Hello readers, and welcome once again to Free Software Magazine's fortnightly newsletter (sorry about the delay!), keeping you up to date with all things free software... AND the top 10 FSDaily articles for this week! Enjoy!

Announcements

We have reason to celebrate because FSDaily recently crossed the 1000 user mark! This is great news because we have only been up and running for 3 months and have only been advertising on Free Software Magazine. So word of mouth must be working well.

We hope that you continue to spread the word and invite other members of the free software community to join in and, if you haven't signed up yet, now is the time! The only way we can have fair, unbiased, free-software-related news is if the whole community joins in and has their say.

We are very grateful to the people who do vote, comment and submit. But, if those same people do all the submitting, voting and commenting we will be providing the wider community with a fairly narrow view of the free software world.

So we call upon all of you who haven't signed up to do so and to those of you who have just been reading to participate as much as possible. Please help us create the best free software community news site on the net. You can help by:

• Signing up: If you haven't joined already now is the time. Let's get the ball really rolling.
• Voting: Vote up the stories you think are important. Don't forget there are a lot of stories in the upcoming queue that won't make it to the front page unless YOU vote for them.
• Commenting: Posting comments helps to let everyone know how you feel on the matter. This generates healthy discussion which new community members can gain insight from. Feel free to ask questions too.
• Submitting: Don't be content with reading the stories other people submit. Please submit any free software related news items and articles that you think other people in the free software community can benefit from or should know about.
• Inviting: Please take a moment to think of the friends and associates you have who would benefit from reading the content that the free software community finds important. Basically, if they're part of the free software community, they should be part of the FSDaily community.
• Promoting: Please link and/or write about FSDaily in your blogs, websites, facebook or myspace pages, or anywhere else you can think of. Let people in your corner of the free software world (LUGs, mailing lists, distro and application communities etc.) know FSDaily is here. Add us to Stumbleupon, Technorati, Reddit, Delicious or your favourite social bookmarking site. (* Note: Please don't do anything that might be considered spamming. Respect your community and its etiquette/rules/guidelines.)

Please participate in some or all of the above ways so that FSDaily can continue to exist and so that our community expands. The more participation we have from the free software community the better it is for the free software community. In this way we can truly represent the free software community and not just a small subsection of it.

Thanks for all of your participation thus far and thanks in advance for all the help you will give in the future.

Original story

Top ten Free Software Daily stories this week

Microsoft WGA servers down; XP and Vista installs marked as counterfeit— DRM bites again: the Microsoft Windows Genuine Advantage servers (which every XP and Vista install phones home to) all failed sometime earlier today. read more...

Why proprietary code is bad for security— Tho Skype is using an encrypted protocol, it’s still their own, non-disclosed code and property. So we don’t know what it contains. read more...

Torvalds confirms there will be no Linux kernel 3.0— According to a new interview with Linus Torvalds there will be no Linux kernel 3.0 as the great man himself says there is no need. read more...

Open Source Contribution - Alternative to Certification?— Today, when open source projects are so active there is a way to earn yourself a measurable reputation by doing what you know the best - coding. read more...

Backing Up Your Linux— Backing up your computer is important. Don't be the sucker who loses important files and has to deal with it afterwards! read more...

Public Schools, Open Source Software and Linux— Last school year, I worked as a technology coordinator for a rural high school in Illinois. In an attempt to save the school some money, I introduced OpenOffice.org, GIMP, Firefox, and Thunderbird. read more...

Order out of chaos: Airforce base swithces to Red Hat— Over the course of 11 months the base switched from using HP Superdome and Sun servers and a Windows environment which Babb (chief information technology systems architect) described as “unstable” to “the only vendor out there that had gone through National Security Agency security" which was Red Hat. read more...

Linux User - You Have The Right To Remain Silent, Anything you say...— There could come a day when it will be against the law...at least in the United States to use, possess, advocate or distrubute any Linux Operating system. read more...

Free ATI drivers for Christmas?— Fully-functional video drivers -- ones capable of handling 3-D acceleration -- remain one of the weak points of free software. The Free Software Foundation has declared them a high-priority project. read more...

GPL Violations On Windows Go Unnoticed?— Seems a slashdot reader has discovered a company using Free Software in their products without complying to the GPL. It seems they've even deliberately tried to hide those, wrapping them in dlls. read more...

Thanks to dave, mark, achingbaby, kofman, greengrass, anna, Jimbob, and incinerator for these stories!

Latest content

Interview with Jeff Starkweather, Chris Buechler and Scott Ullrich— by Tony Mobily. "Centipede Networks has recently entered a partnership with BSD Perimeter to offer commercial support for two important free software projects, pfSense and m0n0wall..." read more...

