Knoppix made live CDs popular—and with good reason too. Do you want to check whether a distribution works well with your hardware, or to show off the latest Compiz Fusion magic, or maybe you have a presentation to do and you want to make sure you have the same environment to show it in as you had to create it? A live CD can help with all of these scenarios. However, until recently you had to read through some pretty dense documentation to make any customisations. Now, Fedora 7 is out and Revisor is here to help you create any kind of live system you can imagine, in 7 easy steps.

If you’re a GNOME user I expect you’re more than familiar with the panels that come as standard with your desktop; if you use openSUSE you’re probably also familiar with the slab menu that Novell have developed. There are, however, several other applications out there that can extend and beautify your Gnome panels.

Gimmie

“Gimmie is a unique desktop organizer for Linux. It’s designed to allow easy interaction with all the applications, contacts, documents and other things you use every day.”

I read a piece in which the author criticized the free software world for not being innovative enough; needless to say this angered me, so I decided to try and demonstrate that this is not the case. Over the next few weeks I’m going to post a series of e-mail interviews with developers who are driving forward the ideas and expectations of the computer industry as a whole, in new and exciting ways! This week’s interview is with Havoc Pennington, who’s currently working on a number of great projects related to the idea of an “online desktop”: read on to find out more!

A few weeks ago, I promised to explain how to create your own custom live CD with Fedora’s new tools. Well, last week Fedora 7 was launched and all the tools you need are available in the repositories. This even includes a brand new graphical tool, put together by the people at Fedora Unity, called Revisor, which will allow you to spin your own live CD or installation material in an unbelievably user friendly manner.

I heard a phrase today that reminded me of my childhood: “...learning and sharing together”. I’m not sure if I ever heard this exact phrase, but it was definitely a theme that was central to my early education; it’s now a central theme of my life again, this time through free software. This link between free software and education was first made by Richard Stallman in his essay Why Schools Should Use Exclusively Free Software, and this link is now being reinforced by the work that’s going on with the One Laptop Per Child initiative.

After the comments on my last post, I decided that perhaps I should investigate the world of free web apps a bit further, and give some real thought to the licensing implications of software that is, in many peoples’ view, not actually distributed.

When I checked my feed reader at one point today I noticed that there was an interesting sounding article from the BBC available - “Tiny files set for a big future” was the heading. It did actually turn out to be a novel look at the importance of compression technologies when it comes to the availability of content on the web; then I read the last few paragraphs and it went horribly wrong: the BBC needs a wake up call (from us!).

The interview with Mark Shuttleworth in which he answers the questions sent in by all of you has finally been released after a few delays. Read on for more information!

In the interview, available at Questions Please..., Mark covers a wide range of topics including the possibility of a completely free Ubuntu release on the time frame of feisty+1 - he also lets us know a quick tip on how to install any current Ubuntu release without any of the proprietary blobs!

A DVD that comes with lots of great examples of Free Culture which plays in your DVD player, with even more examples when you put it in your computer – including a GNU/Linux Live CD. The idea is simple: help to get the word out about Free Culture, including Free Software, by showing off what's already been achieved; the thing is, we need your help!

I recently started a new podcast where people like you and me have the chance to put questions to key people in our community. While doing that I discovered some aspects of our community that I feel are often over looked in the drive to find new users.

Why I did it