Welcome to the Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter, Issue #129 for the week February 8th - February 14th, 2009.

An educational software organization in Germany is pilot testing an educational software system based on virtualized Debian/KDE desktops. Kreisbildstelle Stade's "Desque" system serves up virtualized desktops over "standard" broadband connections, letting students and teachers access their desktops from home or school, the organization says.

GSmartControl is a graphical user interface for smartctl (from Smartmontools package), which is a tool for querying and controlling S.M.A.R.T. (Self-Monitoring, Analysis, and Reporting Technology) data on modern hard disk drives. It allows you to inspect the drive's S.M.A.R.T. data to determine its health, as well as run various tests on it.

In a day of laptops and remote systems, it's often impractical to keep the same ssh session going to a specific server indefinitely. There are times when I want to reconnect from home to an ssh session that I started at work. Unfortunately, ssh doesn't support that sort of thing. But the screen utility lets you do something similar to this.

You may have had the experience of having your SSH connection to another machine drop if you ignore it for too long. Which can be irritating, especially if it's (say) your e-mail.

The acceptance of Linux in the office is directly proportional to the amount of outstanding office applications available.

In case you haven't guessed by now, I like desktop Linux. I admit though that Linux is stuck between a rock and a hard place when it comes to dealing with proprietary media formats. These formats are designed to lock users into a particular video or audio player and those programs seldom come in a Linux version.

I've written numerous times about the importance of writing to governments about their hare-brained schemes, but this one is rather different. In this case, it's the normally sane Internet Engineering Task Force that wants to do something really daft.