How to use Quake-style terminals on GNU/Linux— by Andrew Min. "We know all about how powerful the GNU/Linux terminal is...." read more...

Create your own Live CD in 7 Steps— by Jonathan Roberts. "Knoppix made live CDs popular—and with good reason too..." read more...

Fighting Megatron: five steps to freedom— by Pieter Hintjens. "The free software world is being attacked by a large, wealthy, brutal monopolist, who I'll call "Megatron" for today..." read more...

Snap happy with free software— by Ryan Cartwright. "It's been said that for a free software desktop to succeed it needs to address the needs of the average home user...." read more...

Love and war: the Microsoft patent deals— by Chris Mostek. "Few events have created more fodder for the blogosphere, more fuel for Microsoft critics and more emotional responses than the Microsoft patent deals with Novell, Linspire and Xandros..." read more...

Free software media players— by Robin Monks. "Last year, while running Ubuntu, I decided I wanted to watch a video, so I opened it up in the built-in Totem player..." read more...

Zonbu GNU/Linux computer— by Jeremy Turner. "Zonbu GNU/Linux is a new, environmentally-friendly, compact PC available from Zonbu..." read more...

Linspire: Doomed to failure— by Andrew Min. "Linspire is doomed..." read more...

Introduction to Firestarter— by Ken Leyba. "Most modern GNU/Linux distributions are secure with their default minimal installs, whether desktop or server, while some distributions are designed specifically with security in mind..." read more...

Beware of Skype— by Jabari Zakiya. "On Sunday, August 5, 2007 Bush signed the revised Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) into law, in which the U.S. Congress spinelessly caved in and gave legal authority to the Bush administration to continue to intercept and spy on electronic communications." read more...

Latest book reviews released

**Free/Open Source Software: Network Infrastructure and Security by Gaurab Raj Upadhyaya** What are computer networks? And where does FLOSS fit in? A brief but to-the-point slim book, with loads of links, brought out by a program linked to the United Nations. read more...

**Linux Appliance Design by Bob Smith, John Hardin, Graham Phillips, and Bill Pierce** I am not paranoid... honest, but we are all surrounded, surrounded by consumer appliances such as wireless network routers, media centers and even some clever fridges and microwaves. read more...

Reminders

Comments

Your comments on articles, issues, and blog entries are very welcome. They provide other readers with insightful suggestions, further information, and the feeling that they are not alone. They also provide our authors with the feeling that they are being heard.

Avatars

Avatars are a great way of expressing your personal identity, whether it be a photo or an image that you feel represents the you you want to be. Read more about avatars here. To add an avatar: log in, go to "my account" in the menu on the left, go to the "edit" tab and scroll down to where it says "Upload picture". Now, hit the browse button, find the image on your computer that you want to upload and go to the bottom of the page and hit the submit button. That's it; you now have an avatar image.

Invite a friend

Share Free Software Magazine with your friends! We have a really strong community and we want it to grow and grow, and with your help, it can! When you are logged in to Free Software Magazine, you should have a feature called "Invite Your Friends" showing on the left hand side in your navigation menu. If you click on this feature, you will be taken to a page where you can insert your friends' email addresses and a personal message, and they will receive an invitation from you! You can also keep track of which of your friends have accepted your invitations. Go on, spread the free software word today!

Subscriptions

Ever wanted to follow that story, or blogger, or be informed when a change appears to some content that you want to keep up with? Now you can. Using our new "Subscribe" feature, you can receive an email update every time a blog or page is updated or when a comment is added, so you can keep up with all the latest changes. You can manage your subscriptions by logging in and going here.

Donate

As you might know already FSM is a low profit project with all funds raised going back into producing the fine magazine you can read for free.

Think about how much you would normally have to spend buying a magazine of this quality. We provide it for free!

Your donations will help us to continue spreading the word about free software and producing more fantastic issues.

Contacting us

If you'd like to contribute to FSM: read our Write for us page. Then send your proposal to proposals@...

If you have some feedback for us about our site or its content, then drop us a line at input@...

If you are interested in advertising on our site, or in our magazine or newsletter, you can find more information on our Advertise page or send an email to advertise@...

If you need help with your account for any reason, please send an email to helpdesk@...

Please add freesoftwaremagazine.com to the ends of the email addresses above. Sorry for the inconvenience but spammers make this necessary.

Thanks

Thank you for subscribing to Free Software Magazine. You are a part of a growing community who help to raise the awareness of, and educate new users in, the joys of free software. Without you we would not have this community and without you we would not have a magazine. Happy reading!