Before continuing I’m going to say up front I purposely avoided using Mint because I was under the impression it was just an "Ubuntu with some nice stuff added to it". And there’s a few distros out there like that.

A smaller proportion of Linux users in Asia sign up for enterprise support services, but that is "okay" by Novell global strategic partners' chief technologist Marcin Kurc.

XMPP is an open technology for instant messaging and presence information. It provides the opportunity to build an open source and free messaging server to handle many applications in varied environments. We are going to setup a XMPP server on a LAN to handle communications between LAN and WAN contacts. By running our own server we can gain some insight into how XMPP and Jabber work, create an efficient and easy to use internal communications setup, connect our server to other servers and services including WAN communications, and last, but not least, we can have our own private communications using SSL. Read on for more on XMPP and how we actually set it all up.

Some time ago, Mandriva decided to install the PulseAudio sound server by default in its distribution. Personally I did not really like the decision to activate PulseAudio by default in all desktop environments: I have been using Alsa with great satisfaction now for years, and I did not have any problem with that, so having to depend on yet another service did seem overkill to me. Nevertheless, I let PulseAudio be activated on my system too, in order to help as much as possible with bug hunting.

A new report reveals that in 2007 organised criminal gangs for the first time started attacking Internet connected Apple products with the intention of stealing money. The report issues a chilling warning that the increased popularity of Mac computers and the enthusiastic take-up of net connected products such as iPhone and iPod Touch has its down side.

PlayOnLinux 2.0.6 is out with some minor changes.

What's new :
- Corrections to the English language version: Thansk to AndrewTheArt
- New Italien translation: Thanks to kurama
- Corrected a problem with the "--run" command (the script would leave a space before the first argument, which could hinder some Windows applications). Thanks to hasi for pointing out this bug.

Welcome to the first issue of AWN hosted on the official Amarok website. This makes it a bit more official, so I had to stop screwing around and at least drop the word "Weekly" from the name. So here it is, the Amarok Weekly Newsletter under its new name: Amarok Insider. Not weekly anymore :).

GNU/Linux inherits a tradition of small programs that do one thing very well. A modern example of this tradition is Alexandria, a dedicated book cataloger for GNOME.