From time to time I hear people complain at how hard it is to build an image from the FreeBSD sources. This week, I'll explain how I built a bootable i386 image on a USB flash device and also make some observations about the results.

Fonts in Linux are crazy. Most Linux distributions ship with a big blob of serif, sans serif, and monospaced fonts, and there's barely a pixel's worth of difference between them.

Susan Linton compares Mandriva Linux 2008 and openSUSE 10.3 in installation, visual appeal, included software, software management, hardware support, stability and performance.

"I saw that lispy wrote about this. I happened to spot the original speech by Richard Stallman on reddit. The title intrigued me: “My Lisp Experiences and the Development of Emacs”. I’ll go through some pieces of it, because there are some interesting stories in here..."

Another review of Mandriva Linux 2008, this time from a blog called The Tech Journal. It has a reasonably in-depth look at the GNOME and KDE versions of the One single-CD edition, and comes out with an 8.5 rating: "For ease of use, package availability and being just a cool system to work and play on you cant go wrong with Mandriva."

Oliver Alexy of Technische Universitat Munchen (TUM) Business School has written an interesting paper titled "Putting a Value on Openness: The Effect of Product Source Code Releases on the Market Value of Firms." The research traces the impact of open source on company market valuations from January 1, 1999, to April 30, 2007.

Weather.com, the online arm of Atlanta-based Weather Channel Interactive Inc., last month moved its final customer-facing, proprietary application to open source. Chief Technology Officer Dan Agronow doesn’t say whether his staff broke a bottle of bubbly over the new MySQL app server that replaced an Oracle system, but you can tell he’s happy.