1.4 (which isn’t open source, but still important to us).

Fab, as promised, gives us his APTonCD review, talks about its features and recommends it to everyone using a Debian-based distribution.

After this we talk about the Linux-based in-flight entertainment system eX2 which recently won some kind of award and Fab tells the story how he crashed that very system on his recent flights to and from Australia. But we nonetheless love the fact that the leading system in seat-back entertainment runs on Linux; even if a kernel panic at thirty thousand feet is a bit scary…

The next story is a about a threatened lawsuit again. Apparently, Symantec is suing a guy for calling his open source disk cloning utility Ghost for Linux or G4L which is kinda straightforward but still quite nasty. The poor guy doesn’t make any money whatsoever from it, after all. We propose he’d stick it to the man and rebrand his software Spectre for Linux.

Dan also tells us that Canonical is not only pushing Ubuntu on the desktop, but also wants to get the server edition into wider adoption as a preinstallation option. Most likely partner on the hardware manufacturer side for this initiative is of course Dell due to their recent success in selling preinstalled Ubuntu desktop machines to consumers. We follow this up with a discussion of a story that Dell is already prepping to broaden their Linux desktop offering after the release of Ubuntu Gutsy which would just be plain awesome, we conclude.

We also mention our upcoming Gutsy release episode for next week.

Package of the Week
Fab: md5sum, a MD5 hash checker (part of the GNU core utils which nearly all distros have installed)
Dan: GParted, the Gnome partition editor (especially the Live CD version)

Before we wrap it up, we also mention Fab’s post about killer penguins on the Outlaws blog, plug our wallpaper again and Dan announces his Week Of Distributions.

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.