Today’s top news stories are global warming and Exxon’s $40 billion 2006 profits. Oil companies should use some profits from the activities that cause global warming to develop fuel-efficient, low-emission tech. In Autopia.

Source: Pony Up to Help Slow Warming

The Fedora team has announced that the first test spin of Fedora 7 is available for download via BitTorrent or from Fedora Project mirrors. Fedora 7, also available on live CD, mixes both Core (the complete operating system) and Extras (add-ons that complement the OS) into one package in anticipation of the merger between the two for Fedora 7′s final release. Aside from the newly abbreviated name, the release also departs from Fedora Core 6 in that it no longer ships with the entire Core collection as an ISO set, because the team is planning to produce targeted spins for specific uses.

Source: First test of Fedora 7 released

The RAR and 7-Zip file compression formats originated on Windows, so support for them on Linux is not as automatic as it is for old Unix holdovers like Gzip and TAR. But with the right software, you can handle these compressed files without much trouble.

Source: Handling RAR and 7-Zip archives in Linux

Developers funded by Microsoft delivered on Friday the first phase of an open source tool designed to translate between the default Office 2007 file type and a competing open source document format.

Source: Open source tool released for translating between Microsoft, ODF file formats

Linux users have often complained that even though the vast majority of PC components and peripherals are compatible with Linux, some don’t work at all. Hardware vendors who submit specifications will now receive “a complete and working Linux driver that is added to the main Linux kernel source tree,” according to Greg Kroah-Hartman, a Linux kernel subsystem maintainer.

Source: www.linuxinsider.com

Bash is one of those Unix things that I am fully aware has a lot more potential and power than I know how to use. Every so often I go looking for another handful of useful things to learn about it: this is a selection of recent ones.

Source: www.oreillynet.com

acousticiris writes “Many (if not all) users who took advantage of Microsoft’s Vista Family Discount have been issued invalid installation keys and cannot install Windows Vista Home Premium. Microsoft says, ‘There is no expected time period for a fix at this time.’ According to the article, the keys are valid for something, just not Windows Vista. Perhaps it’s just too simple to issue these folks new keys and send them on their way.”

Source: Vista Family Discount Keys Found Not Compatible

A short snippet from DTV’s blog mentions they’re looking for testers for Release Candidate Zero (RC0). In case you wonder what DTV is [from GetDemocracy.com]:

Play virtually any video– Quicktime, WMV, MPEG, AVI, XVID, and more. Subscribe to any video RSS feed, podcast, or video blog. Download and save videos from YouTube, Google Video, Yahoo Video, and other sites. Watch free HD videos in gorgeous fullscreen. Easily download any BitTorrent file. Fast. Then watch it in the same app.

It’s 100% Free Software (GPL’d, “open source”) and available for multiple OS platforms, including Windows, Mac OSX, and Linux.

Source: Democracy Player 0.9.5 RC0

It’s maddening. For someone who is trying make a daily use of what is to be considered a beginner friendly distribution for the first time, most options leave a lot to be desired for the uninitiated. More often than not, new Linux users find that everything works great at first only to discover that setting up something as common as a dual-head monitor configuration requires editing your xorg.conf file. If you are coming from a non-Linux environment, this can be a fairly frightening proposition.

Source: The Importance of Video Settings on Linux

In this multi-part series, DesktopLinux.com columnist and operating system curmudgeon Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols pits Microsoft’s latest wares — Vista — against Linux’s fair haired boy — Ubuntu — to see how the pinnacle of commercial desktop operating systems stacks up against the free, community-developed Linux upstart.

Part one of three, a dualboot with Vista Ultimate and SimplyMepis 6.0.1

Source: Vista vs Mepis