On various women's mailing lists, a subscriber has raised the idea of a distribution developed "for and by women." So far, the idea has met with a cool reception. It might even be a troll. However, if such a distro ever gets underway, it would be very much in the spirit of the community, and might give more women the background and confidence to reduce the gender gap in free software.

In less than two weeks time Mandriva 2008.0 will be ready and published. There were great ideas at the start of the development phase, and in in those six months that have passed, Mandriva has always been one of the most active projects on CIA.vc. Let's take a look at what can be expected.

Which Distro is the one to go with If one has never dabbled in Linux. Keeping in mind that once I do get the hang of it I can always upgrade to something more advanced. but for now I want to learn which would mean something that is more straight forward and easy to grasp.

Fast, small, lightweight—and still a full-featured GNU/Linux: Puppy Linux combines a complete set of applications with great flexibility, yet it requires minimal hardware. This article introduces this increasingly popular GNU/Linux distribution.

Last week, Lenovo competitive analyst Matt Kohut wrote a blog entry about Linux on laptops. The blog entry, which included extensive criticism of Linux's laptop support, explains why Linux "just isn't ready" for the laptop, and provides insight into some of the challenges faced by OEMs that support Linux.

A common question is how to compare Fedora [1] and Debian [2] in terms of recent updates and support. I think that Fedora Rawhide and Debian/Unstable are fairly equivalent in this regard, new upstream releases get packaged quickly, and support is minimal. They are both aimed at developers only, but it seems that a reasonable number of people are running servers on Debian/Unstable.

A beautifully constructed timeline of Unix which includes modern day Unix descendants such as Solaris and Mac OSX as well as Linux. This timeline is not very much unlike the mind map of Linux I had created a long time back. But this timeline also provides the year when the Unix/Linux flavor was born.