Next up in our series of interviews is Bdale Garbee, Chief Technologist for Open Source and Linux at Hewlett-Packard. Garbee is a steady fixture in the Linux community, known for his work at HP as well as Debian Project Leader.

One of the rants I've been seeing in increasing numbers of late is in the form of rants against Linux users who constantly try to "Evangelize" everyone into using Linux and/or Open Source software. Sadly, back in the day when Linux was new, there was plenty of low hanging fruit that such tactics would work on.

"Fred Chien from Taiwan has published some results on the LXDE blog about his current work for the LXNetworkManager and I am happy to present some screenshots here. Besides having Fred working on code related to wireless networks, the goal of teaming up with him in the Freifunk Google Summer of Code is to bring him closer in touch with the global free wireless community.

The openSUSE project, which creates the development version of Novell's SUSE Linux, is getting a handful of full-time Novell developers.

Just when I was getting nervous about Dell's Ubuntu Linux strategy, the PC giant delivered some good news at the OpenSource World conference in San Francisco, according to PC World. The Dell statements don't address all of my concerns but they do restore my faith in Dell's commitment to Ubuntu.

Ubuntu Linux is the world's most popular Linux desktop OS. Day in day out, more and more people choose Ubuntu over other Linux distros and Windows. However, most new users of Ubuntu are very frustrated with the problems they encounter initially when they start to use it.

The world of open source is structured to invite unusual, often downright quirky contributions from people with unusual skills, and that inevitably leads to offbeat inventions. On the Linux front, especially because of easily executed embedded Linux concepts, both hardware and software inventions of the quirky type appear regularly.